When most people think about nursing homes they think of a bunch of old people living in a big building. Sadly many young people living with disabilities are placed into nursing homes and forgotten about. The funny thing is that if a small amount of money was given to accommodate these people they would be able to live independently and make a living for themselves instead of being force into dependency of the tax payers. Services are out there to help people living with disabilities become independent. Independents is freedom to make choices. Nursing homes are not equipped to handle people living with disabilities and often neglect them. A person living with a disability and working is about to give back to the community rather simply live off its hand outs.

When people living with disabilities are able to get into the work force using Vocational rehabilitation then every one dollar spent to help get someone living with a disability a job, $8 dollars is returned to the federal and state governments. By getting more people supporting their selves the more money could be used for other programs for people living with disabilities.

Disempowering someone is to take away there ability to be treated equally and therefore now have no influence to make things better for themselves. In the movie, “The kids are Albright”, with Mike Irvin, disempowerment was seen in a very covert way. While millions of people see the telethon and give money they do not realized that they are being brainwashed with the images that the telethon uses to get money. The kids that they bring out are portrayed as helpless and simply have no chance of living a full and happy life. This pitying is what is disempowering the group of “Jerry’s Orphans”. By people seeing them as helpless they do not see them as people but only see their disability instead of a person living with a disability. When you are pitied you are not able to demand anything. You are at the mercy of the system that is in place.  In Gattaca the disempowerment of people living with disabilities forced them into a lower SES which pengion held them into low paying jobs where they were unable to demand anything from the system but simply just hope to get by.

To empower someone you must see them as equals. In the movie Gattaca the main hero had to make others see him as equal. If you give a group of people who are disempowered laws which are set in place so that the group could make demands which would help to slowly empower them.

Children are the most disempowered group in the US simply because they are 100% dependent on there caregivers. While there are laws in place to protect them we as a society have come up with the idea that children do not have the knowledge or experience to make smart decisions in life. That is why the first thing we do is educate kids to start and build that knowledge that they need.

The perceived cause of the disability can influence the degree of stigma directed toward the individual (Smart pg. 101). If someone has been hurt in an n accident situation a person is more likely be able to relate them because a car accident for example, can happen to anyone at any time. However when the disability is congenital, meaning when it is from birth and not the cause of an outside force the person living with a disability is not looked at as sympatric because people who are not living with a disability can not even begin to think of what it is like or relate. On the hierarchy of stigmas the person living with the disability that was cause by a war is looked at as being noble and honorable. They did not cause it but somebody else did but a person born with a disability may be looked at as causing there own disability. 

 I think that the hierarchy of stigma is learned and not a built in part of the human thinking process based on the example I have seen in children. They will see a person with a wheelchair and be very excited and want to ride on it. But that child five years later will avert their eyes from the same person in a wheelchair. Walster (1966) suggested that the human tendency to blame the individual for his or her disability is an attempt to protect ourselves from existential angst or acknowledging the randomness of the disability. This would make it seem like the reason that people often want to know how someone living with a disability is so that the person asking can mentally find a safe ground.
To some degree I think that many of us see life as a story and often want to know other peoples life stories. To know a person you need to know their past to some degree and by asking how a person they got to where they are is simply just a question to better understand someone.

Recently there was a discussion I was a part of debating weather people living with disabilities had to use “pc” terminology when they were talking about disabilities. My response to this is that they can. Because they know more about their disability then anyone else since they have to live with it then they can talk about it in any way they want. The danger in this is that they, by using non-pc terminology will allow others to use it.  When people take things that are said and apply it to everyone living a disability.  Just like in movies, people will use non-pc terms and allow them to set their schemas. This will only help to take a step back in the disability awareness movement.  Pc terminology is used to help shape societies view on people living with disabilities and with people who are living with a disability using negative language about the group they are a part of it hurts all people living with disabilities in the long run. 

“Confessed Murderers” Cleared and Freed (Florida, Arkansas, Pennsylvania)
During 2003, at least three men with mental retardation who had confessed to murders were released after their confessions were discarded.
One was Timothy Brown, who reportedly has an IQ of 56. Brown was freed in May after spending nearly 12 years behind bars for the 1990 killing of a Broward County, Florida sheriff’s deputy. Brown’s confession was thrown out after a former jail guard admitted in February 2002 to killing the deputy. Brown claimed investigators encouraged him to waive his right to remain silent and put physical and psychological pressure on him to confess.”

After reading this article i found myself confussed on where I stand. On one hand the confession should be thrown out because we was taken advatage of by the police who did not give him an accomadations to his disability. On the other he should be help accountable just like eveyone else. There seems to be a very then line when it comes to crime and people living with disabilites. Should they be given privelage in the prsion system due to there disability? But we can not ignore the fact that he might not of fully understood what he was signing or saying when he was interviewed by the police after his arrest.

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‘Million Dollar Baby’ perpetuates stereotypes, Rebecca Nappisays.

Not everyone thrilled with plot twist

Rebecca Nappi
The Spokesman-Review
February 2, 2005

Warning: This column reveals the twist at the end of the boxing movie “Million Dollar Baby.” If you don’t want to know it, don’t read past this first paragraph. My editors made me put that warning in. But my real belief is that you should read this before you see the movie. It will make your viewing experience an enlightened one.

In the movie, Hilary Swank becomes a boxing phenom, thanks to coaching by a reluctant but ultimately loving Clint Eastwood. In a title fight toward the end of the film, she’s paralyzed and rendered a quadriplegic, dependent on a respirator to breathe. She lives in a rehab facility and eventually loses a leg due to a bedsore. She then pleads with Eastwood to kill her. He obliges.

While movie reviewers rave, disability rights activists fume. My column regular, Marshall Mitchell, who teaches disability studies at Washington State University, alerted me last week to the outraged Internet buzz about the film.

So what’s wrong with the twist? For starters, it spreads some lies about the physical realities accompanying spinal-cord injuries.

“When you use a respirator, you can’t talk with ease like she did,” Marshall says. “You can only talk on the ‘out’ breath.”

Also, Swank’s character is living in a first-class facility. No way her pressure sores would get that bad so quickly. “And very few people ever lose a leg over a bedsore,” Marshall says.

But the big problem with the twist is the way it perpetuates the misconception that people are better off dead than disabled. In Marshall’s classes, he shares studies that show that spinal-cord injured people often want to die the first few weeks after their injuries. But within a year, following rehab, these suicidal thoughts disappear.

The twist also rings false, because it doesn’t match Swank’s character.

“Why make a character who has an incredible spirit to (box) against all these odds, yet when she becomes a quad, she gives up. She would fight that just as she fights anything else,” says Marshall, who has used a wheelchair since a diving accident 36 years ago.

The fictional Swank character even has advantages over most real-life folks with similar injuries. She has plenty of money from her successful boxing career, and she possesses great support and love from Eastwood. She’s obviously smart, yet when Eastwood suggests college courses to her, she dismisses the idea immediately.

And then the mercy-killing plotline punches in. As assisted-suicide groups grow more powerful in the United States, Marshall believes people with disabilities will become more vulnerable to pressure to commit suicide. He contends that mercy killing has its roots in Nazi Germany when disabled people were among the first to be dispensed with.

“We are fighting very hard against the assisted-suicide trend,” Marshall says. “This (movie) gives advocates one more weapon. When are we going to stop trying to kill people who are not like us? When is the madness going to stop?”

Disability-rights Internet sites (check out raggededgemagazine.com) claim Eastwood chose the plotline out of revenge. He’s been outspoken about what he perceives as greediness by lawyers who search out claims against businesses not complying with the Americans with Disabilities Act.

Eastwood denies the revenge charge. He counters that disability rights groups are using the film to garner their own publicity.

Unfortunately, the movie perpetuates other stereotypes, too. Swank’s Southern poor family is living every imaginable white-trash cliché. And the Morgan Freeman character borders on being an all-wise “Magic Negro,” a movie stereotype black groups protested a few years ago.

Still, Marshall and I urge people to see “Million Dollar Baby” in the hope it will generate important conversation about disability stereotypes and misconceptions.

“Don’t go with your eyes wide shut,” Marshall advises. “Go with eyes newly opened.”

The media shows once again that they do not understand the slippery slope of Euthanasia. To Hollywood, it is better to die then to be someone living with a disability. They make movies that pity people living with disabilities, instead of simply seeing that person as human. If you focus only on someone disability then you are missing out on truly ever knowing that person. Million Dollar Baby is simply another movie that supports the idea that instead of moving on from your disability, you should not dwell on it and never get past it. I am not talking about physically getting past it but simply accepting it as part of who you are and getting on with your life.

Humor in movies is a debate between, exploitation vs. increased awareness. Some people will say that when you are able to look at a touchy topic and bring humor out of it then it is funny and helps people accepted the topic. But in reality this just pushes stereotypes and helps people form negative schemas about people living with disabilities. Instead of being someone to respect and simple just another person they are now the source of jokes and seen as objects of humor. Jokes are use as harmful ways to excuse oppression. If you can laugh at something then you can forget about it and go on with your day instead of dealing with issues that face our world.

This blog is going to discuss issues regrading people living with Disabilities and how their lives are effected by the media, the government, and our society. I will be writing on the pros and cons of the media in relation to people living with disabilities. I will write about the current laws that have been given by the United States government and other countries. I will discuss the treatment of people living with disabilities around the world and in the past. The goal of this blog is to give the readers a better since of what people living with a disability have to go through everyday.