after a day of shopping.

The sight of these well-dressed men and women, laden with packages, really gets us fired up. Their affluence and conspicuous consumption are their rewards for exploiting the needs of people who are older or disabled. We turn up the volume of our chanting: “PEOPLE ARE DYING, SHAME ON YOU!” and a popular favorite, “WE’RE ADAPT, -YOU’RE TRAPPED, GET USED TO IT! ” When the AHCA delegates will look at us at all, they look with contempt. Occasionally one will read a poster on somebody’s wheelchair, and roll their eyes. They talk to each other, ridiculing our words and actions. They feel unfairly singled out for harassment, and they are frustrated and angry at our ability to prevent them from moving freely in and out of the hotel.

One guy comes right up to me and starts shouting above my head at the cop standing behind me: “Are you going to allow this? What are you going to do about this?” The officer tries to explain that they can’t just rough up a bunch of disabled people; somebody might get hurt. The AHCA guy thinks that’s absurd. He says he wants to go down to the police station and file some kind of complaint against us. When he stops talking, I tell him that his is how people in nursing homes must feel, confined against their will. “Well, there’ s two sides to every story, ” he says. He goes on to insist that the people in nursing homes want to be there. I notice that his official name badge has a tag on it that says “AHCA PAC.” He is part of the organization’s political action committee, which lobbies Congress for more nursing home dollars. He is really angry. For a moment I am afraid he’s going to have a heart attack right there on the sidewalk. But he eventually gives up and leaves.

The standoff continues for a couple of hours. The police do manage to open an entrance through the garage, and allow hotel guests in while barricading protestors out. Finally the word comes around, through ADAPT’s mysterious but effective communication system, that we are going to declare victory and go back to our hotel. We march back the same way we came, again chanting all the way. That evening, and indeed most of the next four evenings, our coverage on the TV news attests to the impact of our message and of our action. It’s not easy to get coverage in a city with so much going on, including a protest every other day or so. But they haven’t seen protests like this in a while.

Monday: Day Three

Today we will hit two targets at once. For months, ADAPT has been calling and writing to President George Bush and to Govemor Bill Clinton, demanding that they endorse the ADAPT plan for a national attendant services program. Neither has given a satisfactory response, although Clinton has been getting closer and closer. He has declared his support for a national system of guaranteed, consumer-driven attendant services. Yet he still hadn’t made clear how he would finance the program, whether he would take on the nursing home industry and procure the money from that budget. So today we will try to take over both candidates’ local campaign offices.

The Bush office is a particularly juicy target; Bush, despite his much-touted signing of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), is an unpopular figure with many of us. The reasons range from his penchant for cutting social programs to his militaristic foreign policy to his anti-abortion stance—but also because it’s his administration, his Secretary of Health and Human Services, which has resisted our demands for guaranteed attendant services for the past two years. When the day’s assignments are made, several people request going to Bush headquarters, feeling that he is a more loathsome foe. But some of us feel it's just as important to put pressure on Clinton—or perhaps even more important, since polls show he is likely to be the next president.

We all march together down Van Ness Street, again following a route cleared of traffic by police on foot and on motorcycle. At Republican headquarters, half of our group breaks away and charges the building. These protestors are barred from entering by police, but they manage to block the doors for a time. Staff members are hostile, refusing even to discuss the issue under these circumstances. Ultimately, the police forcibly move protestors away from the entrance.

The Clinton headquarters turns out to be a friendlier place, although it takes some time for the import


Photo Caption: AT GOP headquarters

Creado en

Martes 16 Xullo 2013

Enviado o

Martes 10 Setembro 2019

Álbums

• San Francisco, fall 1992

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143

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Canon

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Canon EOS 40D

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2013:07:16 10:44:47

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