\u00a9 2016 Don Baker<\/p>\n
Two things happened yesterday.\u00a0 A nice lady from a business startup organization called to say that she just didn\u2019t know what to do for me.\u00a0 I finished re-reading \u201cBlood\u2019s Pride\u201d by Evie Manieri (2012, TOR Fantasy, New York).\u00a0 Good book.<\/p>\n
The Norlanders, a group of the cast of characters in Blood\u2019s Pride, are tall warriors from a frozen north, with silver-blue eyes and blood, white hair, and gray frosty skin, who leave the maimed, disfigured and disabled out in the cold woods to freeze to death.\u00a0 Something like the Supreme Court of the United States does in its decisions to people with disabilities when they come before the High Court asking to be allowed to work.<\/p>\n
If you don\u2019t believe me, read Toyota v. Williams, (00-1089) 534 U.S. 184 (2002).\u00a0 In it, the High Court went to great, fantastic lengths to determine that Toyota did not have to keep a woman with carpal tunnel syndrome whom it had forced to work in positions she could not handle, until her Doctor told her to take some time off to heal or suffer permanent damage.\u00a0 All of the Justices took a hand in fantasizing, without any apparent benefit of personal experience, how it was to live with true disability.\u00a0 (See Naef, Andrea Kloehn, 2012, Toyota Motor Manufacturing v. Williams: A Case of Carpal Tunnel Syndrome Weakens the Grip of the Americans with Disabilities Act, Pepperdine Law Rev., 31(2):575-607)<\/p>\n
But it wasn\u2019t a matter of business necessity.\u00a0 It was a matter of culture.\u00a0 (See http:\/\/www.npr.org\/blogs\/health\/2012\/11\/12\/164793058\/struggle<\/a>…, Struggle For Smarts? How Eastern And Western Cultures Tackle Learning, by Alix Spiegel)\u00a0 According to Spiegel, the Japaese believe that with the dint of effort, everyone can do everything the same.\u00a0 There are no \u201cslow\u201d children in Japanese schools, just ones who have not yet learned how to do something right.\u00a0 The entire class waits and encourages them until they do.<\/p>\n So in Toyota\u2019s U.S. plant, under a policy of rotating job positions, Toyota required Ms. Ella Williams, who had already brought suit under the ADA and settled twice, to work in a position which required her to exacerbate injuries.\u00a0 Toyota required inspection workers to rotate weekly through a series of four jobs, one of which Ms. Williams could not do.\u00a0 Her Doctor ordered her to stop, and take time off until she healed.\u00a0 Toyota fired her for not coming to work.<\/p>\n The Supreme Court accepted and proceeded to embellish on the argument that since she could perform three of the tasks, she was not disabled under the ADA, and thus not entitled to its protections.\u00a0 As Kloehn notes, the Court had been expanding this doctrine in a series of rulings.\u00a0 Despite the ADA, it often holds that business should not have to put up with disabled people.<\/p>\n People with psychiatric disabilities face even grimmer prospects. \u00a0(See Laden, V.A, and Schwartz, G., 2000, Psychiatric Disabilities, the Americans with Disabilities Act, and the New Workplace Violence Account, Berkeley J. of Empl. & Labor Law, 21:246-270)\u00a0 Under High Court rulings that society has a right to defend itself against any threat of violence from mental illness, because of \u201cthe dangerous tendencies of some\u201d (Arlington v. Texas, 1979), it grants employers the right to terminate on the mere perception of threat.\u00a0 For example, the Post Office employee fired for speaking about nightmares, in which the employee was the victim<\/em> of a workplace shooting (Laden & Schwarz, p 248).<\/p>\n Nor does it stop there.\u00a0 I once corresponded with a woman in a wheelchair who organized theangrygimp<\/em> newsletter.\u00a0 She told me of a run-in with a black female supervisor who went ballistic when this white disabled woman tried to commiserate with racial discrimination.\u00a0 She said her supervisor then proceeded to make her work life as miserable as possible. \u00a0Her supervisor got into some trouble over that, but her job did not last.\u00a0 She told this story without making any racial comments.<\/p>\n Most people with disabilities would love to have proud and productive work, to be tax-paying citizens.\u00a0 It\u2019s just not allowed.\u00a0 So we try again and again to make jobs for ourselves.\u00a0 But there\u2019s this one problem.\u00a0 We\u2019re not supposed to.<\/p>\n Our society may not put us out in the freezing forest to die, or burn us at the stake, or shut us up in poor houses and asylums anymore.\u00a0 But society does put us in welfare ghettos.\u00a0 My last job, a post-doctoral position, part-time because of physical injuries delivered by a drinking driver, went according to social principles described by Laden and Schwarz.\u00a0 After it became apparent that there would be no more professional work, Social Security Disability Insurance was the only place left for me.<\/p>\n I have since aged out into Social Security, able to live in reasonable comfort, if not style, on the graces of State and Federal aid for healthcare and housing.\u00a0 It\u2019s an interesting setup.\u00a0 My SS checks come in at a dollar a month below the cutoff for aid.\u00a0 If I buy a tee shirt for $4 and sell it for $5, that\u2019s $4 or $5 over the limit, and I stand to lose many times that in aid.\u00a0 They count gross income, not net.<\/p>\n Considering that my losses in aid could effectively be several thousand dollars, that\u2019s an insurmountable barrier to starting a business.\u00a0 Not to mention that at my age and current abilities, it\u2019s much more productive for me to spend what energy I have left developing intellectual property and filing patents.\u00a0 Making up business plans for businesses I can\u2019t afford to start without going homeless just doesn\u2019t compute.<\/p>\n This brings me to the other thing that happened yesterday, the nice lady from the business startup help organization.\u00a0 None of these places, not the Small Business Administration, not the Oklahoma Small Business Development Center, none of the fee-for-service or membership entrepreneur shops, none of them are geared to work with people who have disabilities and income barriers.\u00a0 So sorry, but they just don\u2019t know what they can do.\u00a0 Especially if we are nearly house-bound by health issues and lack of reliable transportation.<\/p>\n If there really is a God, then God help me, but it looks like liberals and conservatives alike would prefer to keep us sucking on the welfare teat, while they either complain (like the Nazis) about \u201cuseless eaters\u201d, or use us to justify gun control.<\/p>\n Well, the hell with them.\u00a0 A pox on both their houses.\u00a0 I\u2019m going to keep doing research, writing patents, and filing as many as I can afford on limited means.\u00a0 It keeps me off the street and out of the mad house.\u00a0 And if I can\u2019t sell any patent licenses at my price, the hell with the industry, too.<\/p>\n The nice lady from the business startup organization had one possibly good suggestion, ask a Business School to make it a student project to write up a business plan and do market research for me.\u00a0 I\u2019ll go one better.\u00a0 How about coming up with a legislative package that would let people like me start businesses without going homeless over it?<\/p>\n It\u2019s called vision.\u00a0 There seems to be a lack of it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" \u00a9 2016 Don Baker Two things happened yesterday.\u00a0 A nice lady from a business startup organization called to say that she just didn\u2019t know what to do for me.\u00a0 I finished re-reading \u201cBlood\u2019s Pride\u201d by Evie Manieri (2012, TOR Fantasy, … Continue reading