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Abuse of a Two Finger Test

When someone breaks into your home and steals from you, you have much evidence that a crime was committed — the broken door, the mess made by the criminal would make it evident. When it comes to the extremely vile crime of rape, however, it is considerably more difficult to prove that anything happened and it often comes down to the word of the victim against the person or people being accused of the crime. What seems even worse than this, however, is when the victim is forced to prove that the crime took place through humiliating tests — such as the so called ‘two-finger’ test that currently is employed in India for many women who have undergone the worst sort of abuse.

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Using Robots as Therapists

With the tremendous amount of unemployment in the United States, there is one section of employers that, far from suffering, have been rather lacking in qualified hirees and that is in the area of therapists for autistic children.

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Bright Light Blinding the Dependent Eye

Two week ago, I went in for my yearly routine eye exam.  My regular doctor told me she wanted me to see the retina specialist because — the new treatment theory is that anyone who has a -6.0 or higher correction is at risk for a retinal tear and they want to find any trouble early and laser it to prevent more severe degradation in the future — and she wanted to get a baseline for me, even though she didn’t see anything that concerned her.

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The American Horror Story: Asylum Review

It seems like only a year ago that I wrote a review of the television program American Horror Story on this very blog and indeed it has been nearly a year, but American Horror Story is unlike most television series which follows a line of continuity from year to year. Every season of American Horror Story is a self-contained unit, with many of the same actors, but an entirely distinct plot.

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Cruelty Because of Who You Are

Cruelty because of disability is the unfortunate, de facto, standard of living for anyone who dares to live outside the mainstream of the able-bodied merely by purchase of birth.  Janna, a Deaf Woman, and my wife, feels the sting of that cruel indignity every single day with impatient people who refuse to acknowledge her Deafness and who force her to read lips or to use her voice because they don’t feel like writing or finding a common cure that will enable a fair communication dyad that can be understood by all parties.

That inevitable cruelty is part of the daily station of the Disabled, and those of us who love and care for our Disabled friends and family feel that cruelty, too, by proxy, and we do our best to help create a cure of basic human courtesy.  We are often unsuccessful.

What fascinates me, in a maudlin and depressing way, is when families of the disabled place politics above doing the right thing.  A glowing example of a family member standing up and doing right is found in David Axelrod, one of President Obama’s dearest friends and campaign managers, and the fact that Axelrod is willing to shave off his 40-year-old mustache in order to raise a million dollars for epilepsy research.  Axelrod’s oldest child has epilepsy.

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