The Voiceless Minority

  Happy Monday, everyone. We hope you enjoyed our post from Friday. Today, we will discuss a rather disturbing trend. Last October, Disability Sco T op published an article entitled How School Shooting Fears Led to A 10-Year-old Boy with Autism Being Handcuffed. Due to the publication's limited number of free views per month, I will summarize the article below before I comment on the issues it raises. In 2023, after saying to a teacher that he should bring a gun to school so that kids would listen to him, it would come out later that the student wasn't referring to using a firearm in the typical way. Instead, he wanted to ride it like a horse so that kids could laugh with him. While this does not make sense to most people, we must understand that people with Autism have a different way of thinking about things sometimes, and they may not understand the impact of their words. Especially given the context in which they say certain things. America has always been on edge, and righ...

The picture above is of Michelle Zeman. She is wearing glasses and a green blouse.  As you may or may not have heard by now, Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. recently shared some statements about people with autism in an April 14 press conference. The rhetoric that he is spreading is causing an uproar within the autism community.   If you're new here, RFK has made some… bold (for lack of a nicer word)... statements about autism. : They will never pay taxes, they'll never hold a job, they'll never play baseball, they'll never write a poem, they'll never go out on a date. Many of them will never use a toilet unassisted." Do his comments represent me? Not. However,…is this a reality for some people with autism? Absolutely. That being said, it does not mean that they should be treated like they are less than a neurotypical person.   Another statement that he made was that autism is a preventable disease." It doesn't take...

Image description: Voting stations against a wall. On March 25th, President Trump issued an Executive Order (EO) titled "Preserving and Protecting the Integrity of American Elections." This EO proposes many changes to how our elections work, including voter eligibility, maintaining voter registration lists, vote-by-mail processes, which voting machines can be used, and who is responsible for managing elections. American Association of People with Disabilities (AAPD) is highly concerned that if any aspects of this EO go into effect, voters with disabilities and other marginalized communities will be disproportionately harmed. Already, disabled voters face increased challenges in accessing their right to vote because of policies and practices that make voting difficult. The policies in the Executive Order are voter suppression tactics – policies that make it harder for many Americans to vote. This order comes at a time when Congress is actively considering similar voter sup...

            Black and white image of a sign that reads sign 504 now. The "O" is made up of a wheelchair.  In “America in Danger of Going Backwards: If We Forget Our History, We Are Doomed to Repeat It” by Jason Hahr and Samantha Lebron, the authors discuss the lawsuit involving 17 states that attempt to overturn Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973. In today’s article, we will discuss what Section 504 is and why it’s crucial to maintain this legislation.   For those unaware, Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 is a landmark piece of civil rights legislation prohibiting discrimination against individuals with disabilities in programs and activities that receive federal financial assistance. The core provision of Section 504 states: “No otherwise qualified individual with a disability in the United States shall, solely because of their disability, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to di...

  We are one week away from Donald Trump retaking the presidency once again after an overwhelming victory last November. Disability advocates and allies have some concerns regarding a Donald Trump presidency. This article will build on an article published by Disability Scoop late last year. By the end of it, you, the reader, will be more aware of crucial programs like Medicaid and how they affect persons with disabilities. Along with a Trump presidency, the Republicans will maintain a slim majority in both chambers of Congress. This will enable them to reshape public policy and, indeed, policies that affect people with disabilities for years to come. Nothing is known for sure, but it is rumored that the Trump administration aims to cut funding to vital programs such as Medicaid and others. I can understand wanting to provide tax cuts and tax reforms that were promised during his campaign; however, even though I am a supporter of President Trump, in this case, I think he is treat...

America is supposedly the land of opportunity. We toute ourselves as being the greatest country in the modern world, and for the most part, I am a proud American, and I tend to agree with this statement; however, did you know that even though we are just beginning 2025, it is still legal to pay people with disabilities less than the federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour. Let me say that again: it is still legal in the greatest country in the world to pay a group of our citizens less than $7.25 an hour. How is this possible? The rest of this article attempts to answer that question and shed light on the problem of "sub-minimum wage." People with disabilities have been a part of American society from the beginning. However, in this author's opinion, we only began to be seen as human in the late twentieth century. In 1938, there was a provision written into the Fair Labor Standards Act that allowed employers who employed people with disabilities to pay them, and I'm not ...

 We are less than two weeks away from the 2024 presidential election. Both campaigns are making their final pushes for votes because they are aware that this election may come down to just a few thousand votes. However, there is one group of people that both former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris have not paid much attention to people with disabilities.   In this instance, people with disabilities are without a voice. In an article written for Disability Scoop written by Michelle Diament earlier this month, she notes that there are      40,200,000. People with disabilities who are eligible to vote. She also pointed out that if people were counted based on disability, the number of eligible voters would outnumber the combined total number of eligible black and Hispanic voters. The article also points out that disability organizations have not received responses to their questionnaires. As noted in the article, Lisa Schur, th...

To all my regular readers I want to say welcome back and thank you for your continued support. To anyone reading this blog for the first time welcome, please make yourself comfortable and grab a seat or a parking space for your wheelchair and a beverage and enjoy what is to come. In January 2014 I wrote a blog entitled “Aide Care System; The Hurtful Loop Holes” I have included the link to this blog at the bottom of this piece. That piece discussed a crucial problem when it comes to aide care that people with disabilities still face in 2023, however one area it did not cover in great detail was the lack of funding for aide care waivers. The waiver goes by different names depending on the state you live in. I currently live in Florida. Here the waiver is known as the Home and Community-Based Services Waiver. The waiver in theory like all the other waivers started out with good intentions but to be quite honest good intentions don’t pay the bills. In my previous blog on the subject, I tal...

Recently I finished a book entitled “Rosemary: The Hidden Kennedy Daughter” by Kate Clifford Larson. I was turned on to the book by my girlfriend Samantha Lebron. She knows that I love history, especially political history. When I first began reading the book, I wasn’t sure what to expect. The Kennedy family has been written about extensively. I thought this would be another look at the Kennedy family through the lens of politics, and, to some extent, it was, but it was much more than just a book about politics. As I got deeper into the book, I realized the book was about something more. It was on a deeper level about the history of the treatment of people with disabilities in the United States. Although Rosemary Kennedy was born to one of the most affluent families of the 20th century, unbeknownst to her she would face prejudices not only from the outside world but even from some members of her own family. Without recounting the whole book which I highly recommend you should read, I w...

           The news in America has become constant recycling of all the same stories. With the advent of cable news, the news is on 24/7 on some channel or another. You have three major providers, Fox News, CNN, and MSMBC. Along with these providers, you have local affiliates of ABC, NBC, and CBS. But all these channels tend to tell the same stories. Now there is a new type of news network out there.                The Disability News Network, or DNN, is a news network run by DST, Developmental Service Trainers, in Ocala, Florida. DST is a personal care company, which uses the radio station to provide a voice for people with disabilities. Currently, they do not broadcast all the time and are in the process of re-vamping their broadcast schedule. Even though they are based in the U.S., now they only have 1200 listeners. Most of their listeners come from China and Switzerland. Although this is a young radio station,...

       As the 11-month of the year begins, we also mark the end of a month-long celebration. October was Disability Awareness Month. Disability Awareness Month is designed to acknowledge all forms of disability, everything from emotional and behavioral to mental and physical. My university recently even did an exhibit entitled “Allies for Inclusion: The Ability Exhibit.” This consisted of a variety of stations at which visitors could experience an aspect of being disabled. In October, the events that were held throughout the country demonstrated a great effort in the disability community to bring awareness to an often forgotten minority. However, there is a much greater task at hand.        Rarely do I call my readers to action, but this time I am asking you to read what follows and use your political voice to make a difference. On November 5 th  and 12 th,  your voice can be heard. The U.S. Senate Committ...

So I've written a lot about disability issues, and while that is my main focus for this blog, I thought I would expand it a little bit. To show you (the reader) that while I, as a disabled person, am very aware of issues that concern the disabled community, I am more than just a disabled person. Therefore, this blog post is going to talk about something relevant to all of us as Americans--the recent Government shutdown        Now I realize that you guys are probably sick about hearing about this from talking heads related to media on both sides. Because of the advent of cable T.V., the news media doesn't work hard, but they repeat the same thing over and over again. They treat us like Five Second Tom from Fifty First Dates.  Five Second Tom is an individual that we meet in the care facility with a five-second memory and re-introduces himself every five seconds. The media treats us, the American people, as if we don't comprehend what they t...