War Veterans with Disabilities and Their Families Coping with Change

http://www.sesamestreetfamilyconnections.org/grownups/changes/

Sesame Street provides information for chidren and adults in a comprehendable media. Queen Latifa and John Mayer appeared on an episode detailing the changes families, children in particular, needed to make to accommodate and understand why a spouse, mother, and/or father came back from war different than when they deployed.

Some of the "changes" mentioned included PTSD, traumatic brain injuries, and amputations. Elmo and Queen Latifa discussed the questions that each child may ask about why this happened and how life will change, but can still remain the same to Rosita (another Sesame Street character). Rosita's father returned from the war needing a wheelchair. Rosita didn't know how to react, so Elmo and Queen Latifa invited other military veterans and their families to Sesame Street and each explained their story and how they've coped with the change.

This episode allowed me to realize three things. The first deals with communication. I don't recall any of the individuals stating disability instead stated their personal obstacles, experiences, conditions, and perspectives. As I metioned during my mini lesson today, there are universal ways to address a disability without making it the object of the story or document.

Secondly, I remembered my desire to become an engineer. I know I say this a lot, but I wanted to become a biomedical engineer because I wanted to design prosthesis. After I had my ACL reconstruction and went through nearly a year of physical therapy, I developed an interest in physical therapy and prosthetics. I knew there was a market because of the amount of disabled war veterans returning from duty.

The last realization I had is that I may actually suffer from a minor case of PTSD. One misconception of PTSD is that it is only found in war veterans, but any civilian can experience PTSD. My possible PTSD stems from the Virginia Tech shooting on April 16, 2007. I've never felt it overwhelm me or cause me to need to seek professional help, but at times I think it would be in my best interest. I've never been diagnosed, so I don't consider myself to have a disablity. Honestly, even if I did seek help, and I was told "Yes, you have PTSD." I still don't think I would consider myself disabled. I can't form the words why; it may just be my personality.

This Sesame Street episode made sure to incorporate that not all disabilites, specifically caused by war, are physical disabilites. This concept can be hard for any person, young or old, to understand. If a disability isn't seen, such as PTSD or autism, how do you know the person has a disability? Regardless of physical, emotional, or mental disablities, it is important to be concious and sensitive to each person because you don't know what the person sitting next to you is going through.

Addressing Disability in the Media

Before reading the post, I encourage all of you to look at this video/article I found from ABC's news team based in Chicago: Check It Out Here.

This video is relevant in two ways. First, the Oscar's just happened yesterday and it's a fun time for all of us and second, it brings to light how we handle addressing disabilities and people with disabilities through popular media sources and the like.

As the article points out, a movie with a disability-related theme gets nominated for an Academy Award every year. This is eye-opening to me and at the same time provokes a lot of questions. RTC guidelines stress that we should not portray people with disabilities as super heroes or saints because it gives false hope. Hollywood apparently doesn't follow the same guidelines because their inspirational, tear-jerker stories do just that. (Disclaimer: some of the movies focus on the way of life, or in some cases, the people surrounding the person with a disability.)

This brings up an interesting point and one we've also mentioned in class. People want to read about other people overcoming their disabilities. They motivate us to be better people and stop looking at these particular people as "unable" or "incapable" of the things we take for granted. Yet RTC tells us no to do that. If we start to look as people as "capable" rather than "incapable", even if that means bringing to light their disability, isn't this just a step further towards equality? If you watched the video on the site above, towards the end we see movie-goer Bill Smith. Smith has a stutter and related closely to Colin Firth and his portrayal of King George in the movie and said he could feel his "embarrassment." This movie brought to light a disability that over 3 million Americans deal with. I feel like this is important when getting past the issues of addressing and representing disabilities.

I guess my biggest issue with this is the RTC guidelines attempt to put every person, editor, publication, etc. into a neat little box and say "this is the way we want to be portrayed." And it works for most people. But some people want to get the news out about their disability (Bill Smith) and others, like those in the discourse communities we talked about, want to be addressed according to their disability. I respect RTC's attempt to make a "general" set of rules for everyone to follow, but I don't feel like it applies to everything when you look at different situations.

I want to look at the media as doing a positive thing by showing different people with different disabilities and the things they can accomplish. I don't think these types of movies would have been so successful if this was an issue when they were released.

Web Accessibility

When trying to figure out what sort of topic I wanted to cover in my blog post, I found myself surfing the internet. This web surfing “distraction” led to me think about web accessibility for the disabled. I assumed the role of a partially blind person and thought, well how accessible are these websites I’m looking at to someone with poor vision?

Given that I was on Facebook and a few other popular websites, I figured they would have covered this somewhere in their sites, since they received so much traffic everyday. Turns out, Facebook has been hard at work in attempts to make some of their sites “more accessible.” Their solution seems to be a glorified “different” version of the Facebook pages we all know and creates a different experience to the user if they have a disability.

Although, these are steps in the right direction for Facebook, but this sort of singling out creates the issue of “separate but equal” mentality. Why should your disability prevent you from having the same user experience as everyone else? With the 40 million plus people in the world that have disabilities, it would behoove web developers to analyze their potential audiences and put web accessibility on a higher pedestal. Although, it is easy to pick on this site since they receive so much traffic and publicity, they are giants among millions of other websites. I would think that they would want to set a standard that others could follow in making their social community 100% accessibly to all communities of people even the disabled.

Visual Design & Disability

So after our last two classes and examining the visuals that go along with disability, I was thinking about the question: if we have certain guidelines to address disability and illness in writing and language, why don't we have guidelines for the visuals? Or, better yet, why don’t we use the guidelines for written text (better known as “text” for Katy and Christy…) and implement them into the visuals?

Part of the problem is probably what I raised in class on Friday: where do you draw the line between being realistic and sensitive? I can’t answer this question, but I’ll tell you something that doesn’t seem to comply with RTC’s guidelines or probably any guidelines for disability: the “Accessible Parking” visual: a person in a wheelchair. You all know what I'm talking about. It’s in every parking lot-- In the world (Well, every parking lot that sets aside accessible parking anyway, which is not at all an international concept). And you know what it’s actually called? The International Symbol of Access. But it emphasizes a person with visual disability. I find this interesting.

I also want to bring up some of the guidelines-- "avoid negative labeling," "emphasize abilities, not limitations," and "bypass condescending euphemisms..." but yet the proper term is still disability, emphasizing not what is able to be done but instead that something is not able to be done. It seems to me that if an organization is going to make these claims towards trying to better the situation, they should do it 100%, not only insofar as convenience will let them. Disability is an easy term to use, but still does not comply with their own standards. Just food for thought...

Capitalizing (on) Disability: A Unit(y) in Professional Editing

I presented the following at the 2010 WRTC Symposium. Your posts for this assignment don't have to be as involved or as long, but this does represent the kinds of topics you could discuss.

I use my experience as a professional writer and editor for nonprofit, corporate, and academic environments to discuss various processes and forms of writing in my classes. For example, my work for a public relations department housed in an agency that helps people with disabilities has helped me to critically think about how we write and edit subjects, to borrow from Foucault, who among others, says that discourse about an object in a certain time, a certain space, constructs that object. To know something, to make something real, we talk about it, we document it, we notate behaviors, actions, opinions of subjects—and it is that documentation that builds a history of interpretation about the subject, and thus builds a history of the subject itself. In this way, people, objects, whatever, are always rhetorically constructed.

This is, of course, quite evident in Othered people; marginalized groups are constructed as Other by those in the norm, and as specialists in writing, rhetoric, and tech comm, we spend time talking about how people talk about such groups, such subjects. My focus, then, is on representations of people who are deaf, reflecting a unit on editing disability in my TechSci Editing. In this course we discuss that, as editors, we’re not simply editing other people’s words and images; we’re taking part in editing those people—their values and standards—themselves. And not simply the people who write the words we’re editing, but the also the people writers are writing about. We’re also situating ourselves among standards, sometimes competing standards, and we must be aware of the positive and negative consequences of following one standard over another.

Take for example, the word deaf. Deaf scholar and rhetorician Brenda Brueggemann, among others, notes the difference between a lowercase “d” deaf and a capitalized “d” Deaf. Lowercasing the word deaf represents the audiological problems of hearing. Capitalizing the word Deaf connotes Deaf culture, a community of people who use sign language to communicate, who advocate for the rights of Deaf people, who are quite aware of being and participating in that community in order to forward the values of what it means to be deaf. From a practical standpoint, these constructions make sense for editors who work as advocates for the rights of people with disabilities. As a public relations person for this nonprofit way back when, I worked with one of our departments called the Chicago Hearing Society, who maintained the position that Brueggemann takes: capitalizing Deaf whenever we’re talking about people who are deaf. And so, when I wrote, for example, press releases for CHS, I would, of course, capitalize the "D". Then I’d send out the release to media throughout Chicagoland. The largest newspapers in Chicago, the Tribune and the Sun-Times, for example, would print some of those news releases, but they’d edit the word deaf with a lowercase “d”. Now, this might not seem a big deal to the general reader; I suspect it’s what the reader would expect to see, and it certainly follows the AP style guide’s recommendations to not put explicit focus on a disability, which is what capitalizing the "D" does. It brings focus onto a word that we normally see as lowercase, emphasizing something different about this so-called disability.

And that’s part of the problem for Deaf people, for Deaf culture. Lowercasing the "D" is seen by—at least by Deaf people I worked with—as stripping a bit of identity away from them. Capitalizing on the capitalizing of the word Deaf gives Deaf people a sense of pride, of community membership, of the importance of belonging, of promoting worthwhile ideologies. Despite a 1990 recommendation by the American Society for Newspaper Editors’ who recommended capitalizing Deaf to connote culture, many editors have been slow to adopt such a suggestion. And so, we have Othered standards that compete with more hegemonic standards. And, quite frankly, at the end of the day, it really does sometimes come down to picking battles: do we as advocates for disability and linguistic rights refuse to write press releases to inform the public about our services, about Deaf culture, if publications won’t consider our own standards? Or do we just let it go? The answer to this last question, for me, is no. I continue to fight, continue to resist, unquestioned standards.

So, here, my company’s editorial policy conflicts with another institution’s editorial policy—both adding up to construct a history of our subjects—in this case, those who are deaf. And this competition reflects a history of struggle. In addition to struggling against discrimination against people with disabilities in the workforce, in education, and in other institutions there is the challenge to be heard, to be listened to, and to be so in a way that does not jeopardize or erase individual as well as collective agency, experience, and identity . . . an identity that some people with disabilities—not all—want to construct for themselves and to resist the identities other, more powerful institutions construct for them. And it’s that more powerful construct—the lowercase "d"—that the general reader has knowledge of. The struggle does get tiring, though, and I no longer do public relations. Instead I teach about these experiences in order to make students aware that these issues exist—and that, hopefully, they buy into strategic resistance as well, learning for themselves what battles are important enough to fight.