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This county is lousy for the disabled
My best friend in high school was a polio victim. He was skin and bones below the waist, but he could do a thumb-stand, what passed for his butt sticking straight up, and nothing but his thumbs touching the ground. He wore braces to keep his useless legs from flopping around so they could act, in concert with his crutches, as the third leg of a tripod. He didn't like wheelchairs. His torso was all muscle. We took a trip up the west slopes of the Sierra Nevada the summer we graduated, and back down the east side. He hiked up the King's River well over a mile, and wasn't tired when we got back. I imagined that he had thick calluses in his armpits, but I never asked to look. He was born in a car--the one his family lived in. Transients. Homeless. His father was kind of nutty, but he did his best and stuck by his family. Some people draw a tough hand in life; others get royally flushed. I pity the latter; they have been deprived of life.— October 2, 2015 10:29 p.m.
This county is lousy for the disabled
Autistic people are special. Read "Animals Make Us Human," "The Outermost House," "The Horse Boy," and some of Temple Grandin's other books. See the documentary film of "The Horse Boy." The trailer is here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MxWMVE2ijBE Autistic people are different, but not inferior. As are all of us. "We" know so little about reality--all of us. Narcissism may be a far more serious affliction . . . in fact, it may be a true affliction, whereas autism is merely a feeble attempt to describe something we can't--or don't want to--understand.— October 2, 2015 10:16 p.m.
This county is lousy for the disabled
Meanwhile, back in River City, the instant subject is "How do we want the "disabled" to fare in our fair city? Do we care if we are fair? "The opposite of love is not hate; the opposite of love is indifference." --Oscar Wilde I believe that all people who have a disabled placard should display it at all times when they are parked, so that the authorities can know, if they will look, where additional "handicapped" parking spaces are needed. The last time I looked at the Home Despot lot in the Sports Arena area, they had closed a lot of parking spaces (required under their original permit), including handicapped spaces, and the Planning Department would do nothing about it. Don't shop there. Don't shop at any branch of any corporation that does anything antisocial. Ignore antisocial people. Don't comment on their rants. Ignore them. Tw— October 2, 2015 9:17 p.m.
This county is lousy for the disabled
The message is that one must look at the tangled web to get real answers. Consider the Roseburg shootings. All the blatting about "sensible" gun control is just so much talk. None of the popular pundits will touch the real issues with a ten-foot pole. The history of the bus driver we don't know. I do, however, strongly suspect that she did not act solely out of indifference to the person of limited mobility, but a choice between enduring the wrath of the dispatcher (ironic, eh?) and keeping the lousy job and feeding her children. The point is, "we" need to attack problems at their SOURCE, not swat at the first gnat that emerges from our minds. Where are the disciplined studies of the relevant elements that combine to produce monsters?— October 2, 2015 9:08 p.m.
Another echo from the dot-com bubble burst
The perils of Pollyana-ing capitalism. The old, long-lost paper I did in economics on capitalism and the Fed in about 1965 (previously mentioned on this blog) traced the emergence of capitalism from a gift-centered (dynamically stable) culture to a hoarding (runaway acquisition) one and money as a means of control/enslavement where "virtual" illusion Trumped substance just might apply here. Being a vet in college for the second time and kind of WWIII-shocked, I dumped it when the economics prof was luke-warm and the comparative government prof suspected me of plaigarism. I was a contradiction at the time--a rebel just out of a highly authoritarian organization. Now, in my sunset years, I am beginning to wonder if maybe I was onto something. If so, it never will be popular. But then, I never was much of a salesman. Tw— October 2, 2015 8:47 p.m.
This county is lousy for the disabled
Riding a bus from Chula Vista, I sat opposite the driver, in the front of the bus. Guess my color. A man in a wheelchair was at a stop, and the bus driver, a young (liberated?) woman, who no doubt had troubles of her own, lowered the special wheelchair-access-ramp, wheeled the man in, and in apparent consternation, dutifully strapped the man in securely with the special equipment designed into the bus for the purpose. This took maybe five minutes. She roared through the next two stops, but at the third, ANOTHER wheelchair-bound person. She stopped, opened the door, and yelled, "I'm behind schedule--you'll have to wait for the next bus! And roared on in pursuit of her schedule, harried, no doubt, by the "rules" and their Brooks-Brothers-suited creators/superiors who don't know and don't care what it's like where the wheel meets the road. Tw— October 2, 2015 6:38 p.m.
Another echo from the dot-com bubble burst
Of cur-se!— October 2, 2015 5:29 p.m.
SDG&E attempts brazen caper #2
And, of course they should call y'all BEFORE they're fired. Tw— October 2, 2015 12:54 p.m.
Another echo from the dot-com bubble burst
Petty theft compared to some. Tw— October 2, 2015 8:54 a.m.
Loretta Lynch, former president of P.U.C., says it is a “corrupt, co-opted agency
Too bad Lutz is on Facebook. I won't sign up for Facebook. Tw— October 2, 2015 8:52 a.m.