Happy and Included Has Moved

It's here now!

Happily,
Gina ;~}

Unifying the Message

Hey folks:

Part of being Happy is feeling like your life is somewhat in the flow, but my online life has become a disjointed collection of idea silos. I have disability-related sites, art-related sites, my weight-loss/health blog, my all-things-gratitude blog, and this just-getting-off-the-ground effort, too.

I’m in the initial week of building my first-ever, authentically-me, including-my-really-real name website. The catchy blog titles and URLs -- like Happy and Included -- that I’ve created previously seemed too specific and narrow when I wanted to talk about something new — do I really want to create a whole new site every time I see something shiny? So I decided that I wanted a site with my name on it. If it’s an online extension of Gina, let’s just call it that.

Once I got past the “It’s conceited to name a site after yourself.” hang up, I began thinking about what I wanted my site to reflect — about me, about my life, about my professional strengths, about the stuff you can’t pay me enough to do, about my passions, and about the stuff that just irritates the fire out of me.

So, in a nod to a more holistic approach to my online presence, I'm moving Happy and Included to www.ginalynette.com. I hope you'll come on over and check it out.

With abundant gratitude,

Gina ;~}

The R-Word: Beyond Political Correctness

Justin is a bright, funny, creative 10-year-old boy. He loves science and reading. He builds rockets, watches movies and spends hours playing with his dogs, Rascal and Champ. He had a part in his 4th grade play, was on the winning team in his community softball league, and has traveled to Washington, DC to meet with legislators.

In addition, Justin has an intellectual disability. He also has a massive pet peeve: he hates being called “retarded.”

It turns out that Justin’s not alone in wishing that people would pay more attention to the things that he does well, rather than to his diagnosis. Folks with a variety of disabilities are speaking up and asking us to think before we speak or write about them.

In a world where a diagnostic label can easily become a playground taunt or a laugh-grabber in a movie—how often do you hear the R-word said as an endearment?—people who are assigned these labels are stigmatized, ridiculed, or worse, seen as easy targets for abuse. Throughout history, words like retard, idiot, spaz/spastic, and moron—all originally diagnostic labels—have been adopted as insults. Yes, we often use them without thinking, but we can do better.

Some folks may argue that changing the language we use when we speak or write about people with disabilities is futile—that whatever we call people will become the new insult—or purely an exercise in political correctness. The points are well taken, but misguided. Those same folks would be hesitant to say the N-word out loud in a room-full of people. It isn’t about political correctness. It’s about respect, eliminating words that humiliate and ostracize whole groups of people, and shifting the cultural dialogue about disability from one of pity, fear and shame to one of inclusion.

Known as, “People First Language” the guidelines for respecting the dignity of folks with disabilities are pretty straight-forward.

First, we only refer to a diagnosis or a disability if it is relevant and critical that we do so.

Second, when we do need to talk about the diagnosis, we try to be respectful of the person, and we refer to the person first. So we would say, “man with a disability, student with a learning disability or person with an intellectual disability” rather than, “disabled man, LD student or retard.”

Let’s work together to remove diagnostic labels from our joke and insult vocabulary. It’s going to take practice to break the habit of reaching for those words, but if we gently remind one another when it happens, we’ll quickly eliminate them.

As Kathie Snow so eloquently says, “They are people: moms and dads; sons and daughters; employees and employers; friends and neighbors; students and teachers; scientists, reporters, doctors, actors, presidents, and more. People with disabilities are people, first.”

Justin sums it up perfectly when he says, “Call me Justin. That’s my name!”

This article originally appeared in Hope and Dream Magazine.

Happy and Included

For as long as I've been a part of the disability community there has been an ongoing debate. Well, there have been many ongoing debates, but one in particular speaks to the fundamental nature of how folks with disabilities -- especially intellectual disabilities -- live in our society. What's the debate?

Choice versus Safety

See, there's this belief that they are mutually exclusive realities. Somewhere along the way we decided that either an individual can lead a self-determined life -- a life of their choosing -- or they can have a safe life where they are protected from bad choices -- their own and, presumably, others'.

And then we started seeing the reality of this "safe" life option. The exposure of the horrors at Willowbrook and similar institutions began the slow shift toward the empowerment of individuals with disabilities to make choices in their lives. Some might argue that the pendulum swung too far and opened up all sorts of dangerous realities. Others will argue that no one is truly safe in this world -- that getting into a car is inherently dangerous and most of us make that choice every day.

So, we debate it endlessly. How much choice does an individual with a disability get to have? When do others have the responsibility to step in and protect them? Who is liable if they make a choice that risks their health or costs them money or ostracizes them from their community? Do they get to vote in our elections? And around we go.

I've spent about 25 years listening to these conversations as I have worked with folks with a variety of labels -- some of them disabilities -- in a variety of settings. And as luck would have it, I'm raising several kids and have innumerable family members, colleagues and friends with labels of their own.

It's my intention to share more of this background as this blog develops, but the end result of all of this experience is the solid belief in two essential elements for a well-lived life. The first thing that people really want and truly need is to be happy. As Michael Smull often says, "While alive and unhappy is unacceptable, dead and happy are incompatible." We have to pay attention to both -- choice and safety. The second essential element is to be included -- to be seen as and to feel like a person of value, as someone who contributes to and is a welcome part of their community.

Now, defining those terms -- happy and included -- is about as individualized and as universal as it gets. Getting to those definitions and then making them reality is where the real work comes.

Ah, but it's wonderful when we get it right and it's pretty great when we get it close to right... and it sure beats arguing over semantics.