Re: Washington Post editoral: Claims Against Common Sense

All,

if you would like to respond to this article, the URL is
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/edit/letters/letterform.htm

Sincerely,

Michael R. Burks
-----Original Message-----
From: Jamal Mazrui <empower@smart.net>
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<blindtlk@nfbnet.org>; webwatch-l@teleport.com <webwatch-l@teleport.com>;
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Date: Tuesday, November 17, 1998 8:23 AM
Subject: Washington Post editoral: Claims Against Common Sense


>From the web page
>http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WPlate/1998-11/16/010l-111698-idx.html
>
>Claims Against Common Sense
>
>By William Raspberry
>
>Monday, November 16, 1998; Page A25
>
> If I promise to go back to being my old sweet self tomorrow,
>would you let me get a little meanness off my chest today?
>
>Thanks.
>
>Randy Tamez: Get a grip.
>
>Tamez, left blind by treatment for a brain tumor a dozen years
>ago, has sued the Bay Area's Metropolitan Transportation
>Commission for violating his rights. The basis, according to the
>Associated Press: He can't access the system's Web site for bus
>and train schedules. That, in his view, is a violation of the
>Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA).
>
>It is, in my view, a clear violation of common sense.
>
>Of course I sympathize with Tamez's difficulties. Who wouldn't
>sympathize with a 36-year-old guy suddenly rendered unable to
>see anything beyond shapes, shadows and light? Blindness must be
>a terrible handicap, and I would applaud any genius who comes up
>with a device to make it less burdensome.
>
>But someone already has come up with something that works quite
>well for most of us: Web sites with lots of graphics, sound,
>video clips and such that make it possible to provide useful
>information in user-friendly ways (and also to facilitate the
>advertising that makes many Web sites worth providing in the
>first place). Apparently a return to a text-based system would
>make it easier for the visually impaired, though arguably less
>attractive for the rest of us. Is that a violation?
>
>I hope you don't think I'm just being nasty to Tamez. I've been
>waiting nearly a year for a chance to be nasty to the disabled
>folk who complained about Rick Fink's nice-guy gesture. Fink,
>divisional maintenance manager for the 97 Wendy's restaurants in
>Kentucky, West Virginia and North Carolina, decided that while
>the company was undertaking renovations to make the bathrooms
>and other facilities more accessible to wheelchair users, he'd
>go an accommodating step farther. He positioned two regular
>tables near the door and marked them with the stylized
>wheelchair symbol.
>
>You know what? Some representatives of disabled groups accused
>Fink of establishing a "disabled ghetto." "We want the
>opportunity to be there without the stigma or labeling," one of
>them said. Are those choice near-the-door parking spaces a
>"disabled ghetto" as well? Get a grip.
>
>Look, I think the ADA is a terrific idea. The wider doors,
>ramped entrances and roomy, handrailed toilet stalls must be a
>godsend for those who need them -- with no skin off the noses of
>those who don't. Similarly with wheelchair-accessible curbs and
>other modifications -- particularly in cases of new construction.
>
>I still remember a column by Charles Krauthammer praising the
>subtle ramping at Washington's Kennedy Center -- an
>architectural boon for wheelchair users and utterly unnoticed by
>others.
>
>What sparks my meanness is the insistence by some among the
>disabled that (1) their disability be accommodated and (2) that
>we take no notice of it. I mean, for instance, the people who
>insist on putting chair-lift devices on all public buses -- even
>when relatively few wheelchair users are among the riders and
>even though it can be significantly cheaper for local
>governments to furnish door-to-door transport by taxicab or limo
>than to retrofit all the buses.
>
>I mean the deaf guy who wanted to discuss some controversy with
>a colleague of mine, using one of those phone devices that
>involve speaking to an intermediary who then teletypes the
>message to the caller's phone screen, and then waits for a typed
>response that he reads to the callee. It can take awhile. My
>time-pressed colleague finally offered a deal: Put your comments
>in a letter, and I'll respond in detail by return mail.
>
>The guy was furious. He didn't have time to write letters, he
>said, clearly resenting the fact that other readers who wanted
>to talk to columnists didn't have to write letters.
>
>Get a grip.
>
>A part of my problem, I suppose, is that I am utterly unable to
>extract a useful principle from any of my resentments. Sometimes
>I'm happy for the accommodations our society is making for the
>"differently abled." Sometimes I think they ask too much or are
>ungrateful and whiny. And sometimes I think, with Krauthammer:
>Why, what a sensible, nonobtrusive, nonhumiliating solution.
>Shouldn't all our accommodations be like that?
>
>But, of course, they can't be. Sometimes the handicap means that
>you can't do things the way everybody else does them, that you
>have to accommodate to your own situation. By picking up the
>phone and calling the transit authority's information line, for
>instance.
>
>There, I feel so much better.
>
>
>          (c) Copyright 1998 The Washington Post Company
>

Received on Tuesday, 17 November 1998 08:42:07 UTC