The Antisocial Socialist

 I'm now given to understand that you shouldn't be afraid of the Monday morning announcements, as those are likely to fly well with the public; it's the Friday afternoon ones that the Drug Fraud Regime would like to slide under the table.

The Goatfucker's announcement this morning was confusing, so I'll clear some things up to the best of my ability.

What it sounds like: The Benevolent Leaders have heard the cries of parents of autistic kids who lost funding for treatment. It is responding by increasing funding to all the autistic kids it's now dumped into the mainstream education system without any supports. It will also provide mandatory training on how to deal with these oh-so-difficult autistic kids for every teacher.

Translation into real-life terms: As far as I can tell, this is the funding that a kid with any sort of exceptionality would get upon entering the school system. So essentially the government is proclaiming its generosity and expecting parents and teachers to lick its boots for continuing funding that already existed, even after it has slashed the extra funding that families used to get.

The training thing is even weirder. It looks like in-school aides are history and classroom teachers are now expected to do the work of specialized support workers with likely minimal training. And given that they're likely abolishing class caps, we'll be expected to be educational assistants for autistic kids in a class of 45 or whatever. I imagine the training will be some kind of compliance video or afternoon PD workshop. I asked the opinions of some autistic folks I know and they seemed to feel that the organization in charge is okay but not great, and certainly not led by autistic people. "Training" could mean anything from expecting us all to implement ABA and basically abuse the kids in our care to just simply useless videos where people read PowerPoints to us very slowly and then we do a multiple choice quiz, but it certainly isn't going to look anything like effective supports in small classes that centre the needs and voices of autistic people.

I imagine Friday's announcement will be lifting of class caps, followed by layoffs and spending cuts to balance out today's magnanimity.

Kathleen Wynne, our newly appointed, self-described "social justice premier," has a plan to "reform" welfare based on the Orwellian-titled report "Brighter Prospects." Part of this reform is the elimination of the already criminally low Ontario Disability Support Program (ODSP) and the special diet allowance. There will now be no distinction between regular welfare and disability. Under the current system, ODSP gets you $1,075 a month and general welfare gets you $606 a month. Neither amount is really enough to live on, especially in Toronto, but now people on welfare will get slightly more ($100) and people on disability will get drastically, murderously less.

Anyone who is disabled or knows someone who's disabled will see the immediate problem. I mean, there are many immediate problems, but the biggest one is that having a disability costs much, much more than being an able-bodied but jobless person. Medications, mobility devices, and other necessities for survival cost a lot. The medication that kept me alive for a year, thankfully covered by my insurance plan because I'm employed, cost $679.70 a month, which is nothing compared to what it costs to keep a cancer or HIV patient alive. A manual wheelchair starts at maybe $130. A motorized wheelchair—a crappy one—starts at almost $2000. Many disabilities require a special diet beyond what food banks can provide. You can, if you're lucky, get a tiny and shitty apartment for under $1000/month in Toronto (subsidized housing being a scarce commodity), but good luck if you want something on a subway line so that you can haul your disabled ass to one of your many doctors' appointments. And if you've managed that, have you noticed that you don't have any money left over for food, or transit, or emergency expenses?

How do disabled people get by as it is? Generally, because there are free subsidies that the government doesn't need to think about—beleaguered friends and family members who take up the slack when the state fails.

Wynne ought to know, because she's premier now and it's her job to know. If this budget passes, she'll have condemned thousands of people in Ontario to desperate poverty, starvation, and homelessness.

She'll get away with it too, because disability advocacy is just as problematic as any sort of advocacy for marginalized people. No one listens to crips. If you're disabled, you generally have too many problems dealing with bureaucracy and pain and sickness to fight for your rights. But above and beyond that is the difficulty with quantifying deaths that occur due to capitalism.

If you are, for example, calculating deaths under Stalin, you can look at how many people were shot, how many died in gulags, how many died of famine and forced relocation, and so on. (If you're being brutally honest, you need to separate which famine deaths would have occurred regardless of the political regime in place and which were deliberate, and also compare the death toll when any large shift in economics happens—for example, privatization—but it's nuances like these that get me called a Stalinist even though I'm quite far from that.) Deaths under capitalism, and particularly the deaths occurring in a vulnerable population, are much harder to quantify. Many disabled people are sick, and likely to die while on disability. This is a given. How do you separate out the "natural" death toll from the premature death toll that will occur when the threadbare safety net keeping some alive is yanked out from under them. You can't easily do so, and thus it will look like Wynne murdered 0 people, when in fact she might be murdering thousands. (But, of course, it's with a stroke of a pen rather than by the firing squad, and we as a society are much more comfortable with that.)

It also highlights the ridiculousness of tokenism in politics. Wynne is the "social justice premier" because she's queer and a woman. What good will this accomplish for queer disabled people? For disabled women? Precisely fucking nothing, just as the election of a black "progressive" president in the US didn't benefit Trayvon Martin or countless children murdered by drone strikes, just as the election of a female Prime Minister in the UK all those years ago crushed the poor and the working class just as surely as the election of a male Prime Minister would have done. Wynne is proving herself already to be just as bad as Conservative butcher Mike Harris—if not worse—and our main alternative seems to be an outright fascist who would further destroy unions and institute chain gangs. (Oh, and the NDP is being useless. I had hopes there, but it's useless.)

It's a pity Ontarians are so placid. We ought to be storming the legislature with pitchforks and torches. These people are monsters, killers, targeting the weakest and most vulnerable amongst us so that they can kiss up to their wealthy base. There's no gulag hideous enough to punish that level of cruelty. We ought to refer to them, and treat them, as enemies of humanity.

Oh, and for the record? Both welfare and ODSP need to be raised significantly to pre-Harris levels + inflation and cost-of-living. We can tax the obscenely wealthy and/or cut MPPs' salaries to make up the difference. It's just basic human decency.

ETA: I dropped by my (NDP) MPP's office and chatted up the office staff about this. I learned—embarrassingly—that this article is from March. To vindicate me, however, the NDP has yet to release an official position. But they were quite receptive and agreed with me that it is a horrid idea.

I'm going to go ahead and make this one public. The personal is political and all that.

Somehow I missed this story back in May, probably because I had other concerns, like not being paralyzed. The short version is that the Ontario government is cutting coverage for various services, including "medically unnecessary" MRIs for lower back pain.

Well now.

About this time last year, I went to my GP in some distress. I've never been a highly energetic person, but after a summer spent travelling and having fun, I was exceptionally exhausted, even by my usual standards. There was something wrong. I could tell. I had a perfunctory round of the usual blood tests to rule out anemia and B12 deficiencies, both of which I'd suffered from in the past, and allergy tests to rule out seasonal allergies. Then my doctor gave up and proclaimed it to be "stress," linked to my preexisting diagnosis of clinical depression. The problem was, of course, that I was still on summer vacation, I wasn't particularly stressed, and I wasn't having a depressive episode.

I desperately wished, at the time, for some sort of major diagnosis. It sounds awful to say, especially in hindsight, but I knew that something had gone horribly wrong somewhere in my body, and no one believed me. I wanted something to point to so that I can say, "See? I really am sick! It's not just in my head." Because if something could be diagnosed, it could possibly be fixed, and I wouldn't have to spend the rest of my life trying to be normal while feeling like I'd been hit by a Mack truck. In hindsight, there were probably a lot of other avenues my doctor could have investigated, and none of them necessarily led to the actual cause, which was that there was a tumor growing in my lower spine, diverting energy to fuel its rapid acceleration. But at least I might have been listened to, believed. Trusted.

Skip forward several months. In March, an MRI finally caught the mass. By April, I had a diagnosis. This was after months of brutal, agonizing pain that left me screaming when I woke up in the morning or sitting down for five minutes, several trips to the emergency room, and visits to both the walk-in clinic and my GP. It was only the intervention of a different GP, this one unusually sympathetic and curious, that got me an MRI appointment. By this time, it had grown too large to safely remove. Had it not been caught, it would have continued to grow until it snapped my spine and left me permanently paralyzed.

Here is the absolute best case scenario for me in the future: The drug injections aimed at shrinking the tumor continue to work. The surgeon is able to remove it after it shrinks enough in an operation less invasive than a spinal fusion. I am not left in crippling pain. I'm able to resume normal activities. I spend the rest of my life knowing that there is a 40% chance that the tumor will regrow, a Sword of Damocles that almost everyone in my life refuses to acknowledge. I will spend the rest of my life fighting with the medical system to ensure that I'm monitored, that the next time Maggie the Tumor raises her ugly head, they can catch her before she reaches the size she did this time. This is the reality of cancer "survivors" and, agonizing as it sounds to someone with anxiety issues already, it's the best that they can do.

So you might imagine that I'm taking this news a little personally. I'm sure Health Minister Deb Matthews is able to sleep at night believing that she's cutting waste and imposing austerity on all the hypochondriacs and whiners out there who don't really need to know what's causing all their pain. I'm sure she, like most neoliberal politicians, believes she really knows what's best for people. I'm sure she pushes the numbers around and hey, this looks good, then goes home and has dinner with her family and doesn't believe that this kind of nightmare will ever happen to her or her loved ones.

But I am left thinking that if I staggered into my doctor's office now with a highly aggressive spinal tumor, I'd probably be fucked by the fickle finger of fate (or, rather, fisted by the invisible hand of the free market) and that long term, it would have cost the taxpayers of Ontario a good deal more money to support my paralyzed ass. So fuck that shit, seriously.

Starbucks fires a little person for needing to use a stool or stepladder. (The article uses the term "dwarf," which I understand is Not Cool; correct me if I'm wrong on this.)

What I don't understand, besides why anyone drinks coffee at Starbucks to begin with, is that while there are many disabilities that are invisible at the time of hiring, this barista's disability clearly isn't. So they hired her, knowing how tall she was in comparison to the counter, and then fired her three days later? This seems fucked.

When people rag on about unionized workers, keep in mind that this is the alternative they are proposing, in which people get fired for having a disability and the only recourse is costly, time-consuming lawsuits.

It sounds like El Paso needs the Starbucks Union.

So, Toronto Police! Tell us more about these 1090 hardened criminals who necessitated over $1 billion in security and brought the city to a screeching halt.

16 of these miscreants remain in prison, 14 of whom will apparently appear in court today.

Jaggi Singh surrendered to police, presumably for conspiracy to provide crash pads.

This is among the most horrifying stories to come out. Cops ripped off a man's artificial leg, dragged him over the pavement, and held him in custody for 27 hours. His crime? Not getting up fast enough when the cops told him to.

To serve and protect what, exactly?

Hey troubleinchina, I'm stealing your tag.

I finally got around to visiting the redesigned Art Gallery of Ontario this afternoon. I went for the Surreal Things show, and the less-publicized Dada and Remix shows, but the art didn't leave much of an impression on me. The architecture, however, is deserving of some analysis.

Entering the building, I was struck immediately by two things. The first was the light-coloured wood and soaring ceilings, reminiscent of the recently built Four Seasons Centre. The second was that the twisting narrow ramp that leads to the ticket booth has enough room for either a wheelchair to go up or a stroller to go down, but not enough room for two-way wheeled traffic. Accordingly, halfway up the ramp, we had to reverse my step-father's wheelchair out in order to allow a man pushing a stroller to leave.

From the main hall leading into the museum, there's a large open court featuring a sculpture and a video installation. A ramp leads down into the court. If you are an able-bodied person, you can continue on through the court through the rest of the gallery. If, however, you use a wheelchair or you are pushing a stroller, you find yourself confused and disoriented, trying to figure out where the other ramp is. As it turns out, you have to head back out the same way you came, and then follow a narrow, counter-intuitive corridor to the exhibit halls.

At this point, we asked one of the museum guides if there was an easier way to get to the exhibits we wanted to see. (The visitor map provided was of little use; it showed things that looked like ramps but were actually stairways, with no indication of which routes were accessible and which were not.) She explained that Gehry's design was intended to encourage the museum-goer to explore the existing galleries (though one could circumvent more galleries by using the stairs), and that the re-design had taken out most of the ramps. "Frank hates ramps," she explained. She was sympathetic; it was clear that she had heard this question before, and she encouraged us to write letters and provide feedback via the website.

The architecture is strikingly sculptural: winding staircases lead up through airy spaces. But the building is primarily a self-contained sculpture rather than a functional space where the public can view art. I watched as an older woman struggled to make it up the stairs—they are tall, narrow, and lack resting spaces. But the space is even more overwhelming and difficult to navigate if you can't climb the stairs at all—you are instead forced into indirect routes that lack signage, occasionally having to cross most of the building in order to find an elevator.

Both signage and staffing are minimal—using the routes available to able-bodied people, a very alert individual can find his or her way. I found myself flagging down the guides far more than I was used to (and far more often than I have done in any other museums, including museums in countries where I didn't speak the language) in order to find routes that avoided stairs. The signage does include some Braille, which is fortunate because the lighting is so low in places that even a sighted person might be tempted to use it.

The washrooms, while they have a handicapped symbol on them, are just as malevolent as the rest of the building. The doors don't have a wide enough swing to allow a wheelchair easy access—it requires two extra people (besides the person using the wheelchair) to get the door open, keep it open, and navigate the person inside. There are things that look like automatic doors, but half the buttons to open them are broken.

The gift store is a particularly interesting case. It has two levels, two staircases, and no ramps. A person using a wheelchair can access both floors of the shop, but in order to get from one to another, he or she would have to exit the shop, find a ramp, and enter through another floor. Apparently, the AGO plans to have only able-bodied people work in the gift store.

The AGO is a public institution; its promotional material promises a welcoming space, a personalized experience, an innovative environment, and "programming and services that reflect the diversity of our audience." The architecture of the building, however, creates something different—while some people are free to experience the space in a variety of ways, a large part of the museum-going public—families with young children, elderly people, people with disabilities, and family and friends of the aforementioned visitors—do not have the same level of choices. Anyone who uses a mobility aid will have a vastly different experience of the museum than someone who does not.

The result is a building that serves the architect's personal aesthetic, but not the audience's needs. It may technically comply with Ontario building and human rights codes, but in practice, it is alienating space that creates a two-tiered experience, dividing its audience into people who are worthy of culture and people who are not. For a new building, and especially in light of the structure it replaced, this is unforgivable.