The Ragged Edge.

• Author: Ervin, Mike

Before the Americans with Disabilities Act was law, here in Chicago and around the country we would protest the inaccessibility of public-transit buses by parking our wheelchairs in front of them in the streets. While reading The Ragged Edge, I was looking for words that captured the kick of bus blocking. This anthology from the first fifteen years of the Disability Rag, the gimp-radical's Bible, is supposed to express "the disability experience," and nothing expresses my disability experience better than the defiant job of bagging a bus.

I found what I was looking for in Laura Hershey's tribute to the late Wade Blank, the phenomenal activist who pretty much originated the tactic. Blocking buses, Hershey quotes Blank as saying, is "like giving the finger to the white man."

This intense collection of essays, articles, and poetry gives you the kind of no-holds-barred disability-awareness crash course that Health and Human Services employees received when several hundred members of ADAPT, Blank's vanguard radical group, barricaded them in their Chicago regional office by blocking all entrances. We were protesting idiotic Medicaid rules that imprison disabled folk in nursing homes. Rag founder Mary Johnson gives her account of that day, saying trapped bureaucrats (no doubt in the throes of nicotine fits) were referring to the protesters as "vultures" and "beasts." That means it was a day well spent. The bureaucrats respect us more genuinely when they see us as hoodlums than when they see us as tragic heroes like Tiny Tim.

The Ragged Edge shows why writing with an attitude has put this bimonthly newspaper leagues beyond most other disability publications, almost all of which are so lightweight you have to put a brick on them to keep them from floating away. It stokes the fires by exposing disability bigotry in its most grotesque forms. The uninitiated and jaded alike are bound to gasp frequently and come away shaking their heads.

It's not all dismal. There's power and celebration, too. But the...