Dissenters

Rosa Parks is not a household word, but she is an inspiration to all those struggling for their civil rights. Rosa Parks is the black woman who, back in 1955, refused to sit in the back of the bus - defying the segregation laws in Montgomery, Alabama. The courage and action of this woman inspired the young Martin Luther King, Jr. to similar non-violent acts to protest the ugly discriminatory practices toward black people in our country.

Rosa Parks became the patron saint of a group of disabled people here in Chicago who, in a similar situation, have been denied their right to get on the buses or trains at all - because they are not accessible for mobility impaired persons.

This group began appearing before the Chicago Transit Authority (CTA) Board wearing Rosa Parks name tags, bringing to the attention of the Board Members that they won't be second-class citizens, and have the right to use public transportation to meet their needs: getting to lobs, to meetings, to church, to doctors, to visit family, to get into the mainstream of society, and not to be shut-ins in their homes and shut-outs in society.

Most non-disabled people seldom reflect on the essential role of transportation in their lives. Only when their car breaks down, or planes are grounded, or the trains and buses don't run on time, do they feel the frustration. But that feeling is transitory. With disabled people that need is permanent and essential if they are going to live a productive life. An article in the Chicago Sun Times by John Stebbins featuring Tom Shworles, a disabled activist in Chicago, illuminates this point.

"Anger grips Tom Shworles's gut whenever he thinks about the time his young son was having open heart surgery, but he could not get a ride to the hospital. 'I had no way to get there. I couldn't use public transportation, and I don't fit in private vehicles."'

Tom cannot use his arms or legs. He transports himself using a "sip and puff" electric wheelchair by blowing into a tube. He makes little of that, casually remarking: "'I am not an object of pity. Give me a chance. I can do for myself'.... The chance Shworles wants for himself and 60,000 other wheelchair-bound Chicagoans depends upon a little justice and a little lift - a bus lift for wheelchairs to be exact." Eight years ago he gave up an administrative job at the City Colleges of Chicago because he could not get reliable transportation.

For years, this Rosa Parks group, nondescript, unpaid, quite ordinary men and women of varying backgrounds, with extraordinary efforts attended the meetings of the Board of the CTA, wearing their Rosa Parks badges. They had accumulated valuable technical information gleaned from in their own experience and that of other disabled persons and organizations throughout the country. All to no avail. The Board stone walled it. This new generation of Rosa Parks, at great personal risk, then went to the streets to demonstrate, blocking buses and traffic, being arrested, and disdained by many for this disturbance.

Three years ago, a group of lawyers sympathetic to the cause of ADAPT, volunteered their services in filing a complaint to the State of Illinois Human Rights Commission. As that trial lingered on, the spirits of the group noticeably drooped. Some of the most active and militant members initially involved drifted away, tasting defeat and feeling foolish for even thinking they could succeed.

But to the great surprise of everyone, on January 18, 1988, the Commission's Chief Administrative Law Judge, Patricia A. Patton, announced that the Chicago Transit Authority, by not allowing disabled people to have full and equal enjoyment of CTA mainline buses, fails to comply with the provisions of the State's Civil Rights legislation.

January 18 was the Martin Luther King, Jr. Holiday. It is hard to imagine that this was an accidental circumstance in that announcement by the Judge. ADAPT (American Disabled for Accessible Public Transit) members reveled in the significance, the induction, so to speak, in that body of disenfranchised people who have put their lives on the line for justice and equality.

That day a press conference was held. As I sat in the midst of these friends, sharing their tears of joy, their sense of pride and accomplishment, I thought of other occasions when their tears were not of joy, but of being rebuffed and ridiculed by transportation authorities, even by some of their more passive disabled friends; I remember the leaders painstakingly master-minding the activities of the group, bolstering the morale, pleading with some not to give up, keeping an exact log of the entire history of the groups' efforts, and educating themselves on all aspects of the transportation systems.

To those who have not been close to disabled people and do not understand their struggles for inclusion, this 'win' may not seem at all significant. There will even be those in the disabled community and those outside it who will scoff at its significance. That has been the case in all struggles for liberation, as evidenced in Rosa Parks on the bus, and Martin Luther King, Jr. in the march on Selma. But this reaction is nothing new. The stone-throwing scoffers watching the march on Selma never dreamed that that motley group of black and white activists would achieve one of the most significant breakthroughs n world history: The Civil Rights Act of 1964.

That monumental change in our country raised the hopes of others who have suffered from discrimination - particularly men and women with disabilities, even though they were not included in the Civil Rights Act. But those who had been fighting for their rights in vain now had a precedent in law to serve as a way to obtain the same protection. This created a new spirit in their communities, even inspired the timid to come out of their closets and enforced ghettos and to take part in their very own civil rights movement. Their protests and lobbying resulted in the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, a momentous step forward in the whole world history of disabled people. However, this Act was initially neutered by public officials who would not establish regulations whereby it could be enforced.

In due time, the leaders of the disabled communities strategized on how to counteract this bureaucratic maneuver and came up with a bold plan: staging sit-ins at the Health, Education and Welfare Offices around the country. Day and night they occupied these offices for over 30 days. Finally they won - regulations were put in place. HEW Secretary Joseph Califano, announcing the HEW regulations, declared: "The regulations attack the discrimination....(they) will usher in a new era of equality for handicapped individuals in which unfair barriers to self-sufficiency and decent treatment will begin to fall before the force of law."

Jesus and Disabled Persons

Jesus lived in a theocratic culture wherein disabled persons were considered ritually unclean, punished by God, and therefore to be kept apart. Sickness, disability and bad fortune were attributed to sin on the part of the victims, and/or their relatives. Obviously, Jesus would have observed this, pondered on it in the earlier stages of his life, and studied all the proscriptions against these people in the Hebrew Scriptures.

What conditioned Jesus in his early years we don't know, but it is obvious in the accounts of the Gospels that he was sensitized to their wretched and unjust conditions and took a different view of them than that of his contemporaries.

When he began his public ministry, he broke through the taboos of his culture by embracing disabled people and being their advocate. Aware of the unjust and demeaning exclusion of these men and women he began his ministry right off with a series of cures.

In the process, he was confronted by and 1 earned from them. In a marvelous little book "Jesus According To A Woman", by Rachel Conrad Wahlberg, there is a chapter entitled "Jesus and the Uppity Woman". It is an incisive commentary on the incident in which an outsider, an 'unclean' Gentile woman, comes to him and pleads for her disabled daughter: "Have pity on me, my daughter is severely possessed by a demon." Here, in part, is Ms. Wahlberg's commentary: "The woman had a just cause. In the first century, possession by a demon was an accepted label for conditions now known as epilepsy or mental sickness. Only a person closely involved with a sick child could know the trauma, the anguish, the need. It gave her the selfless courage to seek out Jesus. Jesus is cool and defensive, responding: 'I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.' Many Bible scholars accept the idea that there was a time in his ministry when Jesus did feel that his mission was only to the Jews. Although his mission was later expanded to include all people, no one can say with accuracy just when such expansion occurred in the mind of Jesus....The undaunted woman uses her first option. She kneels before Jesus and appeals to his compassion: 'Lord, help me!' That appeal should melt the hardest of persons - and certainly the compassionate Jesus. But oddly enough, he continues to argue with her in a defensive, elitist way: 'It is not fair to take the children's bread and throw it to the dogs' ....There is no way his argument does not come out as harsh....It is unkind, a put-down.

We have believed that Jesus could not speak unkindly, that he was not a victim of the prejudices of his own community....Existentially then - as a man and woman communicating at that moment - the saying was harsh and unfeeling. It chokes in the throat of any Woman reader who identifies with another Woman asking help for a child.... Quickly now the woman moves to her second option. She was not only resourceful, she was an excellent debater. She was, in a word, magnificent in her retort. She gets uppity. 'Yes, Lord, yet even the dogs eat crumbs that fall from their master's table' ....Jesus capitulates. He says... '0 woman, great is your faith.' And her daughter is healed.... 'For this saying you may go your way, the demon has left your daughter' .... Jesus endorses the very spirit of the woman, her indomitable, snappy spirit. Her faith, we remember, was indicated in her first appeal for help, and Jesus had been cool to that. But he became aware of her as a person, and responded as the person of Stature she was." This magnificent narrative of the Gentile woman speaks not only for the daughter but also for the mothers and fathers of disabled children who are still pleading and negotiating for the rights and benefits denied them.

In the aftermath of the ADAPT victory, I had written some pious thoughts about Jesus as an Advocate for disabled people. In response, a disabled woman who has been a leading activist on behalf of disabled people, and a key leader in the struggle with the CTA wrote to me:

"Scholars usually concentrate their comments on Jesus: what he did and said and why he did or said it. My point, as a disabled person, is there is an irresistible opportunity to look into the motives of the crowd as well as Jesus. It is true that in Luke 13:10-17 'Jesus overrode the Sabbath restrictions' by performing a cure and is then rebuked for breaking the rule of rest and quiet by the chief of the synagogue. But miss the point that the sick and disabled people overrode the Sabbath restrictions first by becoming clamorous insistent crowd challenging Jesus to action on their behalf. What does this say about their motivation and courage in flying in the face of convention? But why did they come? How 'bad' were the diseases and disabilities and birth defects of those who traveled (on foot, on pallet, being led, being carried) in the hope of being cured by Jesus? Sometimes they traveled for days, it is said, at great risk and with greater discomfort to be 'made whole again'. They were also uncompromisingly prepared to break the sacred Sabbath rules of that society. They sought out Jesus and exhorted him to act. They pleaded and he heard. They changed him.

"On occasion, Jesus heals someone and word spreads about this miracle. On succeeding days he is challenged to heal again. Why would a healing by Jesus produce massive processions of other sick and disabled people? What motivated them to come? Is it possible that they wanted to be cured because they were treated so badly by society - reduced to begging in the streets because of a missing limb, with no chance of meaningful work? Did they hate being scorned and shunned by members of their society and believe that the disability or sickness was bad instead of the bad attitude prevalent? Did they wish just to be relieved of that condition or disability, or did they long to be put in a position of being included once more in their community? In Luke 13:16 Jesus says: 'Should not this daughter of Abraham here who has been in the bondage of Satan for eighteen years have been released from her shackles On the Sabbath?' Did he mean that her disability itself was 'the bondage of Satan'? Or could he have mean that her exclusion from other human beings was the bondage she had been shackled with?"

As Good Friday draws near, Christians seriously reflect on the sufferings and death of Jesus Christ. Unfortunately, these reflections most often are limited to the narrow confines of inherited formulas, such a that in the Apostles Creed: "Jesus suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, died, and was buried", or in the Profession of Faith: "For our sake he was crucified by Pontius Pilate; he suffered, died and was buried. " Throughout catechism lessons, devotional literature and sermons, the phrase "He died for our sins" is repeated over and over again.

While all this is true, it does not do justice to the other dimensions of this event, namely, that it was consequence of Jesus' mode of life. He identified with the disabled, the oppressed, the disenfranchised he was a dissident disturbing the status quo, publicly denouncing the religious and civic officials who denied these people their civil and human rights.

His death was indeed a mysterious, supernatural, redeeming act of love for all humanity, but it was also in its historical context, a horrible punishment for the stands he took in defense of the excluded - a model for dissidents today.