ed roberts

    a small woman named tracy gave me her old wheelchair once she got her new one.

i repaired it with some effort, (electronics are so much harder to fix now than five years ago)

 i took the wheel chair to my brothers house for our family's christmas gathering thinking

the chair would be used by my 90 year old grandma to keep up with us when we take our traditional after diner walk. she's slowing down alot.

               unfortunately, something like a wheelchair holds such a huge stigma,.

even in my own family.

i forget this. my grandma felt like it was putting her in an awkward situation. 

she said to my mom, 

"why  do you keep forcing things on me?"

my poor mom had nothing to do with the chair, it was my idea.

   the chair did get used however, grandma stayed at the house while

 the kids got turns driving it along our xmas walk.

my sister said things like 

"leave it to john to bring something like this.."

her two kids were loving it, making it go in circles around us, giving eachother rides.

we went about two miles and they never lost interest.  

 i couldn't grasp the tone of random comments from the adults.  it was almost

unconscious, but the implications were that they were disturbed seeing their kids in a wheel chair.   i didn't understand this at the time.

i only saw the kids joy and felt a validation of sorts.

 Visibility:

if we all had the chance to ride a wheelchair it would loose much of the association

of "sick"

replaced with a visceral expericence of "fun" 

or at least  "moves me around ", "small electric car",  "ooh, robot.."

 instead, so much of the imagery of a wheel chair is used to provoke sympathy or imply tragedy.

  the more direct variety of personal experiences we have daily, the more broad our definitions become.

     ED Roberts:

lived with a high level of physical disability.

and he liked girls.

  i  knew him in the 90's at the end of his life.

his legacy is much larger than i could have guessed. he is know as 

"the father of independent living"

     i ended up in Copenhagen once,

there was a world wide conference on  disability there.

 not only was i the only one from berkeley, but i was the only american,

as well as the only person who spoke english as a first language,

strangely the confrence was held in english. 

   i was there originally to be the attendant for a japanese man however it turned out that i was put on the spot

most of the time;

"you knew ed roberts?"  (imagine every accent of the world)

 ed was a star there.

ed wrote the american act on disability, the first curb cut, made

all public buildings mandatorily accessible, 

i was shown a dutch book where he was a prominet figure, it also had  pictures of him on stage nude with other disabled naked people and sexy able bodied girls.

there is a logical trajectory here;

    "visibility"

the basis for eds philosophy.

 

   ed was a u.c. student 20 years before me;

"We've tried cripples before and it didn't work", said the university. they reluctantly admitted ed in 1962 and arranged for him to live in the campus medical facility. 

his brother, also a student, served as an on campus pa. often pushing ed from class to class in an  old manual wheelchair.

    ed was accustomed to rejection, 

a year earlier in '61 the state vocational rehabilitation agency refused to serve him as he was considered too severely disabled and labeled "unemployable".

that decision was later overturned. one of the many ironies of eds life was that fourteen years later in 1975 governor jerry brown appointed ed as state director of the same agency 

that deemed him too severely disabled to ever work.

    ed believed that if you see people with a disability in daily life;  going to the store, school, working, an association would form,

  society would have the chance to normalize adaptive tools like wheelchairs, canes, walkers, dogs, etc. stigmas would be lessened with real life example.

         an extension of this would be sex;

if you see some one with a disability having sexual relations the association would stick.

disability doesn't mean you can't be sexy.  ergo the performance art with naked girls.

see,                   

 http://www.sinsinvalid.org

    over the past few months i have been taking a picture every day.

my new office is going to be built right above the ashby bart parking-lot.  it will be

a huge mall housing many disability related groups. 

a "one stop shop for those with disabilities" 

i feel  it's ironic that it is going to be named the "  Ed Roberts campus"

i maybe alone in this opinion however i think he would be against the project of essentialy making an institute of many groups of working disability projects under one roof. ed hated institutions.

this campus is taking these nonprofit and businesses away from more public, integrated spaces. 

 i have been photographing the construction of this place for a timelapse animation.

im not sure what to do with that afterwords but i would like to 

get the spirit of visibility across.

 naked ladies always help with that.