No Pity: People with Disabilities Forging a New Civil Rights Movement.

• Author: Ervin, Mike

People with disabilities who have managed to get out of nursing homes or other stifling institutions can rattle off the date, maybe even the minute, of their release as if it were their birthday. That small reality capsulizes more than anything the essence of the disability-rights movement, and it does not escape the discerning eye of Joe Shapiro, a correspondent for U.S. News & World Report, in his book No Pity.

One chapter opens with the story of Jeff Gunderson, a man with cerebral palsy who lived a decade in nursing homes and celebrates the date of his liberation at age twenty-seven. Once in his own apartment, one of the aides he hires for physical assistance turns out to be a psychotic who sometimes thinks Jeff is a tree and therefore dresses him in green and fertilizes him by pouring chocolate milk on his head. Jeff sometimes fears for his life in this man's hands but tolerates it because it's better than going back to the nursing home.

Jeff now has an aide who is sane and hard-working and treats him well. But Jeff's is the classic conflict for hundreds of thousands of disabled Americans - a choice between surrender to the institutional model of extortion under cover of benevolent care-giving or the often-solitary struggle for survival in an indifferent mainstream. To understand the righteous stubbornness that rejects such fatalism is to understand the primary power of a movement that has not only accelerated but made its most astounding gains in a climate of profound political hostility toward civil rights. Shapiro makes...