A girl needs a stick

[kestrell]

and it should be whichever fucking stick she wants. More comments after the link.
https://nfb.org/sites/default/files/publications/bm/bm19/bm1902/bm190207.htm
This story reminds me of when I was doing time at the Carroll Center, and I was walking along, bouncing my cane off objects to identify them --bang! trash can tang! newspaper dispensor thwong! bike rack-- and the mobility instructor told me I was doing it all wrong, that the point of a white cane was for the blind person to gently sweep it back and forth in order to alert sighted people that she was blind.

Seriously, how is a person supposed to respond to that?? I'm a goddamn blind Jedi and she thinks I should be selling pencils.
*"A girl needs a stick" is my riff on a song by the Flash Girls titled "A Girl Needs a Knife." I added some of my own lyrics including, A girl needs an accessible flamethrower, A girl needs a Death Star, and, thank you John Varley, A girl needs a sentient talking black hole.

Comments

[ambyr]

Wow, that's a really enraging article.

[cvirtue]

The IEP process sucks for so many families and students, and this fits in with most other stories I've read from people /families with all kinds of nonstandard needs. Argh.

[kestrell]

And it doesn't necessarily get better, even when you become an adult. My experiences with UMass Bston went along the same lines, and a number of my interactions with Mass Commission are similar. So what happens is you have adults with disabilities who opt out of receiving services because they don't want to deal with the condescending and controlling attitudes.

[cvirtue]

Is "Mass Commission" the same as "Massachusetts Rehab Commission" ie MRC? I'm dealing with them for both my kids, and at present our caseworker seems to be both motivated and good. I certainly have seen plenty of people in alleged service organizations who were neither, however, in the past 7+ years.

[kestrell]

No, Mass Commission for the Blind owns all the blind people, and all services for blind and visually impaired people go through MCB. And I could be wrong, I haven't dealt with MCB for over a decade.

[cvirtue]

Ok, I understand now. Thanks.

[kestrell]

The most disturbing thing to me is, IAP didn't exist when I was i high school. I wanted to learn braille when I was in school, and my request was denied because the head of the Commission for the Blind said I would "use it as a crutch." This is why I am only semi-literate in braille. The IAP was supposed to fix these issues, but it's just become the same bureacratic machine s before. The travesty is, this isn't even what like outside of the institution is like: for the most part, total strangers treat PWD with more dignity than the "gatekeepers."

[conuly]

...no, you'd use it to read. JFC. Would they deny you an actual crutch if you needed one of those? (Don't answer that, I think we all know the answer.)

[capri0mni]

Use it as a crutch... as opposed to what? not reading at all?

Did you tell then that only reading books with black ink on white paper was also a "crutch"? That he should be reading all his words in pale grey ink on slightly less pale grey paper?

(And speaking as someone with a mobility impairment -- Why are crutches a bad thing, when the alternative is not getting from one side of the room to the other, at all?)

[kestrell]

I didn't feel empowered to say anything as a teenager, which is one reason I am such a troublemaker now. This is one more reason, however, why I feel kids are perfectly capable of stating what they need.
Re canes: one time I was in a really crowded mall with a former housemate, and I'm slightly ahead of her, winging my cane and clearing a path, and I heard this little girl ask, "Mommy, can I have a cane?" and her mom did the really embarrassed trying to shush her noises, but I thought it was pretty cool.

[capri0mni]

That was pretty cool!

[jesse_the_k]

I kinda want to print up business cards for you to hand out to little people like that.

"Yes! You can have a cane! You can have what you want when you speak up for it!"

[jesse_the_k]

Argggghhhhhhh.