Text of Marcia Bristo's speechHappy Birthday ADA! Today is the 14th Anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act. Around the country, 54 million people with disabilities-like me-are gathering to celebrate this historic civil rights law, and the movement that brought the promise of one America to reality.
We have made great strides, yet the real promise of the ADA-inclusion, independence and equality of opportunity-eludes many of us. Millions of us languish in unwanted and unneeded dependency in nursing homes and state-operated institutions in the name of states' rights. Millions of us are denied protection under the law as courts define away our rights and abandon the principles upon which our nation was founded. Millions of our children with disabilities are "left behind," as funding for the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act is denied year after year after year. Our much-loved leader, Justin Dart Jr., who galvanized Americans with disabilities, challenged us when he said, "Get involved with politics as if your life depended on it, because it does." At no time has this been truer than now. There are choices-the politics of "Jim Crow" or of civil rights, the politics of imprisonment or of liberation, the politics of division or of one America. One America is opportunity, inclusion, and independence. One America is embodied in the laws that promise disabled Americans their rights to live independently, productively, and to pursue happiness on their own terms. It is the promise our children make each morning when they say, "One nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all." To my children, disability is just another part of the human experience. They have witnessed the most visible and rapid liberation of a people in our nation's history. They are proud Americans. But now they see that progress slowed. And they don't understand. John Kerry and John Edwards will restore our progress and our hope for an end to bigotry, the hope for the pursuit of happiness for 54 million Americans, the hope for "One America."
We must give that hope back to our children! We must. We can. And we will! |
