NetNews Usenet Archive 1992 #30/NN_1992_30.iso/spool/misc/activism/progress/9298

Text File | 1992-12-14 | 6.0 KB | 130 lines

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Subject: Disabled Homeless
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>From The Yellow Dream Machine B B S (U S A) 512/451-3222:
-------------------------
From: JOANN KOEPKE (Sunday) 12/13/1992 17:15 THE-504-CLUB--DISABILITY
To  : ALL

                    The Sisters and Brothers Keepers Center
                         200 Crockett St., Apt. 2-112
                             Austin, Texas 78704
                               [phone]
                               December 13, 1992


Austin American-Statesman
Public Forum Editor
P.O. Box 670
Austin, Texas 78767


Dear Public Forum Editor;


        As the joyous holidays approach again this year, I am
most grateful simply to be alive. I am the one-handed, perser-
vering pianist who was featured in this paper's Life-Style
section, July 25, 1992, and while I am very proud of my musical
talent, I have spent many hours recently grappling with how
little protection my talent really offers me in a society, where
while money does not buy talent, money does seem to be the bottom
line way to obtain the means to stay alive.   After this past
past year's serious crises with my multiple disabilities and
trying to survive in what I can only call a survival of the
fittest world, I almost became another one of Austin's death
statistics-- namely, one of the homeless who died on the streets
of Austin. I have been on the streets before in better economic
times because of serious problems with my disabilities. The
economic crisis this year only made my vulnerability to being on
the streets more stark and terrifying.

        Reading about Diane Mulloy's death in this paper three
months ago had a great impact on me for many reasons. I had no
trouble identifying with the pain and exhaustion that she must
have felt, while she was trying to survive on the street without
the rest and care she so desperately needed. She was recovering
from the effects of having tuberculosis.  Her death also made me
realize how fragile  human status is in our society, sadly,
including Austin. Many nights I would ask: Why did she die and I
survive? I had no answer.  I did, and still do, however, realize
that the only reason I have survived this past year was because
some caring people chose to reach out to help me when either my
own acceptance of society's stigma about being poor prevented me
from asking for help or the realities of my disabilities simply
made it impossible for me to ask for help.

       Diane Mulloy's death has made me very angry.  The deaths
of the other 44 homeless persons who have died on the streets of
Austin since 1990 have also made me very angry. The painful hours
I have spent listening to and attempting to challenge some
persons' dismissals of these tragic deaths with their  idea that
persons choose to be homeless have simply left me with a numb
sadness.

       Both my anger and numb sadness are meshed with a serious
concern about Austin's failure to remember another part of the
Nazi Germany atrocities--namely, that homeless persons, disabled
persons,and war veterans were also systematically murdered in
Nazi Germany. The murder of these groups were founded on the
belief that human worth was based on usefulness, that these
persons were gentically inferior and that these persons
constituted part of the category of "life unworthy of being
alive".  The murder of these people did not occur out of nowhere,
but instead occurred because of gradual change of Germany's
attitudes towards dependent persons. My concern, now, is that
some of these same attitudes are prevalent in Austin.  Like much
of Austin seems to have done, pre-Nazi Germany got frustrated
with trying to rehabilitate dispossessed persons during its
economic crisis and got even more frustrated with caring for
persons who could not contribute to the economy.  Like some
persons in Austin, Germany used eugenics to promote the idea that
immigrants, poor persons and disabled persons were overbreeding,
using up scarce resources and as result they became synonymous to
a cancerous growth to society. Like many persons in Austin,
Germany wanted homeless persons away from its commercial areas
because aesthetics had become more important than human life.

       The Holocaust legacy has also transformed my feelings
about my musical talent.  In Nazi Germany, my musical talent was
one of the few ways I could have gotten a reprieve from a death
sentence for the crime of having an "imperfect" body and mind.
Such I found this past year. Even my musical talent could not
compensate for the times when I could not force my body and mind
to be useful.

    So as these joyous holidays arrive again this year, each day
that I am able to do so I play one of my piano compositions,
"Wordless Prayer To A Cruel World". I wrote this composition for
the October 25 Memorial March to mourn the 45 homeless persons
who have lost their lives on the streets of Austin since 1990. As
I play this composition, I just hope that next year I am also
able to write and play another composition called "A Prayer Of
Thanks To A Kinder World", for a kinder world where no person is
relegated to a cruel death on the streets.




                                             Sincerely,


                                           Jo Ann Koepke

* I am currently the Executive Director of The Sisters and
Brothers Keepers Center, a center which I founded to address the
needs of homeless with disabilities.