By RANDY SOUDERS
Through the years I served as Chairman of the Board for Jean Kennedy Smith’s Arts and Incapacity program, Very Particular Arts (VSA on the Kennedy Middle), I had there alternative to satisfy a variety of exceptional and brave disabled Individuals. Among the many lasting friendships is a painter and visible artist, Randy Souders, who was rendered quadriplegic on the age of 17 in a 1972 accident. His issues of late have been heightened by Trump and MAGA Republicans. I share his communication together with his permission right here within the hope that tech designers and others will likely be alert to the truth that nice care is required at this level, lest historical past repeat. — Mike Magee MD
Once I was injured on the age of 17 the world was nonetheless fairly closed for folks like me. That was a 12 months earlier than passage of HR 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973. As I recall that regulation was the primary to mandate entry to public locations that acquired federal funds. A 12 months later Jean Kennedy Smith based VSA (Very Particular Arts) which has supplied vital arts alternatives to actually tens of millions of individuals with disabilities across the globe. It was a really totally different world again then and inventive achievement was an vital approach folks reminiscent of myself may show their price to a society that also noticed little proof of it.
It’s unbelievable to suppose there are severe threats to roll again lots of these laborious gained features within the identify of deregulation and profitability. Disability is costly and other people with disabilities are nonetheless woefully underemployed. So when a billionaire presidential candidate repeatedly mocks people with disabilities, how lengthy until the “ineffective/ unworthy” excuses rise once more? The outdated time period describing an individual with a incapacity as an “invalid” has one other which means. The adjective use is outlined as “Not legitimate; not true, appropriate, acceptable or applicable.”
Few right now are conscious that the primary victims of the Holocaust have been the mentally, bodily and neurologically disabled folks. They have been systematically murdered by a number of Nazi packages particularly concentrating on them. The Nazi regime was aided in their crimes by perverted “medical docs and different consultants” who have been typically seen sporting white lab coats with the intention to visually reinforce their propaganda.
Branded as “ineffective eaters” and current as “lives unfit of life,” folks with disabilities have been declared an insufferable burden each to German society and the state. As Holocaust historians have documented, “From 1939 to 1941 the Nazis carried out a marketing campaign of euthanasia often known as the T4 program (an abbreviation of Tiergartenstrasse 4 which itself was a shortened model of Zentral Dienststelle-T4: Central Workplace T4) the deal with from which this system was coordinated.”
These most susceptible of people have been reportedly the primary victims of mass extermination by poison gasoline and cheaper CO2 from car exhaust fumes. However first “a panel of medical experts have been required to offer their approval for the euthanasia/ ‘mercy-killing’ of every particular person.”
In the long run an estimated quarter million people with disabilities have been killed in gasoline chambers disguised as bathe rooms. This mannequin for killing disabled folks was later utilized to the industrialized homicide inside Nazi focus and loss of life camps reminiscent of Auschwitz-Birkenau.”
A lot has been written on this subject however few appear to know the chronology and diabolical historical past of how these “useful cleansings” of undesirables typically begin. The Nazi’s enlisted medical doctors to offer them with a veneer of ethical justification for his or her atrocities.
All through historical past, authoritarian political despots have additionally labored diligently to silence dissent and co-opt faith with the intention to help of their mutual quests for whole management and dominance of others.
And theocrats are satisfied their explicit splinter of a schism is the final word authority on earth in addition to your entire universe. Stoning, beheadings and the hanging of transgressors and non-believers are arbitrarily justified by interpretations of their explicit holy guide.
There’s a lot to concern when politicians exploit the spiritual beliefs of medical professionals with the intention to move legal guidelines denying the rights of others to regulate their very own our bodies. This blatant pandering for votes by promising to ship on spiritual wedge points creates a constructive suggestions loop leading to politicians being deified by their spiritual influencers. That is aided by a marketing campaign of rationalization absolving them of their apparent failings. Such a marketing campaign of apologetics by spiritual leaders is active and widespread in America as I sort.
Examples embrace “God doesn’t name the certified…He qualifies the referred to as” (Exodus Chapter 4) and “God calls imperfect males to do His good will.” Is there even a pink line the place such “imperfect males” turns into an existential menace? Apparently not. I’m positive most residents of the Third Reich didn’t suppose so till every thing imploded.
The present Republican candidate for President is on the file as being a believer within the “racehorse concept” – the concept that selective breeding can enhance a rustic’s efficiency, which American eugenicists and German Nazis used within the final century to buttress their objectives of racial purity. On September 18, 2020 he informed a principally white crowd of supporters in Bemidji, Minn. “You have got good genes. A variety of it’s concerning the genes, isn’t it? Don’t you consider? The racehorse concept. You suppose we’re so totally different? You have got good genes in Minnesota.”
That is considered one of many such statements he has made relating to genetics that has resulted in his private superiority and that of his household. The New York Times studies “Mr. Trump was speaking publicly about his perception that genetics decided an individual’s success in life as early as 1988, when he informed Oprah Winfrey that an individual had ‘to have the suitable genes’ with the intention to obtain nice fortune.”
These statements mixed with these “about undocumented immigrants poisoning the blood” of America ought to equate to a 100 alarm fireplace.
Randy Souders is a Skilled Artist, an Arts & Incapacity Advocate and has been Quadriplegic since 1972
