The Dream continues

Ben Mattlin has a wonderful piece in last Friday's USA Today about the lessons of Martin Luther King and disability rights (available here: http://benmattlin.blogspot.com/
and at the USA Today website here: http://blogs.usatoday.com/oped/2010/01/column-disabled-owe-personal-debt-to-king-as-well-.html#more).

As the family listened to some of Dr. King's speeches yesterday (a yearly tradition), I couldn't help thinking of how his words still resonate not just for racial justice but also to disability rights. And, indeed, to so many politicians and pundits of today who suffer from the same "high blood pressure of words but anemia of deeds" against which Dr. King warned in his "Give us the Ballot" address.

We couldn't listen to "I Have a Dream" as a family, because my girl's class is listening to it today in school and she insisted on waiting to hear it with them. A demand to which I happily acceded.

But thinking of Dreams of the sort imagined on the Lincoln Memorial steps that day in '63, made me realize that my Dream for my boy is not that he no longer need to use a wheelchair, but that it not matter one bit that he does...

...that no store will have an entry step that poses an insurmountable barrier

...that every playground will have ramps to the top of every structure so that all may play and reach the same heights

...that all new homes and buildings will incorporate universal design

...and that my boy not have to endure the stinging stares of curiosity and the caustic comments of ignorance.

My Dream is a barrier-free world and a consciousness of disability that does not victimize or pity, but understands and respects. Seems a long way off, but I'll bet few in 1963 ever dreamed there would be an African-American president elected less than half a century later.