#ADA25, Mental Health, Justin Dart and My Crazy #’s
This weekend I am celebrating the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act, July 26, 2015. For gifts, here are some hashtags for tweeting! Below watch a two minute video by my good friend David Zupan:
Justin Dart, father of the ADA, stopped to pose with me, David W. Oaks, wearing his Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest award possible in the USA for a civilian. Justin got the award, but wanted to share it with many activists! He was on his way that day to donate it and his famous hat to the Smithsonian, where I guess you can view them today, along with his famous cowboy boots.
My friend, Justin Dart, is called the father of the ADA, and godfather of the disabilities movement. Justin loved activists, his friends, his wonderful wife Yoshiko, and people with disabilities. Being near Justin and friends Tom Olin, Janine Bertram Kemp, and others felt like being near a campfire and warming your hands! Love is truly the revolution.
#LeadOn is a tribute to Justin. He encouraged everyone by saying “lead on!”
For example, “#LeadOn Senator Bob Dole! Your leadership for disability is appreciated!”
My next gift, #LTFO, stands for something a little stronger than lead on: Lead The Fuck On! Because some folks might be a little squeamish, this hashtag is for folks who can handle this such as many of our US vets. After all, vets gave us FUBAR and SNAFU! Seriously, because vets tend to go through the VA system, there is segregation between disabled vets and the rest of us disabled Americans.
For example: “#LTFO, my friend and Vietnam-vet Kim Maynard, who says that the disabled vets he knows have values that are reflected by non-vet civilian disability activists. Unite!”
My next gift reflects the urgency of our times, when Pope Francis calls Catholics, non-Catholics and non-believers to create a revolution because of global warming and poverty. This ferment reminds me that when I started in activism we thought of ourselves as One Big Movement, the beloved community as MLK called us.
#LERC is a hashtag based on what my wife helped come up with: Love Earth Revolution Celebration. Your name may be different in this horizontalish world revolt.
I should keep this post brief. My wonderful homecare worker Cat said, “Just say that you have a book today and only two minutes to say it in!”
So my final gift is simply this:
#ADA
Happy birthday, everyone!
The Cuckoo’s Nest Salon: The Maddest in America!
A famous partly-paralyzed person once reassured a frightened nation that confronted depression and fascism. I will make a change in that statement because we now face something that may be trillions of times bigger:
“The Only Thing Normal Is Madness Itself”
Our choice, our only choice, and we always have a choice, is what kind of madness we want.
Instead of #ADA I see that some people are instead tweeting out #ADA25, so maybe I will do that too, because I sure do not want people to think I am speaking for the American Dental Association. If I did that, I might rant against their endorsement of forced fluoridation in the water supply, and how an epidemic of spinal arthritis broke out in India after pollution from fluoride, but as the Kogi in South America warned us little brothers, in the excellent documentary Aluna available from Netflix, a thread of life weaves a web for us all. I sure would not want too look to crazy for you!
So I will look just a little crazy, I hope, as we mark this historic occasion. Love you!
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Originally by David W. Oaks published at http://davidwoaks.org/ada25-revolution
David W. Oaks blogs related to mental health activism are re-published by the Mad In American blog and there tends to be more discussion comments there, find info about that here:
http://www.madinamerica.com/author/doaks/
