Post for the "First International Day for Mourning and Memory"

[capri0mni]

In the words of Dave Hingsburger, who proposed this day:

(Quote)
I wonder if we here, in this little community, can start something that might grow. I propose the 'International Day for Mourning And Memory of the Lives of People With Disabilities'. The day would be one of remembrance of those whose lives were not celebrated or remembered, the lives of those who were slaughtered by care providers or brutalized to death by bullies. It would also be a day to remember the entire disability community - the elders who came before and who made the world different and better. It would be a day where a moment was taken to pause and reflect and remember.
(Unquote)

Yesterday, I told myself that I would commemorate this day in the way I best can: by posting something in this journal. Today, I woke up stumped, and drawing a blank. I don't know of anyone in my family who was locked away in an Institution for difference (and that's kind of the point, isn't it?). It's very hard to remember an mourn anyone in the abstract -- people who are left out of history, and whose names are erased.

I know (based on my own vague, toddler-rooted, memories, filled in by stories my mother oft repeated), that I was almost among that number. But I grew up, by the good luck to be born to an iconoclast, mainstreamed, before (Quote/Unquote) "Mainstreaming" became codified and Institutionalized in its own way.

And then, I remembered this snippet from British Medieval History that I found and posted last October: from this website: The Sheredes Project: Spitalbrook Hospital):

(Quote)
The Living Dead

In the Middle Ages, if a person developed leprosy, they would be declared legally dead and lose all their possessions. They would have to leave their family, and go to live with other lepers in a place like the hospital at Spitalbrook. In Medieval times, this would have been outside the village of Hoddesdon.

Lepers were given special clothes, a begging bowl, and a bell or wooden clapper, so they could be clearly seen and to warn other people to keep their distance. They were given these in a ceremony that was modelled on the service for the burial of the dead and, in many places, the leper was actually required to stand in an open grave while the ritual, that marked them as outcasts from society, was performed above their head.
(Unquote)

And it occurred to me that this is what institutional life is like -- whether or not it's actually inside the brick and mortar walls of a "Facility."

'Special-Ed' students are taught under the same roof as 'normal' students, but they're segregated into 'Special' classrooms, and are 'exempt' from going to all-school assemblies. So they and the 'normal' students never cross paths.

Entire suburban developments are built where only the houses that wheelchair users live in are actually wheelchair accessible, and houses that have ramps are "improved" by having them dismantled.

Rather than make all public transit accessible, and properly train drivers, municipalities provide "para-transit" services, where wheelchair users have to call and schedule a ride days in advance, and they're only allowed one able-bodied companion each to ride with them, in the role of an aide.

----

In twenty-first century North America, we're no longer marked as outcasts by ritual and costume, the way we were in medieval England. But we're still outcasts -- still living in a parallel world, skimming along the edges of Public Life, and not fully a part of it. Like ghosts, or like Scrooge on his Christmas Eve travels, we observe and hear, but are neither seen nor heard.

Institutionalization is in the mind and the attitude, not within walls.

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[capri0mni]

&hugs.