AMP - Access Mob Pittsburgh Meet & Greet

AMP, the Access Mob Pittsburgh, cordially invites you to our Meet & Greet on Saturday, April 2, from 11-2 at TRCIL's new headquarters at 901 Pennsylvania Avenue, Pittsburgh PA 15233.

Senator Jay Costa will be attending as a special guest and is looking forward to talking with constituents about accessibility-related issues in the Region.

There will be a sign language interpreter at the event. I also have a limited number of braille documents, so I encourage people with vision impairments to find me and give me your email address so I can email all of the documents I wasn't able to get done in braille. Donations will be gratefully accepted to help offset costs and to provide interpreters and braille documents at future events.

And because we don't come unless we're fed.... THERE WILL BE FOOD!

About AMP, or Access Mob Pittsburgh:

The Americans with Disabilities Act is a complaint-driven law that often requires people with disabilities to sue businesses in order to be granted basic civil rights. This is exhausting, can turn people with disabilities into social pariahs, and does nothing to create a community of involvement.

The goal of the Access Mob Pittsburgh is to bring communities together to advocate through positive measures. These include projects such as:

* Organizing groups to canvass neighbourhoods to do censuses of sidewalks, intersections, and cut curbs in residential areas and business districts.

* Organizing groups to canvass business and retail areas to evaluate the level of accessibility individual businesses according to ADA and ABA standards.

* Ramp Crawls, Shopping Crawls, and related activities to reward businesses who are ADA compliant, to show the collective buying power or people with disabilities, and to demonstrate to a range of businesses that yes, people who are disabled like going out to night clubs and fancy restaurants.

* "Un-Protests" - Approaching businesses that are not accessible and expressing to them that people with disabilities want to spend money there, and that people who are currently fully-abled want to continue patronizing should they become disabled in the future.

For more information, please see the posters attached below. You can find us on the web at:

Meetup: http://www.meetup.com/Access-Mob-Pittsburgh/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/groups/1628957307389450/

Google Groups: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/access-mob-pittsburgh

We can't wait to meet you!

In medical school they didn' teach us it was OK to kill people with disabilities

A couple of nights ago I attended a vigil for the Disability Day of Mourning, which honors the memories of people with disabilities murdered by their family members or caregivers, often under the pretense of being "merciful" and "heroic" and "out of love." To say I was moved would be an understatement of the highest order, and I found myself in tears on several occasions.

One of the most memorable speakers was a local medical doctor, who read a poignant piece she had written. I won't steal her thunder, except to quote one small portion of her words, and to encourage you to visit her blog (linked below) to read the rest of her powerful statement:

In medical school
They didn' teach us it was OK to kill people with disabilities

They just rounded on the hospital floors and shook their heads and clicked their tongues, and said "he has no quality of life"
And "she should be DNR"
And "his poor mother"
And we should "ind the circuit breaker" for this room full of babies who breathe with ventilators
And "he best thing for him would be for him to earn his angel wings."