Thank you Laura! I appreciate seeing not only your experiences but also the various needs and steps to meeting them laid out so clearly.
I have been involved with similar things, including Transition, but a huge challenge-how to participate in and contribute to these community activities when I am unable to physically get to my community?
I know how to grow food, I know how to do lots of things-and even came up with ideas and helped get many things started over the years but every time, after the start, I myself did not get to participate or interact with most of them.
Unlike most disabled people I’ve met I am not the chatty Cathy, the “cheerful cripple” that everyone knows.
Even after decades of activism and involvement in my local community very few people even know who I am and exactly none of them interact with or visit me.
I’m not a jerk-I’m just an Asperger so-no matter how good my intentions I seem to be either invisible, off putting or just not easy for most to relate to or connect with.
For a long time I thought it’s just me so it really doesn’t matter,but I’ve started to notice that the population of both physically and mentally/emotionally disabled people and those who are not disabled but simply very introverted is not exactly small.
So despite my interest, involvement and promotion of the many good ideas listed in your post and others-if the free fish is cancelled I am extremely likely to starve.
I used to think well that’s Darwin for ya-time to become fertilizer for more functional creatures!
But now that I see the situation is more common and not just a personal failing I can’t recommend that as a standard solution:-)
I know that in traditional cultures people like me are not forgotten or left behind but are integrated usually thru family connections into the larger community.
But here in St Petersburg the number of homeless mentally ill and otherwise disabled folks without family to help them is staggering.
If we truly cannot expect to rely on government ( tho I still hold hope for clearing corruption and returning government to being the structure of community it was meant to be in a democracy) then we have to find ways for people like me to be part of it.
I’ve wracked my brains and used all sorts of tools to try and resolve this aspect for myself over the last 20 years without significant success. I hope that there is a more compassionate solution than eugenics by default and I just can’t see it for whatever reason.
I’m not concerned for me because for me death is just a door not a fear but I feel that even if that were true of everyone like me abandoning the misfit toys won’t be very healthy for the rest of Santa’s elves either.
please excuse if this is not worded well everyone but I’ve been thinking about it a lot lately and this wonderful post of good stuff that is happening, problems that are being solved made me want to bring this one out for a chance at many hands making light work.
But I’m rotten ill and on the phone I can’t read over what I wrote to determine if it is Asperger-irritating-neurotypicals-speak or not ( sometimes I can’t tell even when I can read it over but I try!:-/
Spirit In Action 