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The first hour of Beyond Affliction: The Disability History Project begins with a personal question: Laurie Block, the series' producer and narrator, asks why people come up to her daughter, who has a disability, and give her money. Her quest for an answer leads the listener on a surprising journey into the American experience. Along the way, she explores the changing rationales behind charity in America over the past 150 years and the impact they have had on people with disabilities. Block hears from adults with disabilities who have shared similar experiences to those of her daughter. Her question leads Block back -- by way of Dickens's Tiny Tim -- to 1840s America, where disability, especially in children, had an intense religious and moral character that it hasn't entirely lost; to Elyria, Ohio where in 1910 a Babbitt-like businessman and do-gooder founded the Society For Crippled Children, today's Easter Seals; to the Depression-era March of Dimes which was inspired by Franklin Roosevelt; to the scare tactics employed in 1950's public service announcements; to the contemporary efforts of charitable organizations to reinvent their portrayal of disability. We hear from givers and receivers of charity, including those who "worked" for charities as poster children. We see how media campaigns designed to raise funds for services and research have helped shape, over the decades, our common feelings about disability-- a compound of pity, fear, and hope which has yet to be untangled. And we see the profound impact that our long-standing stereotypes have had on how people with disabilites have been able to live their lives. Access to health care is a particularly critical issue for disabled Americans, the heaviest users of health-care services in the country. As long as we, as a society, don't provide universal access to health-care services, voluntary health-care services-- run and funded by philanthropic foundations and charitable organizations-- will remain a fundamental part of the American health-care system. Inventing the Poster Child's final question is put to fundraisers, advertising directors, service organizations, and the general public: how can we help people in need without exploiting them? How does our understanding of what disability is and what it means have to change so that we can accomplish this? |
