Not the “oh Einstein was probably autistic” or the sanitized Helen Keller story. but this history disabled people have made and has been made for us.
Teach them about Carrie Buck, who was sterilized against her will, sued in 1927, and lost because “Three generations of imbeciles [were] enough.”
Teach them about Judith Heumann and her associates, who in 1977, held the longest sit in a government building for the enactment of 504 protection passed three years earlier.
Teach them about all the Baby Does, newborns in 1980s who were born disabled and who doctors left to die without treatment, who’s deaths lead to the passing of The Baby Doe amendment to the child abuse law in 1984.
Teach them about the deaf students at Gallaudet University, a liberal arts school for the deaf, who in 1988, protested the appointment of yet another hearing president and successfully elected I. King Jordan as their first deaf president.
Teach them about Jim Sinclair, who at the 1993 international Autism Conference stood and said “don’t mourn for us. We are alive. We are real. And we’re here waiting for you.”
Teach about the disability activists who laid down in front of buses for accessible transit in 1978, crawled up the steps of congress in 1990 for the ADA, and fight against police brutality, poverty, restricted access to medical care, and abuse today.
Teach about us.
Oh! Oh! I got one! Meet Edward V. Roberts-
Ed Roberts was one of the founding minds behind the Independent Living movement. Roberts was born in 1939, and contracted polio at age 14, two years before the vaccine that ended the polio epidemic came out (vaccinate your kids). Polio left Roberts almost completely paralyzed, with only the use of two fingers and a few toes. At night, he had to sleep in an iron lung, and he would often rest there during the day as well. Other times of the day, he breathed by using his face and neck muscles to force air in and out of his lungs.
Despite this being the fifties, Roberts’ mother insisted that her son continue schooling. Her support helped him face his fear of being stared at and ridiculed at school, going from thinking of himself as a “hopeless cripple” to seeing himself as a “star.” When his high school tried to deny him his diploma because he had never completed driver’s ed, Roberts and his mother fought the school and won.
This marked the beginning of his career as an activist.
Roberts had to fight the California Department of Vocational Rehabilitation for support to attend college, because his counselor thought he was too severely disabled to ever work or live independently. Roberts did go to school, however, first attending the College of San Marino. He was then accepted to UC Berkeley, but when the school learned that he was disabled, they tried to backtrack. “We’ve tried cripples before, and it didn’t work,” one dean famously said. The school tried to argue the dorms couldn’t accommodate his iron lung, so Roberts was instead housed in an empty wing of the school’s Cowell Hospital.
Roberts’ admittance paved the way for other disabled students who were also housed in the new Cowell Dorm. The group called themselves “The Rolling Quads,” and together they fought and advocated for better disability support, more ramps and accessible architecture like curb cut outs, founded the first formally recognized student-led disability services program in the country, and even managed to successfully oust a rehabilitation counselor who had threatened two of the Quads with expulsion for their protests.
After graduation from his master’s, he served a number of other roles- he taught political science at a number of different colleges over the years, served on the board for the Center for Independent Living, confounded the World Institute on Disability with Judith E. Heumann and Joan Leon, and continued to advocate for better disability services and infrastructure at his alma mater of UC Berkeley.
Roberts also took part in and helped organize sit ins to force the federal government to enforce section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, which stated that people with disabilities should not be excluded from activities, denied the right to receive benefits, or be discriminated against, from any program that uses federal financial assistance, solely because of their disability. The sit-in occupied the offices of the Carter Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare building in San Francisco and lasted 28 days. The protestors were supported by local gay rights organizations and the Black Panthers. Roberts and other activists spoke, and their arguments were so compelling that members of the department of health joined the sit in. Reagan was forced to acknowledge and implement the policies and rules that section 504 required. This national recognition helped to pave the way for the Americans with Disabilities Act in 1990.
Roberts died of cardiac arrest in 1995 at the age of 54, leaving behind a proud legacy of advocacy and activism. Not bad for a “hopeless cripple” whose rehab counselor thought he was too disabled to ever work.
[id: a black and white photograph of Roberts, a bearded white man, sitting in his chair and smiling with a ventilator tube between his teeth.
A younger Roberts lying in an Iron Lung with a cup with a straw next to his head.
Two photographs, one of Roberts and a black man with a service dog (probably a seeing eye dog) walking along a path together, the other of Roberts participating in a march, with another man behind him holding a sign saying “Civil Rights for Disabled”]/end id.
I know it made it up to #6 at one point. Being a pre-existing fan of both Trigun and This is How You Loose the Time War made this especially enjoyable.
I’m just going to add some more Twitter screencaps I pasted into the groupchat.
The producer of Trigun Stampede. (No word from Nightow yet, I checked.)
A literary agent. To be precise, the agent of at least one of the authors of Time War.
Slate, posting their article about the whole thing.
A frenzy of mutual adoration and signed hardcover offers.
Other authors want in on the Bigolas Dickolas goodness.
Dongwon again.
Saw this on Twitter and HAH.
Bigolas Dickolas is now Alexander the Great.
And finally, the forecast is good for a livestream of Max and Amal watching Trigun.
This is apparently still unfolding! Tumblr “news” is sometimes 5 years old so I wasn’t sure 😂 The latest - it’s up to #3!!
LMFAOO YEAH I JUST SAW IT HIT #3 been trying to keep this post updated but didn’t want to spam, and the speed at which these things have been happening is beautifully astounding so:
trigun, following bigolas dickolas, has also become a trending topic in business and finance
and the situation very much escaping online confinement xD
A significant number of hours later (and too much to summarize):
Time War summary: reached #3 on Amazon overall, #1 (and 2, And 3) in science fiction romance, #3 in lit and fiction, social media presence overseas, and-
printing with a bigolas dickolas sleeve and so much more
And then after tweeting @ dark horse for a potential trigun maximum (trimax) reprint due to the eng verison being out of print for several years by this point:
so everything can now basically be summed by by this tweet!
(I don’t know if i’ll keep updating this thread considering how many branches there are and idk how much more this can escalate, but I’m keeping an eye on the situation so we’ll see!!)
For those asking what time war is about, per Mr. Bigolas’s post: DO NOT look up anything about it. Just read it.
For those asking about trigun, it is an amazing manga, anime adaptation, and new reboot anime.
Yes Elon is bad at running Twitter. It should be noted that he is more than likely intentionally tanking the value of Twitter, so he can declare bankruptcy. He must do this while looking like he’s doing his best.
Remember, all this happened because he joked on Twitter about buying Twitter to temporarily spike his Twitter stock. This is blatantly insider trading, and the sort of thing the SEC loves punishing people for.
This put Elon in a tricky place. He could say he was joking, and risk getting investigated by the SEC. Or he could double down, and actually buy Twitter to prove he wasn’t lying to boost his stock price. These were both horrible options for Elon. But being investigated by the SEC is the type of thing that rich people have nightmares about.
So he was forced to buy Twitter. He could not afford Twitter. So he was forced to engage in a leveraged buyout, meaning he had to pay a big chunk of the check in Tesla stock. This was a shit deal for Elon. Twitter was well known for essentially being at the peak of it’s profitability, and the previous owners were looking for a nice exit. They were happy to sell the company to Elon for what was probably the highest price tag Twitter would ever have.
What this meant for Elon, was he had just used several billion dollars of his actually profitable company, and had to tie it’s ankles to a company that would only drop in value. (and a company he had no idea how to run.) If Twitter drowns, Tesla does too.
His only way out is to tank Twitters value so the company can declare bankruptcy, sell off the assets, and stop bleeding money. But he can’t LOOK like he’s doing that ON PURPOSE for the same reason that he had to double down on buying Twitter in the first place: the SEC is very scary.
The kind of thing a good coder wouldn’t mind seeing on their tombstone:
DEGRADED GRACEFULLY
Finally, a truly useful flashlight design! Because even just some light from one or two functional batteries is better than having not enough batteries to even close the circuit! Plus, if the contacts corrode at one spot and you don’t have the time & means to clean it, you can still get light out of the thing!
