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Galileo -- and Ed Roberts
Feb. 15, 2002 -- Today, February 15th, is Galileo's birthday. He was an Italian astronomer and physicist who, while dealing with the symptoms of Attention Deficit Disorder and learning disabilities, made the first effective use of the telescope. Doing so led him to question the strongly held belief at the time that the Earth was at the center of the universe. For this he was tried and convicted in 1633 by the Church Inquisition as a heretic. Even while being forced to publicly "recant" that belief, he quietly maintained "And yet...it moves!" He died a quiet hero with visual impairment and under permanent house arrest.
Fast forward 400 years or so to our own time. Ed Roberts, whose own birthday
was just a few weeks ago, worked to reorder the world in an equally radical
way. As a person with quadrIplegia due to polio, he took his own struggle
with house arrest due to inaccessibility public and brought millions of
disabled people along with him. More than once this modern-day Galileo
insisted that the real problem of handicapping attitudes came from bureaucrats
who were "paralyzed from the neck up!"
Galileo taught that the Earth actually did move around the Sun. Ed taught
that people with disabilities actually could move through society. Neither
message was truly welcomed by the Powers-That-Be.
Ed pointed out that people with disabilities are not invisible; that the
problem is the stairs and not us; that if you can't "go" then you can't go;
that we have minor medical ailments; go to church; eat out and even hang out
in sports bars.
Ed is gone now. Those "paralyzing" handicapped attitudes are not. The access
fight is getting harder all the time. Employers are currently winning 96.4%
of all disability access complaints gainst them. We can see the table in the
employee breakroom, but we still aren't getting to it.
Treatment for mental illness is still arbitrarily limited by HMOs. "There is
nothing more we can do" is more and more really coming to mean "there is
nothing more your insurance will cover." "Futile treatment" decisions are
still really decisions about "futile lives."
The worldview-shaking Galileo-scale idea that Ed Roberts brought to
able-bodied "thinkers" is this: Between perfect body and death
is a place where less-than-perfect life is still worth living. Between
recovery and death is disability.
I discovered this on my own when my disability began. First, I was going to
fully recover. Then I was going to have the best death hospice could provide.
Lots of support was there for those two options. Then it turned out that I
was going to live, but as a new member of the disabled community. All my
support then, mostly medical and religious, headed for the inaccessible hills.
That's when I was lucky enough to hear Ed Roberts' great truth for the first
time about the ability of people with disabilities to live independent lives.
That truth kept me from agreeing to go to a nursing home to wait to die. That
truth is why I am sitting and writing this sentence right now.
Ed Roberts was the Crip Galileo who upturned all accepted notions of what
people with disabilities can and cannot do. All his friends are still out
there rocking that boat named The Status Quo.
They and we still have a lot of
work to do. St. Petersburg Times movie critic Steve Persall called the film "I Am Sam" "complete science fiction," since social workers never let people with
disabilities raise children. The writer raged in print about the fact that the possibility
was even entertained.
Boy, do we have a lot of work left to do!
It wasn't until 1992 that Pope John Paul II publicly endorsed the 1983
findings of a Commission that decided the Church should not have condemned
Galileo for teaching that the Earth moved. That acknowledgement of error was
only 359 years after the fact. That acknowledgement exonerated Galileo the
Crip, folks.
Every time a person with a disability speaks out about inacessibility we are
exonerating the work of another of our own, Ed Roberts. We don't have to wait
over three and a half centuries to do that.
Galileo was the Ed Roberts of his time. Ed Roberts was the Galileo of ours.
Thank you and "Happy Birthday" to you both.
Rus Cooper-Dowda is a minister and freelance writer in St. Petersburg, Fla.
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