Eileen Cronin’s memoir, Mermaid, is on Oprah Winfrey’s list of Best Memoirs of 2014 and has been translated into three other languages. The memoir is about growing up in the 1960s without legs below the knee. At TruthDig, where she is a regular contributor, Cronin writes—39 Million Reasons to Know Us:
I am a woman. In 2017 I marched for miles, on two artificial legs, along with my husband and 750,000 others in the first Women’s March Los Angeles. […]
We are a family invested in the civil rights of all people. With each civil rights breakthrough, however, this bittersweet truth emerges: The rights of people like me are not celebrated. […]
Even though there are 56 million Americans with disabilities, 39 million of whom are voters, neither the resistance nor the Democratic Party greet us as allies. We don’t have speakers at marches who tell our stories, or leaders who wax on about our accomplishments and who inspire crowds to witness our achievements along with the achievements of other minority groups.
When I read in The RespectAbility Report that only 49 percent of Americans with disabilities voted for Hillary Clinton, even after Donald Trump insulted a New York Times reporter with a disability, I suspected that my community was upset that this investigative journalist was repeatedly referred to as a “disabled reporter” in campaign ads. His name is Serge Kovaleski, and he contributed to a Pulitzer Prize-winning article. […]
Democrats and the resistance should both be looking to include women from my community to help win over the votes of the other half of the disability community. It is a myth that all people with disabilities vote Democrat. The disability community includes swing voters from every state, every racial group and every gender variation. Although the entire disability community has 39 million votes at stake, disability is not a characteristic studied in many election polls. Maybe that is a practice that should be reconsidered. […]
Our community is hard at work connecting with anyone who physically cannot attend future events through the Disability March online, started by writers Sarah Einstein, Sonya Huber and Andrea Scarpino. In the San Francisco Bay Area, Alice Wong is actively organizing online connectivity for all people with disabilities, but we deserve a place at the podium in future rallies, a voice from our community.
With 39 million votes, we should not have to fight to join this army.
TOP COMMENTS • HIGH IMPACT STORIES
“There is one forecast of which you can already be sure: someday renewable energy will be the only way for people to satisfy their energy needs. Because of the physical, ecological and (therefore) social limits to nuclear and fossil energy use, ultimately nobody will be able to circumvent renewable energy as the solution, even if it turns out to be everybody’s last remaining choice. The question keeping everyone in suspense, however, is whether we shall succeed in making this radical change of energy platforms happen early enough to spare the world irreversible ecological mutilation and political and economic catastrophe.”
~Herman Scheer, Energy Autonomy: The Economic Social & Technological Case for Renewable Energy (2006)
On this date at Daily Kos in 2014—It’s odd how managing the menfolk’s sextimes never turns into a movement:
You never seem to hear the conservative all-our-religion-is-belong-to-you outrage machine on this stuff.
The federal Department of Health and Human Services dispatched its Office of Inspector General to review Medicare payments for vacuum erection systems, less formally known as penis pumps.
Certainly, there may certainly be individual wags out there who are miffed that their tax dollars are going for medical treatments to allow older people to have sex. There may be cranky folks who do not think that anyone should be getting Viagra for any reason, because if God wanted them to have an erection God would have taken care of that already.
But it’s not a movement. You don’t see a dozen conservative women all lined up in a row to testify to Congress that allowing men past childbearing age to have sex is an abomination unto their Lord, or nationwide hobby supply shops demanding that the entire national health care system be restructured to allow them to personally decide which of their male employees ought not to be receiving medical care for insufficient sexytimes. Their religion may dictate that nobody have sex unless they are married, and unless they are fertile, but there is no nationwide, Fox-News-covered movement afoot to demand that the appropriate health care remedies be given only to married and fertile people. You don’t hear the Fox News talking heads going on about that.
It’s only American women that get that treatment.
On today’s Kagro in the Morning show, Greg Dworkin knows right away: Rob Porter is the story of the day. Who is this jerk, and what’s the source of his privilege? Would conservatives “boycotting” Republicans be enough to right their ship? Maybe, if they were just a political party and not MS-14.
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