ADAPT sets a good example - Americans Disabled for Attendant Programs Today

A shaven-headed Orange County, Florida, cop twisted the arms of Bob Kafka, a quadriplegic in an electric wheelchair, painfully behind his back and upward. "We've got to get this one," he said. "He's definitely one of the main actors." Although carefully observing the nonviolent discipline of the demonstration and restraining an impulse to lash out with my cane, I was arrested, too, shortly after 1:00 p.m. on October 6, along with seventy-two other demonstrators from Americans Disabled for Attendant Programs Today (ADAPT).

Our crime was trespassing, for which we were punished with more than seventy-two hours in jail plus court costs and a variety of restrictions on our future activities. We had gathered at the entrance of the Peabody Hotel, a glitzy Orlando high-rise where delegates to the American Health Care Association (AHCA) were gathering. AHCA is the lobbying group for the big nursing home chains which have grown enormously profitable by warehousing the disabled and the aged on billions of Medicare dollars.

They want even more billions and are suing Bush's Health and Human Services Secretary, Dr. Louis Sullivan, to get it. The Nursing Home Reform Act distributes money to the states, which in turn are supposed to distribute it to homes for disabled persons, most of them privately owned. AHCA claims that the states are not giving sufficient funds to the nursing homes and that Sullivan should force them to do so. Nursing homes already receive $26 billion annually from federal payments, which account for 60 percent of the profits of this rapidly growing industry.

ADAPT wants at least 25 percent of the nursing home allocation to be spent on programs which will allow most of this country's 1.6 million severely disabled people to live independently, outside of institutions, which the overwhelming majority prefer to do. A Brookings Institution study concluded that this would be cheaper than nursing home care, and it would allow those family members and friends who have had to give up their jobs and go on welfare in order to minister to disabled persons to return to paid work. It would also free disabled persons from the neglect and abuse they experience in nursing homes, where, according to ADAPT members, they are often tranquilized with drugs when they protest and are not informed of their legal right to leave.

AHCA's response to this demand has been a stone wall. They have, despite denials released to the press, repeatedly refused to meet with ADAPT representatives or to discuss ADAPT's demands, the chief of which was forty-five minutes of AHCA's Orlando agenda time to present the case for home attendant programs. AHCA convention activities included a golf tournament, a Disney MGM studios theme park party, and a fond-raiser for their powerful Political Action Committee. ADAPT leadership felt it had no choice but confrontation and demonstration, tactics which worked well in the group's earlier successful fight for accessible public transportation.

Like many protest groups before it, ADAPT is long on grassroots enthusiasm and short on bureaucratic structure. It is an umbrella group, and many local chapters pre-existed the national organization and have somewhat different emphases and goals. A wide variety of political styles co-exist. I have heard gratitude expressed for George Bush's signing of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) last year. Others are working with Democrats who support the Russo health care bill. Still others are disgusted with both major parties and are willing to form a coalition with like-minded groups. Many persons, perhaps most of the nearly 300 ADAPT members who were in Orlando, were taking part in their first demonstration.

The organization is centered in Denver, where inaccessible buses were first blocked by wheelchair protesters in 1978, an event as important to the disabled rights movement as the arrest of Rosa Parks was to civil rights or the raid on the Stonewall bar was to gay liberation. ADAPT's most frequent spokesperson is Wade Blank, an ex-Presbyterian minister and nursing home attendant who wears thick glasses but has no other noticeable disability. He is one of the most accessible persons I have ever met, the exact opposite of the Machiavellian portrayed in the AHCA's press kit.

Women, African Americans, and Latinos are noticeable in ADAPT policy-making sessions, and I noticed no tension between gays and straights or between financially independent disabled persons and those dependent on government support payments. None of the demonstrators I met expressed any major dissatisfaction with the ADAPT program or spokespersons.

Wade Blank's chief Denver associates are Robin Stephens, famous for a brief appearance on C-SPAN last June when she wheeled herself into a room where Louis Sullivan was addressing an AHCA meeting in DC, and Michael Auberger, a quadriplegic who has been arrested in thirty-nine ADAPT demonstrations so far. News of ADAPT is provided by Bob Kafka's newsletter Incitement and Mary Johnson's weekly Disability Rag.

In Orlando, opposition to ADAPT was fierce. The local chamber of commerce promised AHCA an incident-free convention. Police were shown a videotape of an ADAPT demonstration in Sparks, Nevada, so that they could identify "leaders," and clandestine arrangements were made to bug ADAPT meeting rooms with the cooperation of the Clarion Plaza Hotel where we were staying. AHCA circulated anti-ADAPT propaganda, centering around the canard that previous demonstrators had thrown urine bags at police.

At the confrontation, a private security guard struck one wheelchair-bound cerebral palsy victim with a kryptonite lock, and the police were obviously inexperienced in avoiding injury to disabled persons, but most arrests were no more than routinely brutal. Police singled out able-bodied attendants for arrest, believing that the ADAPT effort would collapse without them. My wrists had handcuff bruises for a week, but I heard of no broken bones or serious internal injuries.

Trying to deal with disabled prisoners overwhelmed the Oranged County jail. It took fourteen hours to process us. The women's cell block was so crowded that there were not enough bottom bunks for the wheelchair-bound. There were acts of callous officiousness and even a few of deliberate cruelty, but for the most part jail officials tried to take care of our special needs, and some guards and trustees whispered their personal support for our cause. They seemed impressed by the hunger strike in which many of us engaged.

The judge who arraigned and sentenced us had a syntactical difficulty with both English and Spanish which was more pitiable than many of our disabilities. We never saw the judge in the flesh, only through an Orwellian TV monitor. He never heard testimony from any of us as to the circumstances of our arrests or about any possible mitigating circumstances. All of us pled no contest and were sentenced to the amount of time we had already served. We agreed to pay $100 each for court costs, but the indigent prisoners, who were the majority of our group, are excused from this. We also agreed not to approach the Peabody Hotel without express invitation and not to interfere with the rights of others to assemble peaceably.

Our comrades kept up a vigil outside the jail all the time we were inside. Others continued to demonstrate against AHCA at the Orange County Convention Center. Seeing them on local TV did much to keep up our morale. We learned later that most national press and TV coverage had been edited to make us seem violent aggressors, which is a lie.

The person who persuaded me to demonstrate in Orlando, Dennis Schreiber of Chicago, was among the first to greet us when we got out. He is totally blind, almost totally deaf, and confined to a wheelchair. He is the founder and president of Disabled Americans Rally for Equality (DARE), now a Chicago affiliate of ADAPT. We had been together in Dr. King's Chicago open housing marches in 1966, when the disabled off the twentieth anniversary march on Washington in 1983, and we will likely be together in the future.

The next day many jailbirds and supporters took a holiday at Disney World and Epcot Center. The Disney people have long since retired the disabled pegleg Pete as Mickey Mouse's villainous opponent, and their facilities are admirably accessible, but the Disney organization still likes to edit out the more unpleasant aspects of reality, most definitely including us. They control the economy and politics of Orlando, the most rapidly growing metropolitan area in the United States and largely dependent on tourist and convention business; and they share the responsibility - along with AHCA, the chamber of commerce, and the police - for the brutal reception that ADAPT got.

That evening, October 9, ADAPT planned to demonstrate in front of the Convention Center bearing a large wooden cross with a wheelchair chained on it. We thought this appropriate for the reception which AHCA was giving for its legislative friends. However, the judge issued a new order saying that any of use who stepped outside the Clarion Plaza Hotel, which was still cooperating with the bugging of our meeting rooms, would be arrested. We contented ourselves with exhibiting our cross at a press conference.

No matter where AHCA meets next, ADAPT will be there. They will not be missing from the presence of Louis Sullivan and the agencies he controls, either. The disabled are mostly capable to living independently and contributing to the general welfare, but they need new recruits for the movement and able-bodied friends.

J. Quinn Brisben, a retired Chicago high school teacher, is the 1992 presidential candidate for the Socialist Party USA. He has been active in the Disability Rights Movement for many years. ADAPT is located at 12 Broadway, Denver, CO (303) 321-7269.

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