HOLIDAY CHEER

It’s holiday season time, so everyone with disabilities can once again expect a new wave of abuse over parking spaces.  The hustle and crush of getting everything done, instead of producing good will, generates intense competition over every possible resource, including accessible parking spots. 

To folks who really need them, the theft of handicapped slots ranks high on the list of life’s irritations.  In May 2010 the Christopher and Dana Reeve Foundation conducted a survey, to discover what were the top ten things that annoy people who use wheelchairs.

Topping the list was, “Able-bodied people parking in accessible parking spaces.”  And not by a small margin, either:  37% reported this, as compared to only 12% for the number two; that’s more than three times as many.  Ladies and gentlemen, we have a winner:  something that really pisses off a lot of the different kinds of folks in wheelchairs.

Despite this, I’ve discovered that the holiday season is when disabled parking spaces are most likely to be taken by able bodied citizens, all in a dreadful hurry, and hence possessing a powerful sense of entitlement.  So much for good will towards humankind.  The presents are due, I need wrapping paper, and you’ll understand if I take your slot and run into the store.  You can find another place to let out that ramp.

This year it also comes on the heels of a growing wave of folks impersonating disability to gain an advantage in so many activities.

There are a number of ingenious, and heinous, varieties of this fraud.  The New York Times reported on the growing practice of improperly requesting a wheelchair in order to skirt lines at airport security checkpoints.  People see a wheelchair passenger breeze through, so they request one too, often quite brazenly.  One wheelchair pusher for Delta Air Lines explained, “When they see that the line is so long, they just ask for a wheelchair,” whether they need one or not.   Another described how, once past the final check, their charge would just stand up, “They say, ‘Ma’am, I feel better — I can go by myself.’ ”  The abuse is so rife on some flights, that professionals refer to them as “miracle flights”, with as many as a dozen wheelchair passengers getting on.  “We’d say there was a miracle because they all needed a wheelchair getting on, but not getting off,” explained Kelly Skyles, national safety and security coordinator for the Association of Professional Flight Attendants, which represents American Airlines attendants.    

The list goes on.  A friend of mine and wheelchair user explained, “The handicapped parking spaces have provided a great convenience to people that use a grocery cart to haul their load to their cars.  Just put the cart on those wonderful blue stripes.  There had to be a reason for the stripes, after all how many people with wheelchairs do you see using them?”

So I came up with an alternative, something that spreads a message long after the holiday crush is over.  A friend of mine owns a chain of airsoft stores, and after remodeling, the employees had some fun and redid the disabled parking logo in one slot.   I had it made up as stickers, one of which is on my rear windshield, then added a caption.  (see attachment)

It’s the holiday season.  Time to light the tree, drink some eggnog.  And above, all do whatever you can to get to the front of every line.  Ho ho ho, everyone. 

ELECTORAL MAPS

The 2012 election map doesn’t look good for Republicans; lots of blue, not much red.  A funny thing, though:  we’ve seen that same map before, just in reverse.  But the old school Democrats were digging their way out of the hole, while today’s GOP just sinks deeper.

In the 1920s this was a Republican country.  If you were proper, if you were middle class, you voted Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover.  Only Southerners went for the Democrats in a presidential contest.

Take a look at the electoral map in 1924, a typical contest in that decade.  The whole country is red.  There is one blue strip of twelve states in the southeast, stretching north from the Gulf to Virginia, west to Texas.  That’s it.  Living in the South meant you were in a different part of America, isolated from the mainstream.

Now glance at the map showing the 2012 results; there’s that limited swath, except now it’s Republican.  Also joined by a few other states, mostly in the plains and mountain west, plus Utah and Arizona.  Places with lots of land but few people.  And America allocates electoral votes based on the number of voters, not the population of sage or trees.  So you have the same limited zone, still out of step with the rest of the country, just as they were eighty-six years ago.  These folks remain separate from America politically; they’ve just switched parties, that’s all.

But that’s where the resemblance ends.  In the 1920s a quiet revolution was taking place, below the radar.  In every big city, Democrats were registering urban immigrants and workers, laying the groundwork for the great New Deal coalition of Franklin Roosevelt.  In 1920 the Republicans carried America’s twelve largest cities with a cumulative margin of 1.64 million votes.  By the 1928 election they lost those same places by a 38.000 margin.  That year Boston’s Jewish-Italian Third Ward gave the Democrats 81% of their votes, while Chicago’s Poles and Czechs turned out 70%.  Even in Richmond, Kentucky, Democratic field reports claimed that “most of the negroes seem to be for [their candidate], and all Jews are.”  The great reversal had begun.

So what are the Republicans doing now to reverse similar fortunes?  They hope that a few candidates with Latino names will do the trick, but without changing any of their policies.  Or even many of their attitudes.

Harmeet Dhillon is a case in point.  Right now she is the front runner for vice chair of the California Republican Party.  Dhillon has some support, but some of her party mates oppose the candidacy.  Despite a solid record as an attorney, Dhillon was attacked in a Facebook post from the president of the San Bernadino County Federation of Republican Women. "I was told by one of Harmeet's friends that because of her religion her loyalty is to the Muslim religion," it read. "So she will defend a muslim [sic] beheading 2 men without any hesitation….”  The LA Times reported that others condemned her on the grounds of being “un-American;” some went so far as to ask if she would sacrifice a goat during the meeting.

For some Republicans there was a different problem.  They were upset because she once worked with the ACLU, and hence wasn’t conservative enough, a familiar claim; she is a RHINO, in other words.   Dhillon’s response:   after 9/11 "I joined…for a specific reason — people [who looked] like my brother and father were being shot, were being detained." Authorities "were rounding up South Asians, rounding up Muslims, people were questioning Sikhs because they didn't know the difference between who's a terrorist and who's just brown-skinned from that part of the world." Obviously some Republicans have no understanding of what that might be like, no sympathy for people falsely accused because of their features, not their politics.  Such insensitivity will not win voters in many California districts.

Party leaders condemned such claims in no uncertain terms.  A joint statement by state party chair Tom Del Beccaro, Senate Minority Leader Bob Huff and Assembly GOP leader Connie Conway read: "Blatant racism has no place in the party of Lincoln.  We strongly denounce this hateful speech in this and any other venue."

We’ll see which message gets out, if the Republican Party is laying groundwork like the Democrats did before 1932, or if they’re still an “Old Party” and not a “Grand” one.