The Physically Challenged I

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Do you think if you knew your life was short, you would bother to help others? At the most, your place would not be there - ere long.
If such "places" were even available, as their beds are often full, you personally might be forced back into whatever disabled and for the handicapped institutions you had left behind, to try for independent living at Center Park.
How would you know if it would be worthwhile to live or work there? One's place helping others is the one where they get jobs out of keeping you sane and whole, in hospitals, institutions, and finally, in your own apartments.
The place I recall with the most welcoming atmosphere in it, due to human evolution, had a laundry room, was made out of heat retentive cinder blocks, which kept it warm in the winter and cool in the summer, and was easygoing to live in.
Its sole problem was lack of purpose.
That's one of the reasons people there were suicidal, but most were unable to complete the act.
They had a few places to dally, such as a common room, partial to elderly lady gossips and no one else, and an arts and crafts center, much the same as at your basic undefended mental institution, but when the excrement hit the fan, there was nothing much doing but watching TV.
I would hope for your patient understanding about the mental institution reference; there was usually a long line downstairs during the day which was called "the medications line," and many of the people were on mental health medications.
I myself am forced to take two, one for anxiety, and one for sleep.
Seattle, Washington has been called the most livable city on the face of the planet, but to some extent, there have been disabled people who were forced to only die there.
The Legend of Center Park was the man in a manual wheelchair who had managed to hump his way up to the locked door to the roof, pick the lock somehow by using his teeth and a bobby hairpin, and who wheeled off the roof in his wheelchair, seven stories up, and successfully died.
That's because in those days, there was no such Internet.
Now those disabled people have the World Wide Web, and most of them with only lower body impairment, or with the aid of special devices such as mouth adjusted motor controls, can now have something doable at their disposal.
They can go on the Internet and breathe.
I suppose from what I've been told that the Legend of Center Park had no sex life, which was "the thing" before the WWW's Internet took over.
The pencil necked geek with the pocket protectors won.
And nowadays on Yahoo! they have a Malcolm Shabazz "Showbiz" X version of a Black People "geek" icon going, which is pretty cute in a peculiar way.
Meanwhile, "the Disabled" can lead fuller lives, with something real to do other than researching weird sex or having new families - or be white racist pricks with nothing to do but be "impressive" to colored people, or vice versa.
Taking care of handicapped people with no lives was once a specialty of mine, really, my day job.
The fact of the matter is that it was a terrific career oriented towards nursing that I worked - while being a struggling, mostly politically based hack writer - who only really cared about Center Park, the first apartment building built in the entire country, possibly the world, specifically for people in wheelchairs.
That fact somehow blew my mind.
It may have been fear of success on my part, but how can one comprehend it? I was in the first building of its kind in the entire country, and maybe - the planet.
They at least had elevators, and a radical hero there who kept tabs on everyone via the telephone.
That was John Tyler, who was six feet tall if he had been able to walk, and he liked to do what he could to push laws allowing wheelchair access, which was one of the main issues at the time for disabled wheelchair using people.
The other major issue I recall was where such people could live, in affordable wheelchair accessible housing.
Nobody in Center Park wants to live in "a rest home," because apparently people die too easily in there.
Actually, they do, because they put them on psychiatric medications, and those are hard drugs which can kill you with their side affects.
Getting them in Center Park was another "attempt away" at being poisoned to death with the little pills.
Sad to say, their side effects are well known, and it's hard to get people to stop taking them, even when they totally wreck up people's systems.
Some are harsher than others.
But they're mostly not good for you, and can even make you look to get "high" taking them.
I unfortunately am one of the people currently stuck taking them, mainly for sleep.
I had a rocky pregnancy and need medication to get me through the night.
I hate psychiatry, but I love my psychiatrist.
He stopped me from committing suicide over the fact that he loves and serves humanity, and he has to dole out poison for a living.
I see the little pill line in my mind; there it is at Center Park - for when you give up trying, is what I originally was forced to think.
It is there mainly for suicide risks.
I did try to kill myself once - and nearly died because of it; now I am adjusted on my medications and am fairly happy with my life, without the added worry of wondering what is happening to my body.
At least I myself, a victim of minor depression and post traumatic stress disorder, can now take my small amount of medication at home.
I live in my own apartment, no longer within the auspices of Center Park, but I often think of the times with friends, "enemies" and colleagues that I have spent there, working towards civil rights for the entire human race, which is often emblemized in Seattle as through Dr.
Martin Luther King, Jr.
and the many programs started by the American Civil Rights Movement.
I have a small amount of physical challenge - which does not encumber me too severely, involving some left side spasticity.
It does not affect my abilities to edit and write pieces such as the freelance writing, copy editing and ghost writing I normally do, and this four part article series, which I am hoping will enable people to better understand the realms of the physically and mentally disabled and handicapped.
Basic human legal and civil rights, the Independent Living Movement, the Civil Rights Movement, and all such needed movements for change in a hostile world all demarcate continuous social and political changes that are needed in today's local and widespread economies - and the whole entire world.
Let's hear it for everyone's human rights, no matter what form of tangible "human" they may inevitably involve.
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