Society

Acceptables, Defectives and the Worksky

A lot of ‘disabled’ activists assume all people with impairments are united in their often left wing aims and objectives and have similar experiences of impairmentism, based on their own experiences. They become defensive when you try to explain that due to the broad nature of impairment and the broad range of society it affects, unity is absolutely impossible.

I would like to propose to in the current social and political environment, there are 3 types of people with impairments. These are Acceptables, Defectives and the Workshy. I have deliberately chosen these terms to be provocative and because they accurately describe what I am trying to explain.

Acceptables are people with visible impairments that society are able to cope with and currently enjoy a level of fashionability in the media, especially if they are able to conform to the norms of society. This is the group of people with impairments, especially younger people with impairments, many ‘disability’ charities like Scope use to sell their messages in a clean and sterile manner that makes everyone feel good.

I would never suggest Acceptables do not face problems or discrimination although it is unlikely to be anywhere near what was experienced by the previous generation. They are often unaware of this and as sometimes as from the last generation it can often be frustrating for me to hear about things they take for granted.

Defectives are people with impairments which society generally find uncomfortable as individuals do not know what to do when they encounter them. Defectives may include people with speech impairments, jerky movements and facial disfigurements as some examples. I would consider myself to be a defective. 

Defectives are by their nature are likely to experience more difficulties and discrimination than Acceptables. Also, there are likely to be fewer defectives than acceptables due to the severity of their impairments. The means their needs and requirements may not receive the attention deserved, and in the current social and political climate this is likely reducing. which is another story.

And then we have the workshy. These are people with minor impairments and this is something I will not take that away from them as they face a range of health and other difficulties. However, whether they face social difficulties or discrimination that makes them worthy to consider themselves ‘disabled’ is a different matter.

And here we have the current political and social crisis in terms of disability identity as the point where an impairment creates a social barrier and therefore disability, and indeed where when sickness becomes an impairment. This means a lot of people who are sick now consider themselves as disabled and feel they have an experience of discrimination equal to defectives. which is not the case.

The workshy often only see disability in terms of receiving benefits, and they are currently those with the loudest voice in terms of disability because they are most affected by the welfare reforms as in their eyes they see disabled as being automatically unfit for work which the other groups may not.

This article is a simple overview of the impairment and disability landscape on what is, in reality, a very complex issue. 

 

If you like my blog article, have a look at some of my products;

Achieve Support – https://www.simonstevens.com/achievesupport
Having Pride (My Life Story) – http://www.balsy.me
Stevens’ Manifesto – https://www.simonstevens.com/manifesto
Understand Assistance – http://www.understand.tips
Understand Dysability – https://www.simonstevens.com/understanddysability
Understand Inclusion -https://www.simonstevens.com/understandinclusion

or visit my website at http://www.simonstevens.com

Donations are always gratefully received via paypal at https://www.paypal.me/simonstevens74
You can also email me at simon@simonstevens.com
or follow me on Twitter at @simonstevens74

Passivity is Big Business, just ask an alcoholic!

It is clear that in the UK we live in a post-industrial society and one where we are now witnessing the collapse of the retailing sector as we decide to shop online more. The only sectors we have that are rising is health, social care and the support provided by so-called charities.

But in order for those sectors to succeed in the long-term they need to keep a high demand for what they provide and so it is not in their best interests to deliver the outcomes of ‘healing people’ as they claim. Instead, it is a better business model to attempt to keep people dependent on their services for as long as possible. And so we have the passivity industry, the big business of keeping a section of the population passive, disempowered and dependent for the sole purpose of keeping the middle class and others in paid employment.

A perfect example of this is the alcohol service commissioned by Coventry City Council called CGL (short for Change Grow Live), a national charity/business designed to keep alcoholics and drug addicts in a state of dependency.

I encountered CGL when I had a period of using alcohol excessively this summer when I was coming to terms with my former personal assistant of 12 years, Flora Lloyd, taking me to an employment tribunal for unfair dismissal after she walked out during a discussion about Brexit and never came back.

My plan was to have a relaxing all-inclusive and therefore alcohol-fuelled holiday before approaching CGL to plan a safe at home detox regime. As future articles are likely to explain, the holiday did not quite go to plan. I did go to CGL on my return and they promised to arrange a home visit, something they said later they had no record of doing.

Events overtook the situation and after being failed 7 times by the NHS over the next week, I finally ended up in hospital with ‘high risk’ alcohol detox. Despite a lot of initial promises in A&E about after-care on the emotional side of alcohol misuse, I was discharged once I was detoxed without any of this being delivered.

So I went back to CGL and decided to give them a second chance to help me by seeing what they could offer. The initial meetings were interesting, but I am unsure they ever had anyone as proactive or complex as myself to deal with. My suspicions that this could be pointless was when I started asking about the psychological methodology they used in their group sessions. When I began seeing myself explaining transactional analysis to them, the professionals, I kinda got the idea they did not have a clue about what they were doing.

I was told by CGL to attend a meeting in their Coventry headquarters and day centre to talk to one of their group leaders. I was somewhat dismayed to be told when I arrived with my personal assistant that he was off sick like it was my fault! Having to wait half an hour to speak to someone else, who gave me no new information. I had an opportunity to get a feeling for the place.

All I could smell was the strong stench of wasted public money. This was not a place that helped people with alcohol and drug issues but rather a day centre to keep them passive, disempowered and most importantly, off the streets so the middle class did not have to see them. CGL has no motivation to really help people with their problems as they need to keep their clients as long as possible.

I was tempted to go to one of their group meetings to see what it was like but I was put off when I was told their ‘breakfast club’ did not actually provide any breakfast, as I was told I may be lucky to get some toast!

While I then made my mind up at that point that getting real help from CGL was impossible and a waste of time to try, the hot weather gave me a further insight into the workings of CGL. My windows at home overlook a major park in the centre of Coventry, and I get to see everything that goes on in the park throughout the year.

The hot weather sadly turns the park into an annexe of CGL’s day care service as alcoholics spend all day drinking and sleeping peacefully throughout the park. Some of CGL’s clients also like to sit right outside my block’s front door. I found this out when one of them left their phone outside and I could return it via CGL.

This is just one of too many examples of how our economy is dependent on passivity to survive. Charities are now big business who depend on retaining misery and despair to survive, relying upon the public’s romantic view of them to get away with these abusive practices.

It is time society wakes up to the realities of the passivity industry.

If you like my blog article, have a look at some of my products;

Achieve Support – https://www.simonstevens.com/achievesupport
Having Pride (My Life Story) – http://www.balsy.me
Stevens’ Manifesto – https://www.simonstevens.com/manifesto
Understand Assistance – http://www.understand.tips
Understand Dysability – https://www.simonstevens.com/understanddysability
Understand Inclusion -https://www.simonstevens.com/understandinclusion

or visit my website at http://www.simonstevens.com

Donations are always gratefully received via paypal at https://www.paypal.me/simonstevens74
You can also email me at simon@simonstevens.com
or follow me on Twitter at @simonstevens74

Capitalism, socialism and dysability

I am always been interested in whether people with impairments were better off under capitalism or socialism. Before the current debates in the UK about which is best, I remember the cold war and I had the opportunity to visit a number of European countries in the 1990s and saw firsthand the effects of socialism.

It is important to understand that both systems see individuals as productivity who are measured on what they can contribute to the workforce. These systems replaced feudalism, where productivity was measured in terms of output of families where people with impairments could make some contribution without being seen as defective.

The industrial revolution was the cornerstone for the birth of capitalism and socialism, and the creation of individuals being considered as commodities of Labour. It was also the creation of disability as individuals who could not deliver the labour expected of them in a factory setting, units per hour were deemed to be defective and traditionally disabled.

The question is how did each idealogical system deal with people with impairments as defective people.

Under capitalism, people would have to fend for themselves. People with impairments had the freedom to try to find work that suited them or in large family situations, they were looked after by their family. Those who profited from capitalism often set up charities, to help them get into heaven, which looked after people with impairments, often in a residential setting.

For me, my enterprising spirit means there would be a chance for me to succeed without interference from others.

Under socialism, that includes communism, the Nazi party and Corbynism, Labour is strictly controlled where everyone has a role to play and motherhood is regarded as a contribution to the state. Defectives are seen as being unable to contribute to the workforce and therefore to the objectives of the state.

How the socialist state deals with people with impairments they regard as defective is solely dependent on the moral appetite of the regime.

For the Nazis, the solution was simple, kill us as the undesirable burdens on the state we were.

Many communist and socialist countries locked us away in large poorly run residential settings to show the public they could pretend to have compassion for those defective. Those injured by war were always treated with more respect and dignity.

Corbyn’s proposal within an era where people with impairments, which is technically most people, wish to self-define themselves as defective, is to keep them at home on a minimum income with minimum support, encouraging assisted suicide or mercy killings as a way out. My response has been well documented elsewhere.

In the reality of 2018 in the UK, we have a mixed economy, somewhere between capitalism and socialism. People with impairments enjoy the support provided by a state-controlled health and social care system, with the freedom to be enterprising under a mostly free market system.

I believe it is this balance that has enabled the slow meaningful inclusion of people with impairments into society as the idea that people with impairments are naturally defective is being challenged.

If I had to choose to live under poor capitalism or poor socialism, it would have to be capitalism because I would have a fighting chance to have some control over my life as oppose to simply being locked away by the state.

There are 2 versions of each day

The news media is full of individual stories of specific situations, such as their experience of a dysability assessment, that is often extremely negative and full of inconsistencies that make me want to ask more questions to discover the precise truth of the situation. If we were to take these experiences at face value then we would believe that the whole world is plotting against them in some great conspiracy.

Endlessly reading these bad experiences, and then trying to understand them based on my own experiences of the world, led me to an interesting conclusion. I began to understand it is ourselves who decide if we have a good or bad experience of a situation by how we decide to respond to events around us. We decide if we are going to allow small or not so small imperfections to ruin our day. It is ourselves who write our own history and we personally decide how a specific day is going to be remembered.

I am not at all suggesting we should ignore the problems and bad experiences when they arise, but we can choose how we respond to them. We can become hot-tempered and emotional, causing frustration for everyone, or we can decide if we are going to try to constructively and calmly resolve the issue. People will always try to hurt us and to a degree, they may succeed but we can decide how we are going to respond.

Being constructive about a negative situation enables us to take more action to put a matter to bed. This surely must be better than spending hours, days, weeks, months and sometimes even years moaning and whining about how bad a situation was to anyone who will listen, adding further dramatisation every time the tale is told, without actually resolving the matter with the people involved.

This realisation there is a choice to how we perceive the situations around us, whether that is positive or negative, means we can decide to remember one of two versions of each day. I have always decided to try to remember the positive version, acknowledging the difficulties I have experienced. When others choose to see the doom and gloom of life in 2018, stating how bad life is supposedly is for one or another section of the population, like people with impairments, I prefer to reflect on all the positive things we have and how life continues to improve over time as we have opportunities previous generations could not even dream of.

The version of each day that you decide to pick will tell others about how you wish to relate to them. Do you wish to be a victim of your circumstances, as an easy state to pick, or the controller and leader of your circumstances, a harder but more rewarding place to be?

If you like my blog article, have a look at some of my products;
Achieve Support – Coming soon
Having Pride (My Life Story) – http://www.balsy.me
Stevens’ Manifesto – Coming soon
Understand Accessibility – Coming soon
Understand Assistance – http://www.understand.tips
Understand Dysabiity – Coming soon

or visit my website at http://www.simonstevens.com

You can also email me at simon@simonstevens.com

How I confronted my trolls

The response of social media towards the stealing of my trike. where my original post was shared over 24000 times, demonstrated the positive activity of social media that is possible and it was the sole reason that the trike was found and returned. However, it was only a few weeks before this that I was dealing with a darker side of social media, which is dealing with trolls.

As I said before, a social media troll for me is different to someone who expresses a specific opinion to a tweet or post, positive or negative, written with kindness or in anger, as I often do. A troll is someone who targets someone to abuse and uses their victim’s posts to attack them with no interest in the content. Their responses are far more personal and also designed to belittle their victim.

I believe the reason many people troll is that they lack confidence in who they are in themselves and so need to knock and attack those with confidence as well as individuality that is different to the collective they wish to associate with. They believe attacking the outcast, they can add credibility within their collective, bullying their way into respect. As someone who is very individual in broadcasting my different views to the world,  I am clearly an obvious target for trolls.

I learnt the hard way that the way not to confront trolls is to respond to them as you will only end up in ‘mirror arguments’, meaning that they will accuse you of stuff like being arrogant that you think they are displaying themselves. Trolls do not see social media as something real to them, as it is to many people, where I am just words on a screen with no real person attached to them. They will say stuff on social media that they will never dare say to me in real life, or say in a professional setting.

It was this realisation that helped me understand there was a way to confront trolls and that was to bring their trolling actions to the attention to their real life world and to ask their real life peers to judge their actions for themselves. If they are confident their real-life peers support what they say on social media, including their abusive tweets, then that is good for them and nothing I do will matter.

I should say that my own tweets, which I always take full responsibility for, have caused trouble with a small minority of the people I have worked for. They would like to believe they have punished me accordingly but the reality is I simply chosen to defend my free speech and right to challenge others as a true activist as opposed to working with organisations that are frightened of the challenge to the current power dimensions of oppression that exists.

I had two main trolls this year and this new technique has appeared to work well as both trolls quickly stopped after their actions were brought into their real world. One troll was a deputy mayor of a West Country town who potentially represented the whole town in his attacks of myself, and so I made a number of officials of the town aware of the implications legally for the town.

If my trolls were confident in their actions, they would have had the support of their real life peers, or had not cared about the real life consequences,. and continued to abuse me. My next step would have been to go public about their peer acceptance of their abusive behaviour.

The moral of this tale is never mess with this drooling spastic because despite looking like an easy target who has chosen to be a political outcast, I will fight back hard in ways people will not expect!

 

If you like my blog article, have a look at some of my products;
Achieve Support – Coming soon
Having Pride (My Life Story) – http://www.balsy.me
Stevens’ Manifesto – Coming soon
Understand Assistance – http://www.understand.tips
Understand Dysabiity – Coming soon

or visit my website at http://www.simonstevens.com

You can also email me at simon@simonstevens.com

 

Saying ‘you can not harm the disabled’ is harmful

I used to equate independent living for people with impairments as the end of Black slavery in terms of liberation politics, but the sad reality is it was merely a small colony of slaves who broke free, which I myself followed as a young man, leaving everyone else behind still enslaved. The recent debate in the House of Lords on ESA, led by Tanni Grey-Thomson, was the equivalent of debating the living conditions of black slaves and how they should be improved by their masters, not the abolishment of slavery.

Society understands it is wrong to treat someone differently because of their gender, the colour of their skin or sexual orientation, even if not everyone agrees with that, and punished accordingly. So why does the fact my speech is naturally slurred cause society to treat me so different? As soon as I open my mouth, often before, my personhood and intelligence is questioned and undermined. From the day I was put in an incubator I had to prove I had a place in society. My bipolar has provided me with an overactive mind and a deep frustration when I feel directly or indirectly my self-worth is being undermined, causing me to challenge those who do, including Tanni and many others who believe they are doing the right thing.

When I hear people like Tanni, the many middle class white fat cat  charities proclaiming themselves ‘disability right campaigners’, and a disabilist media who endlessly scream loudly that ‘you can not harm the disabled’, I have to work very hard to stop myself becoming Darth Vader on a mission! A colleague recently made the problem clear to me when they stated a belief people with additional or changing needs should be assumed to be able ti access social mobility, which links into my enablement and empowerment agenda.

Living, true living, is about taking risks and ‘not harming the disabled’ is about denying people with additional or changing needs that right to take risks, which is harmful to their place in society. While people suggest they accept I can work, because I fought so hard to prove the case, we still live in a society where it is assumed having slurred speech means I need to be excluded from society. While people like Tanni may rightfully oppose assisted dying, and that people like me should not be pushed to end our lives, it does not mean we are yet seen as equal members of society.

In almost 42 years lived experience, I have viewed impairment from every possible angle and I know that it is complex. I am still learning and trying to understand issues, which my articles here are a part of. My vision is a world where having a different form of speech makes no difference. However impossible that may seem, it is no more impossible than how gay marriages have become acceptable in my lifetime, emerging from an era where in the UK I could have been arrested for my sexuality.

People with additional or changing needs need respect, support  and understanding as equal citizens capable of social mobility, not protected as the runt of modern society, tolerated because of political correctness and paternalism until a solution can be found.

We Must Expect More From Disabled People

I think one of my biggest frustrations with society in terms of disability is the naturally low expectations the public has for what disabled people can and indeed should achieve. While everyone talks about the equality of disabled people, the reality is we are perceived as inferior beings, less capable of achieving what most people want in life. I am often asked about aspects of my life, like if I like to go out, as if I was a child, and these are by my non-disabled professional peers who apparently know I am their equal.

An example of what I am talking about is the recent news about the supposed plight of James Sleight, a young man with Downs Syndrome, who went to a mainstream school, and is apparently being evicted from ‘his home’. His home is in reality, from what I can understand, a residential group home, a care service he is not a tenant of, where the one achievement that has been highlighted is the fact he lives with a flatmate of his age, who will be another service user who neither of them would have had a choice over. And now because his family are upset, we must all sign their petition to keep him in a service that we do not even know he is happy about. The media seems not to be interested in his quality of life, his aspirations or his goals, but just what his family wants. The most shocking comment I read was in The Independent, which implied he was too stupid to know who David Cameron was, despite wanting to meet him, or was that his family?

I have personally fought all my life to explain that despite having cerebral palsy and needing support from a personal assistant with everything I do, I lead as normal of a life as anyone can and in whatever normality is. I have the same level of choice as anyone else, which means I have the same level of responsibility as anyone else. Despite all the wonderful images of independent living promoted by the social care sector, it does not mean I have free choice, because no one has that. I can only go to the theatre if I can afford the tickets, have the time to go and so on.

The biggest mistake many social workers and other professionals make with me is when they tell me I can do anything I want within a service, since the reality is they have specific and low expectations of what I will want to do, and therefore they will be horrified when I actually do something they was neither expecting or willing to let happen. Professionals assume for disabled people, ‘going out’ means something like having a cup of coffee in town, but for me it means going whitewater rafting or seeing a musical in London.

Why must we assume disabled people expectations are limited and indeed good. When I lecture social work students, I like to challenge them to see how far they are willing to accept the true lifestyles of disabled people, even if that includes being a gangster. We will not have achieved true equality for disabled people until we can see them inspiring to achieve in all aspects of life, even if it is as a criminal. People must imagine what disabled people could achieve, and then take it a step further, and still further, until we can truly see disabled people as having the opportunity to do absolutely anything.

Unfortunately right now, this kind of equality is not on the agenda, as the 2010s will sadly be remembered as a period where the portrayal of disabled people as incapable inferior beings was strong and the damage that this was doing, in the name of fairness, was high. The fashionable hatred of ATOS is being used to justify the systematic prejudice of disabled people, often by disabled people themselves, in the same way racists use the fear of immigration to justify their prejudices.

Until we can see all disabled people as bundles of potential and assume with the right assistance and support, they can achieve or not achieve in the same way as anyone else, we should stop pretending that a fair society, in terms of looking after people deemed to be too weak to be considered full citizens, as anything to do with true equality and equal opportunities, as to achieve that, we must demand the most of everyone.

– If you like what I say, have a look at my website at http://www.simonstevens.com or follow me on twitter, @simonstevens74

Why Can’t Disabled People Be Positive?

My all-time favourite song and my personal theme tune is Proud by Heather Small, because it sums up how I feel about my life and who I am as someone with cerebral palsy. I believe the media along with the disability charities and many activists has polarised the lives of disabled people, where we are either heroic paralympians or more likely, and as they wish us to be portrayed, miserable benefit claimants living a life comparable to being in a Victorian work house. But disabled people are three dimensional characters who have plenty to offer society, plenty of wonderful experiences to enjoy, and can lead amazing lives in a way that is just normal.

2013-08-15-997bd60accf84462a67fa014d381abf9_200x113.jpg


A perfect example of something positive I have every reason to feel proud about is I’m Spazticus, which broadcasted the first episode of its second series last night, and starred myself as well as a whole diversity of disabled actors. This cutting edge and controversial prank show is one of the few positive but not patronising representations of disabled people on TV to date as its shows we can be funny on many levels.
The show is a combination of hard work and irrelevant cheek that shows we do not always need to be the victims of the story, puppets for others but we can also be the puppet masters, pulling the strings of the poor unsuspecting public. I’m Spazticus does not show the exception but the norm people have forgotten in this era of welfare reforms.
But disabled people do not always need to be this extreme to be positive. One of my greatest personal achievements has been Wheelies, the world’s first virtual disability themed nightclub I founded seven years ago that is still running using the 3d virtual environment called Secondlife. The club has never been for disabled people but simply disability themed becoming a virtual place for people to come and relax, listen and dance via their avatars to music, live DJs and artists.

2013-08-15-172775001.jpg


What so many people found revolutionary was that my avatar used a wheelchair, the very first to do so, despite the fact I could be anyone I wanted to be. I wanted to be me as someone with cerebral palsy and this has continued to capture the excitement of the media and academia ever since I started. The idea someone would choose to appear disabled when they did not need to has helped people understand the positive side of disability especially as the number of virtual wheelchair users around the world have grown.
But these are two examples on being positive at work, where it is ‘easy’ to put on a brave smile, but surely I have no time for fun? Well, I am not when of these many ‘disabled people’ who sit on their beanbags all day on their laptops writing blogs or tweeting how life is terrible! My life is in fact great and I have a great social life. My passion is water sports and I love doing anything that involves wearing a wetsuit and getting wet!

2013-08-15-Myfavpic.jpg


I am no paralympian and I do these activities simply because I enjoy them and they are fun. At the end of August I am going on a week long disabled windsurfing camp in Belgium, as the only Englishman there and it will be my second time at the camp. I windsurf sitting down using a specially adapted board and it is great fun. It will also be great to be around a group of disabled people who are clearly doing something positive, for a week at least, and who probably never heard of welfare reforms or ATOS, let alone hate them! This is certainly a real and deserved break for me.
I believe and demonstrate wherever and whenever I can disabled people can be positive. We can achieve great things, which others may or may not call work. We can make contributions to our communities as citizens, to our families as parents or siblings, and to society as whole people with diverse skills and abilities many already demonstrate every day as just normal events.
In this context, I have started a campaign called ‘Yes we can’ (www.simonstevens.com/yes)that aims to show disabled people can work in one way or another, although may not always been ready to work, and deserve the chance to have a positive life. Being positive is not about pretending everything is perfect and smiling all day, it is about the right attitude to approach whatever barriers you face in a way so that you can overcome them, not just give up and play the victim!

Is the PC dying?

NewImage

By the PC, I am referring to desk based systems that primarily use Microsoft Windows and although it could include Macs, that is another story for another time. The thing here is to see that the rise of tablets as seen a fall of PCs especially in terms of the home computer. While in business, a desk based system on some kind will always be required, for most families, especially for children and those not used to computers, tablets can now easily meet all their requirements.

 

As well as the attraction to tablets, the death of a PC has also been because of Microsoft’s Windows 8, which has been an universal flop to say the least. I could never get my head this hybrid mess and it is what convinced me to purchased a Mac and retire my PC. I can see the sow collapse of Microsoft as the PC sales continue to fall. It is important to realise everything has a beginning, middle and an end and this is the end for the PC.

 

If you like what I say, have a look at my site at www.simonstevens.com or follow me on twitter, @simonstevens74, or even leave me feedback on +44 (0)121 364 1974 or email simon@simonstevens.com  

 

The history of personal computing

NewImage

 

The history of the personal computer is one that fascinates me but I have very much lived it. I had my first computer when I am 7, a Commodore PET with just 16k, which is a billionth of the memory on my iPad. I have embraced the advances in computing over the last thirty years one by one to put them into real live application in ways beyond what they were often intended. Computers have been the key to my liberation as a significantly impaired people, providing me with a connection to the world that enables me to work, rest and play.

 

We need to recognise and celebrate the history of the computer and how it has enabled so many of us to do so much more with our lives and make contributions which were previously unimaginable! There is so much I have to thank computers for as I admire its short history.

 

If you like what I say, have a look at my site at www.simonstevens.com or follow me on twitter, @simonstevens74, or even leave me feedback on +44 (0)121 364 1974 or email simon@simonstevens.com