Committee of One

Everyday, as we listen to the news, we wonder how the world can get any crazier. Reverend Al Sharpton gave a news conference in which he expressed despair that Tiger Woods did not show enough diversity in his mistresses. He said, “It is a reflection on beautiful black girls and makes them feel very bad that he did not have a black girl as a mistress.” We learned yesterday that in one year President Obama has spent more tax funds than all 43 previous presidents combined (George Washington through George W. Bush). This morning the featured headline in the local paper, just off the busiest thoroughfare in this city, an 86 year old woman dead in her home and probably had been dead since spring. Even though paid caregivers were in and out of the house each day. A New York City fireman told me that any time a fire was in a government housing project in Manhattan it was routine for them to find closets full of dead people covered in lime. Any time an older person dies in one of these housing projects, the body is put in a closet and covered with lime so whoever can keep cashing the social security and welfare checks that come in.

As a totally blind, 100% disabled, service-connected, medical officer veteran of the Korean era, most of my time is spent inside staying abreast of everything with radios. I refuse to listen to the sewer known as television. Participating on many national talk shows, I stay in contact with disabled veterans and handicapped citizens from around the country. I have appointed myself a committee of one to write letters and bring the plight of the disabled to the attention of the power brokers, locally, state-wide and nationally. I will assure you that none of the people paid handsome salaries to act as agents for the country's largest minority are doing anything. Evidently, the ADA, elected senators, and congressmen and the agencies which they are supposed to regulate and give oversight, are just “paid to sleep”.

Recently, an aide from Senator Burr's office (each Senator and Congressman has 50 assistants) called me about a matter I had brought to the Senator's attention. She said, “We have never heard from you before.” I said, “That is strange because I write you almost everyday about some matter of interest to me.” In a few minutes she called back, they had discovered a filing cabinet full of my correspondence which evidently, had never been read. Senator Burr, being the ranking minority member of the Veterans Committee, had been contacted by me about many problems concerning many veterans.

One of my early telephone contacts in this city was a lady named Catherine Vasalou. Catherine had been born blind. She did have one young brother, Billy, who fell into a pot of hot wash water when her mother was doing the family wash. Young, blind Catherine said she would never forget his begging her to do something for him as her mother went out to the highway trying to flag down some help. She told about the small casket and her weeping parents. Catherine went to the School for the Blind in Raleigh. She told me about her mistreatment there but, more than her personal mistreatment, the mistreatment of the blind students from the segregated Black School for the Blind in Garner. They would bring the black, blind children to the white, blind school to rake leaves and do the yard work. She said, “As bad as the white blind students were treated, the black blind students were treated worse.” I can testify to this because, as a young child, I saw the treatment of the black mental patients at the NC Asylum for the Negro Insane in Goldsboro (now Cherry Hospital).

Catherine graduated from ECU and did graduate work at UNC-CH. She came home to care for her parents until their deaths while working full time at a local hospital as a typist. After her mother's death, Catherine lived alone until her death at age 85 three years ago. I asked Catherine once, “During all your years as a blind citizen in Wilmington, NC, how many times did any church, civic group, state agency, ever do anything for you?” She said, “When my mother died one church brought by some food to the house.” During hurricanes or holidays she was left to live alone and died alone. She told me she had left instructions with the funeral home just to take her body to the cemetery and bury her next to her parents without any services, any obituary...anything. She said, “The world left me alone while alive, I want to be alone in death.”

As chief of a clinic at one US Army hospital, a sergeant under me who had survived WWII and the Korean Conflict, was the EKG technician (he did all the EKG tests and readings). He and his wife had one child, a son which I saw once, who was both deaf and blind. There were no military facilities for this child and the public schools in Alabama did not make arrangements. The child lived very much as an animal. Can we even imagine what it would have been like for Helen Keller, also from Alabama, if her parents had not had the money to furnish specialized care for her deafness and blindness. She describes all this in her 1903 book, an inspiration for any life. When Hitler was burning books in Germany in 1933, her biography was the first book on his list because he so despised disabled people. He put 275,000 disabled German citizens to death. This seems like a small number compared to the 6 million Jews who went to the death chambers, but where were the sane, responsible citizens who saw this inhumanity to man going on? Are we really doing any better in this country?

Veterans know what it is like to be second class citizens, those who have returned disabled...blind, deaf, crippled, mentally disparaged. There will be more from these wars taking place at the present time. Think of young men seeing these spattered remains of their comrades from the brutality of suicide bombers taking place at present. I can tell you without fear of contradiction, that this blind veteran never had one minute of rehabilitation. It took 30 years for me to get the disabled housing allowance wherein I could put a security system in my house. For 30 years, I put cement blocks by my exit doors so in a break in I could try to get some help by phone. Since my windows are all nailed shut I fully realize the disaster of fire since I cannot see fire.

On radio, and at other times, I have offered to give anyone $1,000 who can show that any veteran's group, civic club, church, and I could almost say family member, has done anything for this disabled veteran. I would not even attempt to describe the insults, such as the nurse spitting on me in a University hospital because of her disdain for veterans and military activities. Veterans did not serve for recognition, but this veteran has tried to bring the disparity of the disabled and the handicapped, the largest minority in the population (est. 33%), to the attention of the media and the public.

Christ never appointed a committee, he always called upon a man to do His work, Abraham, Elijah, Paul. Perhaps, as was the case with civil rights and voting rights, attention to the disabled will occur. It was said, in Germany, that when the Nazi's came for the gypsies no one cared. When the Nazi's came for the disabled, no one cared. When they came for the intellectuals, no one cared. When they came for the Jews, no one cared. When they came for the rest, THERE WAS NO ONE TO CARE.