Monthly Archives: December 2012

With Love for Newtown, Ct – Children First

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Four times I’ve faced a gun at close range.  In 1984 the trigger was pulled. I was shot in the head. The bullet is lodged in my brain. I do all I can not to remember the terror before the trigger was pulled and before, in the other instances, I escaped.

I’ve tried with all my heart and soul not to think (feel) about what those last moments were like for those innocent  people (20 children!) in Newtown, Connecticut.  I’ve tried and I failed. It dawned on me, as I was writing to a close friend this morning, that this may be a healthy thing. If we as people, people!, don’t really digest this horror, and decide that first and foremost we must do all we can to protect our children, nothing will happen, nothing will change, and we will all be accomplices in maintaining the heartbeat of this gun-soaked addicted-to-violence society we live in.

The lack of responsible gun control in this country plays a lead role in the 30,000 deaths a year by gun. As Nicholas Kristoff of the New York Times recently pointed out, “More Americans die in gun homicides and suicides in six months than have died in the last 25 years in every terrorist attack and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq combined.”

One of the tragedies in all this is the instinct of some to protect guns before protecting children. As some have already pointed out,  if members of congress and community leaders and every citizen displayed a fraction of the courage the teachers and principal and school psychologist in Newtown displayed trying to protect the students of Sandy Hook Elementary School, what a difference we could make.

Connecticut Medical Examiner Dr. Wayne Carver said every one of the seven children he examined was shot from three to 11 times, some were shot while clinging to each other!  We must put children before guns. We must do something,  now. If we don’t, more children will die.

Equal rights and the wounding of others

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I take no pleasure in wounding others. None. However, no equal rights advocate gets to choose the oppressors. They are who they are. They are accountable and must be held accountable.

You can’t play favorites as an advocate. Silence in the face of oppression is never an option. Silence empowers the oppressor. Silence in the face of oppression is not in my repertoire. It never has been.

As an advocate you will inevitably wound others along the way.  But if, for example, someone denies people with disabilities a seat at the table, I am going to say so.  If a company providing services to people with disabilities  in the community  engages in community-based warehousing, I am going to say so. If a non-profit organization designed to help others offers little more than lip service, I am going to say so. If leaders from any walk of life are  are among the oppressors, I am going to say so. It’s what advocates do.

Knowing people have been wounded by my advocacy is not pleasant. There are, however, reasons I will not stop. At the top of the list, those being oppressed suffer the deepest wounds of all. And then there’s this. Knowing that oppressors have a found a way to live with themselves as oppressors has made it much easier to live with myself as an advocate.

Those who have been wounded by my advocacy should take a moment to reflect. Perhaps they will realize their wounds are self-inflicted. Those that have complained about me remind me of  someone complaining to a friend about getting a speeding ticket.  Complainer: “That S.O.B. cop gave me a speeding ticket, can you believe it?” Friend: “How fast were you going?” Complainer: “Around 70.” Friend: “What was the speed limit?” Complainer: “Forty-five.”

Sunshine is the best disinfectant and my task as an advocate is to bring things that impede or deny equal rights into the light of day.  My suggestion? Don’t speed.

BIANYS Avner sinks to new low

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The executive director of the Brain Injury Association of New York State stopped people with brain injuries from being on the committee representing people with brain injuries, say several of the committee members whose identities will be protected.

When committee members complained that there was no one with a brain injury on the committee, Judith Avner is said to have claimed she and BIANYS represented people with brain injuries and pointed out that one of the  committee members had a family member with a brain injury. Avner does not have a brain injury.

Avner did not respond to several requests for comment.

The committee was comprised of providers and others and was tasked with drafting a proposal on behalf of New Yorkers with brain injuries for the state’s Medicaid Redesign Team. The proposal had to be filed by a specified date. Not long after Avner took her  stance against people with brain injuries being on the committee, the committee folded.

People with disabilities, including those of us with brain injury disabilities, encounter people and systems who hold to the inaccurate and misguided belief that we are unable to speak for ourselves. Slowly, slowly, this perception is eroding. However, when someone who has been in a leadership position in brain injury for years oppresses the very people she claims to care about, it is beyond unconscionable. It is a kind of moral fraud. It is also bigotry.

What would happen if a committee claiming to represent Jews or Italians or African-Americans refused to allow Jews or Italians or African-Americans to be on the committee? One would hope there would be an uproar of indignation. One would also hope that those blocking the participation of people they claim to represent are fired.

Life with a brain injury disability can be difficult enough; it is made all the more so when those who claim to care are some of the biggest oppressors.

Remembering Frank Pierce

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Frank Pierce died on this day in 2008. The kindness and compassion Frank showed me and the many he loved and cared about was genuine and loving and sincere beyond description. Those who knew him knew a man whose caring and commitment to others, brain injury survivors and their loved ones were what I witnessed the most, was matched by few and outdone by none. He touched the hearts of those who knew him, including mine.
 – Peter

LOVE YOU BROTHER

Remember to say I love you to those you love. I don’t know what it is about those three often maligned and misused words, I love you, that makes them as special as they are, but I do believe that when they are meant, they should be said. Not only to the many who deserve to hear it, but by the many who deserve to say it.

My friend Frank died at 7:35 yesterday morning with the two he loved and who loved him the most by his side. Like many others, I loved Frank. And whenever I’d say, Love you Frank, he’d smile at me and say, Love you brother. And I knew he meant it. I can still hear his voice saying those words to me, Love you brother. He meant them too, all three of them.

The words I love you are remarkably hard for some of us to say. For still others, they are difficult to hear. Still others avoid the phrase because it is has been used as a tool for manipulation and, in some cases, cruel manipulation, in too many scenarios.

However, I think the only necessary guideline for saying it is honesty. Say it if you mean it. Your history, those who betrayed you, used the phrase to manipulate you in one way or another, denied your ever hearing the phrase, none of these people deserve so much control over you today that they stop you from saying it at all.

A woman I love very much said to me recently, “Peter, you love everybody.” Not true. Not by a long shot. Rest assured, there are people I don’t love and there I even people I dislike, some intensely. But what I do believe in is letting those you feel love for know it. While there is certainly such as thing as too much hate in the world, there is no such thing as too much love. However, there is such a thing as not enough love – and not enough expression of the love that is there.

The first game the Yankees played after Yankee captain Thurmon Munson’s tragic death in 1979 was in Yankee Stadium against the Baltimore Orioles. The Orioles catcher was Rick Dempsey, a former Yankee and back-up catcher for Munson. The Yankee manager was Billy Martin. Dempsey sent a note to Martin in the Yankee clubhouse before the game. In it he told Martin that he, like so many others, loved Thurman and he, like so many of us, did not always remember to tell people he loved that he loved them. And so, in this note, he told Martin that he loved him.

And so if you love people in your life, whether you love them as friends or more, tell them. Use the words I love you – all three of them. I would ask the few of you who might feel saying I love you is a wimpy thing to do why saying it is so hard for you to do? Were it an act of weakness, to say them, it ought to be easy, no?

Take care of yourselves in life. Love each other as best you can. And when you do, say so.

I am going to miss you terribly, Frank.

Love you brother.