Beyond Legal Protections, Disability Rights Advocates Seek Economic Progress
Thanks for sending this insightful article. http://www.berkeleydailyplanet
"Validation, if you are mentally ill, is offered when you are a good enough victim."
"Being a professional victim is no way to live. This isn't to say that people are not victims. This is to say that victimhood should not be a source of fulfillment."
Of course, nothing is perfect.
And this same article contains passages that leave me with considerable doubt.
For example...
There is a a background assumption (understandable but arguably counterproductive) that "lots of money" makes people as (presumably) happy as those psychotherapists who "at the end of the day, after working at their high-paying, satisfying therapy job, (get home) to their big house in Walnut Creek, (where) they might sit in their jacuzzi on their back patio, eat some gourmet food, and drink a glass of white wine."
I fully support a decent living wage - and currently advocate a "guaranteed minimum income." (See links below.)
But gourmet food, white wine and back patio jacuzzis, while often epiphenomal to "the good life," are not goals worthy of prioritization.
The corresponding goals I would establish are rice, beans and avocadoes, jug wine drunk from fruit jars, and an accessible shower.
An American poet (whom, if memory serves, was a native American from the upper mid-West) once wrote (and I think I have this verbatim): "Money is important, but not as important as you thought it would be when you didn't have it."
To what extent does a standard, somewhat soporific middle class lifestyle, seduce "us" into adulation of false (or inadequate and self-limiting) attitudes, values and goals?
Even so, it is undeniable that disabled people are "caught between the (transactional) devil and the deep blue sea, needing to play the overlords' game of "dominance/submission" just to make ends meet.
This degrading transactional trade-off -- often intrinsic to material survival -- sucks the hairy wazoo.
Pax-Shalom-Salaam
Alan
May 30, 2017 - Decades ago, on a trans-con flight, I sat next to a talkative intellectual employed by Nixon to develop Tricky Dick's "guaranteed minimum ...
May 23, 2014 - Nixon's Guaranteed Minimum Income Proposal Gets New Traction. I wouldn't buy a used car from The Dickster but I'd take his National ...
Pax on both houses: Nixon's Guaranteed Minimum Income Proposal
paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/.../nixons-guaranteed-minimum-in...
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A guaranteed minimum income would be laughed off the table, a silly proposal to give people an excuse to bum around and not work, rather than the devilishly ...
Sep 13, 2018 - Nixon's Guaranteed Basic Income Bill (Supported By Nobel Prize-Winning Conservative Economist, Milton Friedman) Passed The House, But ...
Aug 9, 2016 - Guaranteed Minimum Income: The Most Conservative Way To Fight Poverty
http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2014/05/nixons-guaranteed-minimum-
Jun 2, 2018 - Ta-Nehisi Coates On The Need For Universal Basic Income · Pax on both houses
May 27, 2017 - http://www.businessinsider.com/mark-zuckerberg-basic-income-harvard-speech-
On Thu, Dec 13, 2018 at 5:14 AM LJB wrote:
http://www.berkeleydailyplanet.com/issue/2018-12-07/article/ 47245?headline=ON-MENTAL- ILLNESS-Validation-and- Invalidation---Jack-Bragen#. XBIwKx6-xK4.mailto
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