The Able-ism of Our Aging Infrastructure
In the summer of 2018, I nearly came to blows with a TSA agent.
My dad was a disabled Vietnam veteran. He had lupus and the accompanying issues with chronic fatigue. He also had a degenerative shoulder problem that limited range of motion in his right arm. In July, we took a family trip to Juneau. Dad was in a wheelchair as we transited through security at SEA. At some point, they asked him to hold his arms up for a scan. For obvious reasons, given his medical history, he wasn’t able to hold his right arm as high as the blue shirt wanted. Instead of showing understanding, they started yelling at my dad. They inferred he was being lazy. This set me off. I chose violence and started yelling. My wife tried to calm the situation. The supervisor jumped in but wouldn’t provide me with the agent's name so I could file a complaint. Eventually, we moved along angrily. This was my first up close encounter with able-ism.
My dad is no longer with us. That shoulder only got worse. In the summer of 2020, he got surgery on his rotator cuff but he contracted Covid while in a surgery recovery center. I think often about the pain he lived with. It was so bad that he took the risk of going into surgery during the worst months of the pandemic and it likely cost him his life.
Fast forward to today. As you may know, my mother was nearly killed by an intoxicated driver in the summer of 2021. She spent ten months in the hospital, has nerve damage, and lost vision in her left eye. She is now confined to a wheelchair. For a person as independent (okay, stubborn) as my mom is, it’s been an adjustment not being able to come and go as she pleases. When I am home, I take her on walks around her neighborhood on Hilltop.
But these walks come with complications. Unless you witness it first hand, you can overlook how inaccessible much of our infrastructure is. If you’re in a wheelchair, things that you and I can step over or walk around can become impenetrable barricades: buckled sidewalks, intersections without curb cuts, dead end sidewalks, cars blocking the paths, etc. We aren’t talking about a rural community or some unincorporated part of the county. We’re talking about the heart of a city, where the median home price is $465k. Most of the homes in my mom’s neighborhood date from the 1910s and 20s. While most intersections are accessible, far too many are not. There’s no logic or pattern to it. Traveling east to west along 17th street, M street & Sheridan have curb cuts—Cushman & Ainsworth don’t.
My mom is lucky. She has a great care team in place, so there’s always someone accompanying her that can help navigate. Wednesday I moved two stray shopping carts and held back several unkempt rose bushes so she could pass. Other disabled people aren’t as fortunate. A person can’t really know if the block they’re going down has a curb cut until you get to the end of it. Because of our inconsistent infrastructure, people with disabilities have to keep mental maps of their surroundings in order to know where they can transit. It’s an invisible tax.
This isn't all on local governments. Although they're the infrastructural part of the equation, homeowners and tenants can further help or hurt neighbors through the choices we make. When you park your car across the sidewalk you are potentially preventing people from passing and forcing them to doubleback. I’m never one to begrudge a privacy hedge or some landscaping but if they block most of the sidewalk they’re a potential nuisance or hazard for the disabled.
This isn’t a pity party and this isn’t just about my mom’s situation. It’s about all of us and our loved ones. In a country where we regularly dip into public coffers to build stadia for teams of millionaires owned by billionaires playing children's games, it’s unfathomable that we can’t provide better accessibility.
The Americans with Disabilities Act, requiring new construction to be accessible, was signed into law in 1990. But there’s no requirement under the law to retrofit old sidewalks and intersections. Cities and institutions are basically on the honor system. In particular in the City of Tacoma, a place that’s been so self-congratulating of its leadership as of late—it’s unfortunate to see so many spaces are inaccessible.
I think we can do better.
Recommendations and Bits for this Week
Channel 253 Fest is coming this week! We’ll be recording episode #200 of the podcast and you can be in the audience. You can get tickets here but hurry, only a few remain.
The first podcast I ever subscribed to was Radio Open Source with Chris Lydon. Over the years he’s had recurring episodes with political economist Mark Blyth. Blyth is a plain spoken Scot with a transatlantic worldview. He contextualizes economic happenings in the US better than anyone. I have really enjoyed their conversations over the years. This week they did a deep dive on the forty year record of neoliberalism on working people in the US and the electoral backlash that efforts to decarbonize the US economy will likely provoke. In particular, Blyth notes that if Trump re-enters the Whitehouse, it will usher in a decade long fossil fuel bonanza in much of the nation’s interior. I am not doing it justice—just go listen to it. It's a worthwhile conversation.
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