{"id":2547,"date":"2012-04-26T22:09:11","date_gmt":"2012-04-27T02:09:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/susansenator.com\/blog\/?p=2547"},"modified":"2012-04-26T22:44:05","modified_gmt":"2012-04-27T02:44:05","slug":"fight-for-your-children","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/susansenator.com\/blog\/2012\/04\/fight-for-your-children\/","title":{"rendered":"Fight for your children"},"content":{"rendered":"

When I was a little girl, I had gerbils for pets. Queen Victoria and Prince Albert. The times that the Queen gave birth were so exciting. It seemed like on every holiday, actually, there’d be a new litter: 5 naked pink gerblets, mashed together like\u00a0 fingertips. But there was a danger: the weak ones could be eaten by the parents. “It’s nature,” Mom and Dad would say. “Ew!” Laura and I would say, fascinated. How could a mother eat her baby? Kill her baby? But sometimes, horribly, they do<\/a>.<\/p>\n

We always hear about the law of the jungle, and survival of the fittest, as if that is the way of all things. And in many ways nature is like that. And this provides some with justification for not helping the needy. Worse, this belief allows some to believe that the needy — the weak, the “damaged,” the non-normal — get what nature intends. What they deserve.<\/p>\n

This is the most primitive of beliefs, since it comes from animals. But if you think about it, even animals themselves don’t always kill the vulnerable. There are stories of animal friendships<\/a>, Mowgli-like tales where one species nurtures another, where wolves and dogs look out for humans, where gorillas adopt kittens. Mythical stories like Tarzan, and Androcles. It is not the way of the world, then, if there are memorable examples of other ways.<\/p>\n

Every religion admonishes us to take care of each other, too. Why is it so easy, then, for us to forget? I just spent two days in Washington, DC with a ton of other disability advocates as well as CCCAID, the organization I’m working for as Director of Autism Adult Services and Outreach. I met with staff from six different Senators and Representatives offices, all to discuss the need to maintain supports, lifelines really, for people with disabilities.<\/p>\n

I talked a lot about the ABLE Act<\/a>, which is legislation that would allow for families to save money for their disabled children in adulthood, so that they would not lose benefits like Medicaid and SSI. Why shouldn’t we be able to save for our needy children when we save for the non-disabled ones? We take aid for college as well as pay our own money for it. How is it that different for our more vulnerable children to take aid from the government — because statistically they will have a harder time than their non-disabled peers earning nearly enough money to survive — to supplement their needs?<\/p>\n

But what’s the “pay for?” I kept hearing this from the aides. “How do we pay for it?”<\/p>\n

“We are one of the wealthiest countries on earth,” said Senator Tom Harkin of Iowa, at a reception I attended Tuesday night. And I say we are the lions of the world. We have a fantastic, rich and bountiful country; we have power, wisdom, and the best form of government on this earth. We can<\/em> take care of our young, and the young of others, regardless of their struggle. We’re not gerbils. Let’s be more like the elephant and the sheep. The bunny and the guinea pig. Koko and the kitten.<\/p>\n

But some parents are so scared for their children. They don’t know how to protect them from the world. A world with no certainties, and the threat of disappearing safety nets. In many places there are no safety nets at all. In D.C. this weekend, one mother told me that she knows parents who hope that their children die when they do. They love their children deeply, and yet they hope this.\u00a0 These are not the parents who kill their children, who drown them or imprison them in a flaming house. These are parents who have no faith, no hope.\u00a0 They do not want to see their children suffer, and they think that when they go, their children will indeed suffer.<\/p>\n

They are sad parents, despairing about the world. And they are so wrong. They have no right to decide that, not about their living children. But they do have the right to be angry. They should be angry. Not at their children, nor God, but at the selfish people who would cut their lifeline funding.<\/p>\n

There is always hope.\u00a0 But hope does not come easily. Unfortunately, just as we have had to work so hard to nourish and nurture our disabled children, we have to work just as hard to help them live adult lives. We can’t turn from that responsibility. And we have to work together to keep our hope and possibilities alive. Life takes work. Hard work. We can’t give up.<\/p>\n

We cannot allow our elected officials tell us that programs like Medicaid and ABLE will be eliminated or not enacted because of money. That is cowardice, not prudence. It is not even conservatism; this is not about being careful and watchful of funds. This is about letting people founder. Not helping our fellow man. If we are talking about not funding and helping with those who are more difficult to manage, then we are essentially talking about dispensing with them. Don’t believe what the Tea Party says, about how paying lower taxes somehow restores America to its greatness. The truth is less glamorous, but nevertheless, it is the truth, that lower taxes = less money for supports for the disabled = saying we don’t care.\u00a0 It is cruelty.<\/p>\n

The answer is clear, but very difficult. It is dreary and arduous. It is about one person at a time, one vote at a time, one phone call or email to Congress at a time. But we have to believe in the collective good, that there is power in that, but we all have to do our share.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

When I was a little girl, I had gerbils for pets. Queen Victoria and Prince Albert. The times that the Queen gave birth were so exciting. It seemed like on every holiday, actually, there’d be a new litter: 5 naked pink gerblets, mashed together like\u00a0 fingertips. But there was a danger: the weak ones could […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2547","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pSTth-F5","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/susansenator.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2547","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/susansenator.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/susansenator.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/susansenator.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/susansenator.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2547"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/susansenator.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2547\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2556,"href":"https:\/\/susansenator.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2547\/revisions\/2556"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/susansenator.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2547"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/susansenator.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2547"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/susansenator.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2547"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}