Wake Up America

Listen people we absolutely must stand up for American values. We can not allow our country to stand for torture. Do you understand that Americans are torturing people to death and not in rare instance. We must hold our leaders accountable our we will reap the injustice of what's going on someday very soon. Do you people not understand that our President met with Blair and set-up the war long before they pulled off 9/11. You must study the Downing Street Memo and then ask your congress people to support John Conyers and the 89 Representatives that have signed on asking President Bush to explain the memo. The events of 9/11 lead to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. The official story can not explain how the three towers WTC 1,2, and 7 all went down due to fire when no steel structure before or since has lost structural integrity due to fire. Just try to find anything resembling flight 77 hitting the Pentagon. Wake up America before it is to late. There are foreign UN troops amassed on our soil protecting the FEMA camps where the shadow government wants to put Americans in. If they confiscate American guns we will have lost. However remember it only took 5% of the American population to kick the British out of this part of the world and they at that time we're the most invincible force in the world. Learn about these things America or our country is lost.

Kill The Crip Night

Kill The Crip Night

On February 28, 2005 Clint Eastwood's Million Dollar Baby swept the Academy awards, winning for Best Actress, Best Supporting Actor, Best Director and, finally, Best Picture. Also Alejandro Amenabar's The Sea Inside was voted Best Foreign Film. Both films centered on sympathetic portrayals of the killing of quadriplegics.

In Million Dollar Baby, Hilary Swank plays Maggie a boxer who becomes a quadriplegic, is then placed in a nursing home, loses her legs to massive bed sores, and finally talks Eastwood who plays her trainer Frankie into killing her as an act of final compassion. With the whole gamut of movie critics from every major and minor newspaper across the nation celebrating the movie and playing off the murder of Maggie as a compassionate act of friendship and loyalty, it cannot under-cut the final message which makes it clear that Hollywood considers- it better to be dead than to be faced with having to live the rest of life with a high level disability such as quadriplegia. The movie viewing population which tends to praise Hollywood’s image making opinion, cried and shed tears over the outcome of “Million Dollar Baby” quietly agreeing with Eastwood’s conclusion muttering as they strolled out to their able bodied lives “Ya, I wouldn’t want to live like that either.” They would never even second guess the murder of Maggie or that she could live happily overjoyed at having another chance at life, like myself and many quadriplegics around the world.

So where does that leave the millions of us who already have disabilities, who already have had to struggle lifetimes against systematic discrimination, insurance companies and government agencies bent on denying us the basics necessary for survival; in three words mad as hell. And why shouldn’t we be when in every state budget cuts affect money set aside for alternatives to institutionalization while the President’s proposed budget wants to make permanent dividend tax breaks for the wealthiest 1% of Americans, slashing programs for the veterans and poor. As many of us across the country struggle to manage the impact these cuts will make upon our lives, thousands of people returning from Iraq with lifelong impairing disabilities will be pressed by the system they just fought to defend.

Here in Georgia 116 of us are fighting a proposed cap of the Independent Care Waiver Program which Governor Purdue wants to top out at $36,500, the cost of one year of care in the cheapest nursing homes in the state. This cap would mean there would never be any upward mobility within the program and in turn would effectively bar high level quadriplegics especially vent dependent individuals from ever receiving services which would adequately cover their needs. This would also set a level of care which may put at risk those who do receive hours from the program.

So instead of setting up a network which takes care of people, enabling people to return to independence through inter-dependence; the government sets up a system in which others profit from the warehousing of individuals in spaces which segregate us/them from the rest of society. The kind of care received in some of these places has called on the state to fine for abuse the same nursing homes the state rewards for keeping the cost of care down to a minimal per individual. I have already documented these abuses in my article “Right To Dignified Life” available at my website www.endeavorfreedom.org.

In that article I cover the story of Carol Carr who watched her husband and 3 sons suffer immeasurably from Huntington’s disease but more than that from the care they received while committed to Sunbridge Care and Rehabilitation Center located in Griffin, Georgia. She was mentally exhausted from years of watching the nursing home neglect her loved ones. James Scott, said his mother "shouldn't have had to go down there every day, changing them (Michael and Andy) and doing the work for the nursing home. It seemed like every time one of us went down there, one of them was just sitting there in pee. We kept having problems with the nursing home, getting them to change their bed linens. We had a big fight with them two weeks ago, trying to get them to help. They left them in there soaking wet," he said. "We went down there Friday, and it was the same thing."

Family members expressed concern, knowing it was just a matter of time before she cracked from pressure and seeing no way out, fed up, and in desperate measure, Carol, went into the room holding her two sons in filth, beset by painful bed sores, and shot them in the face and the neck, before walking to the lobby where she sat down on a sofa awaiting to be arrested. One year before the fatal shooting Sunbridge, was cited as one of Georgia's most chronic violators of state staffing requirements. In 2000, inspectors found that the facility placed residents in "immediate jeopardy" by, among other things, failing to properly treat bedsores. In some cases, the staff was not even aware residents suffered from the sores, inspectors said. The federal government has imposed more than $100,000 in fines against the SunBridge-Griffin facility as a result of poor care, according to records from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. Eighteen staff members were on duty at the 140-bed facility when the shooting occurred.

The kind of care received in a nursing homes has prompted many quadriplegics like Larry McAfee also from Georgia to fight for the right to die rather than live within the constraints of a nursing home environment. There are quadriplegics like myself living grand lives, lucky to have negotiated life while on a Waiting List to receive services through the Independent Care Waiver. Having survived those initial years of minimal care and ultimate struggle, I can speak from my own experience of coming up through the system with quadriplegia that it is the most difficult thing that the government can place on individuals who already have so much more to deal with. In an ideal situation initially when someone becomes injured, a person familiar with the system should inform the individual injured as well as family members, of all the programs available to aide the individual and their families to take control of their lives again, to become as whole as possible again, without the unnecessary struggle the government imposes through institutional bias.

Nationally, 85% of the long term care Medicaid budget goes to warehousing people in nursing homes or institutions. Given a choice most of the 2.5 million people warehoused in nursing homes or institutions would love to live in their own homes and receive services in the community where they can be an active part of their families and communities lives. Nobody wants to live in a nursing home. That one fact has been the reason for many people with high level disability to seek out help in terminating their lives. However, I would wager that should the system have been set-up to immediately assist individuals and families to deal with the initial trauma and then through different programs restore them to inclusion and independence, showing them disability is a natural part of living life sometimes; the thought of suicide would never have been more than a passing phase.

Instead back to reality, Governor Purdue is willing to help, so long as it does not cost more than what they would spend to place us in a nursing home like Sunbridge. The image-makers in Hollywood promote people with disabilities as incapable of living differently, happily, wholesomely with disability. Instead, they portray us as better off dead and good riddance. In rewarding Eastwood they spit in the face of every person alive with disability which has wanted desperately to live even if it meant using a wheelchair or depending on a machine to breathe. And while Hollywood cheers Eastwood for taking out to pasture the destitute little cripple, Judge Greer has sentenced Terri Schaivo to death for the 3^rd time by Okaying the removal of her feeding tube, on which she depends for food and nourishment. In their second attempt to kill Terri, she endured 6 days of forced denial of food and liquids before an emergency session of Florida legislatures met and passed “Terri’s Law” saving her life. They do not even allow such cruel and unusual punishment to be administered to the evilest of death row inmates.

Even with overwhelming circumstantial evidence, Judge Greer sides with the hearsay of Michael Schiavo, a husband that has already fathered two children by another woman. Michael claims that Terri sometime long ago in passing conversation said that she would never want to live with a disability and that she would rather die instead of having to go through life like that. He says he loves her so much that he must see this through, that he must fight all these years to have Terri perish because he wants to see her wishes fulfilled. I state in my 3^rd book, I think he’s desperate to cover something up as stated by Michael Baden, a world-renowned forensic pathologist with over 40 years experience as a medical examiner, who too challenges the official version of early events in Terri’s case, providing her parents with powerful ammunition in their battle to save her from her court-ordered starvation death.

They say that Terri is in a ‘persistent vegetative state’ but if you watch videos of her with her mother and father, she most definitely responds to stimulus and tries to interact as best she can. Her mother and father have been fighting for years just to have her released to their custody, but Judge Greer and the Florida Courts have consistently denied their request siding with the powerful right-to-die groups and lawyers that came out of the woodwork to aide Michael in his quest to destroy Terri.

In a reality where disability benefits and programs are being slashed, Social Security is about to be raped and incurring a disability means life in a crappy piss smelling nursing home, Hollywood support of euthanasia fits right in. Deny us any way to live in our own homes as part of the collective community, sentence us to death by starvation, and then portray through film that it is better for us to die than live with disability, and perhaps you get public support for the euthanasia agenda about to be tried in the United States Supreme Court through Gonzalez vs. Oregon. Soon if legislated a whole population of really expensive tax hoarding people, can be quietly off-ed as long as there is no family member or witness available to complain enough to deny physicians their possible new executive right to euthanize someone considered worthless anyway. Besides look how many people came out in defense of Robert Latimer even volunteering to serve some of his time for him, after he murdered his 12 year old daughter just because she had cerebral palsy.

Now is it any wonder that people with disabilities are a lot pissed about many things like Million Dollar Baby portraying murder as compassion, the long term care bias of our state and nation, Judge Greer’s decision against Terri, or the many things other things discriminating against people with disabilities. ADAPT has been telling government suits in charge of the current bias for a long time, ‘hey what we are trying to do to make things better for us as a population concerns you too. What we do now is laying the groundwork for yourself, your loved ones, and your family.’ I think Georgia state legislators understand better now that I have faxed to them the story of Louisiana Secretary of State Fox McKeithen, who now finds himself in the fight of his life, having incurred a C3-4 cervical injury as a result of a fall in his home on February 16, just a few weeks ago. Doctors say that he is paralyzed from the neck down and will be vent dependant, just like Christopher Reeves and many of the people that Governor Purdue is trying to force off the waiver. Take one moment to see it from our side and then tell us, how is it you would feel.

To view the article about Fox McKeithen, go here:

http://www.thenewsstar.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20050219/NEWS01/502190311/1002

The Long Road Home II

The Long Road Home II

I invite individuals to join Georgia disability advocates for the Long Road Home II campaign, a 5 day rally across the state to promote support and public awareness for MiCASSA (S. 401, HR 910) – the Medicaid Community Attendant Services and Support Act and MFP (S. 528) - the Money Follows the Person Act. MiCASSA establishes a national program of community-based attendant services and supports for people with disabilities, regardless of age or disability. This bill would allow the dollars to follow the person, and allow eligible individuals, or their representatives, to choose where they would receive services and supports. Any individual who is entitled or currently in a nursing home or other institutional services would have the choice where and how these services are provided. MFP would authorize the Secretary of Health and Human Services to provide grants to States to conduct demonstration projects that are designed to enable medicaid-eligible individuals support for appropriate and necessary long-term services in the settings of their choice, often at a cost much cheaper than the annual cost of warehousing individuals in nursing homes or institutions.

According to Steve Gold (www.stevegold.ada) Most states currently have no mechanism to determine if a person would want to stay in the community with support services such as community care or the independent care waiver. He said, “The irony is that your state could receive reimbursement for case management services to meet with each person BEFORE she or he enters the nursing home.” National data from the MDS report – 3/31/05 - (Minimum Data Set (MDS) is a comprehensive resident assessment that Medicaid-contracted nursing facilities are required to submit to the state electronically) 27% of the 1.4 million persons in nursing homes lived alone before going to a nursing home, 56% lived with other persons, and only 17% lived in another facility. The overwhelming bulk of persons go to a nursing home directly from an acute care hospital (58%) from a Rehabilitation Hospital (10%) and another 17% of persons go to nursing homes directly from their own homes.

ADAPT wants state governments to utilize the available federal case management funds to determine appropriate community services BEFORE individuals go into nursing homes especially since once a person becomes institutionalized, they usually lose their apartment and all available support systems. The Long Road Home II campaign seeks to educate the public about the nursing home, institutional bias of long term care in our country and the growing movement of acceptance toward physician assisted suicide. Since the murder of Terri Schiavo, the aging and disability populations are put increasingly at risk by prejudice dehumanizing our lives.

Take for instance the case of Georgia’s own Ora Mae Magouirk. Due to glaucoma and because she lived alone, Mae relied on her 36 year old granddaughter, Beth Gaddy, to run errands and bring her food. Days after Terri’s murder, Beth moved Mae from hospital to hospice, determined to starve and dehydrate her to death. Hospice-LaGrange accepted Mae as a patient even though she was not terminal and without verifying Gaddy’s legal authority to act on her grandmother's behalf. Beth it seems had grown weary of taking care of her grandmother, telling Mae’s brother McLeod and nephew Ken Mullinax from Alabama, "Grandmama is old and I think it is time she went home to Jesus. She has glaucoma and now this heart problem, and who would want to live with disabilities like these?"

Upon Gaddy's request, Hospice-LaGrange denied Mae normal nourishment via a nostril feeding tube or fluids via an IV. She was then sedated with morphine and ativan. In her living will, Magouirk stated that fluids and nourishment were to be withheld only if she were either comatose or "vegetative," and she was neither and yet the hospice complied with Gaddy's request. Mae endured 10 days without food or water until her story reached the internet, where upon members from national Not Dead Yet and newly organized blog site euthanasia resistance groups; pressured the situation enough that Beth was forced to yield, and allow Mae to be airlifted to the University Alabama Birmingham medical facility where she immediately received emergency food and hydration. Once stronger, Mae celebrated her new lease on life by requesting a fried chicken sandwich and a bowl of ice cream.
Her case is exemplary of a larger and more serious problem, detailed in an April 15, 2005, 29 page report released by the Robert Powell Center for Medical Ethics called “Will Your Advance Directive Be Followed?” The study asserts that, “In the wake of the Terri Schiavo case, many authorities are urging Americans to complete advance directives. Every state authorizes these legal documents, which allow a person to specify whether and under what circumstances she or he wants life-preserving medical treatment, food or fluids when no longer able to make health care decisions. However, the laws of all but ten states may allow doctors and hospitals to disregard advance directives when they call for treatment, food, or fluids. Increasingly, health care providers who consider a patient’s ‘quality of life’ too low are denying life-preserving measures against the will of patients and families – and the laws of most states provide no effective protection against this involuntary denial. The result: in most states, if you want life-saving treatment – or even food and fluids – there is no guarantee your wishes will be honored, even if you make them clear in a valid advance directive.”

In four very powerful chapters the study concludes - “1.) The Public Believes Patient and Family Choices for Life-Preserving Measures Should Be Respected, Even When Health Care Providers Disapprove, 2.) Health Care Providers Are Increasingly Denying Life-Preserving Measures In Contravention of Patient and Family Directives Choosing Them, 3.) Denial of Care as “Futile” Is Often Based on “Quality of Life” Rather than Physiological Grounds, and 4.) Most State Laws Fail to Protect Patients and Families Who Want Food, Fluids, or Life Support When Health Care Providers Deny It on Quality of Life Grounds.”

In light of this study the public must also realize that the “Living Will” is a document that was crafted by pro-euthanasia, right-to-die groups as part of a 3 step strategy to implement euthanasia in America. On August 16, 1985 USA Today released an article entitled "Living Wills 1st Step, Euthanasia Group Says" detailing their sinister plot. Derek Humphry, the Director of the Hemlock Society, said in a 1986 interview; "We have to go stage by stage, with the living will, with the power of attorney, with the withdrawal of this; we have to go stage by stage. Your side would call that the 'slippery slope'... We would say, proceed with caution; learning as we go along how to handle this very sensitive situation." What lies after the “Living Will” and subtle acceptance of certain instances of euthanasia? According to pro-euthanasia groups step 2 is physician assisted suicide which Oregon and now California already have; to be followed by step 3 Kevorkian like direct euthanasia. Dr. Leo Alexander, an expert witness at the Nuremberg trials, wrote that the crimes of the Nazis, before the gas chambers, "started from small beginnings" -- the acceptance that "there is such a thing as life not worthy to be lived." Everyone faces end of life issues aging, disability, death, dying. nobody wants to suffer needlessly nor inhumanely. How people are treated in end of life issues and quality of life issues determines how people react to the services of government programs, hospitals, and care institutions. For food and hydration to become acceptable medical treatment to be forcibly denied in certain instances is preposterous and indicative of cruel and unusual punishment that the Constitution protects even the worst criminals from. We do not even condone the treatment of animals in such ways.

How can people like myself as a quadriplegic; a state of being not highly valued by society or Hollywood as seen in Million Dollar Baby, trust any health care worker in America should my life be on the line? We need only look to Holland for a vivid glimpse of America’s future should we not challenge the implications the "Living Will” and the current push for acceptance of physician assisted suicide means to all of our lives. Dutch cardiologist Dr. Richard Fenigsen in his work “Holland Euthanasia Experience Described” informs us of how more than 40 percent of all Dutch physicians have admitted to killing one or more of their patients against their wills and how most Dutch, especially the elderly, are extremely afraid of doctors and, even more so, of hospitals.

In Holland the number of nursing homes has decreased by more than 80 percent in the last 20 years, and the life expectancy of the few healthy elderly who remain in such homes can in some cases be measured in hours.”- Human Life News 1990 Dutch citizens were forced to resort to a defensive document put out by the Sanctuary Society, entitled the "Declaration of a Will To Live," which states that they do not want to be euthanized without their knowledge. Dr Fenigsen said - These documents carried little worth with doctors who believe it their right to determine the value of their patient’s lives. What matters is not what the patient desires, but what the physicians see as beneficial to the medical profession and to society at large.

With the medical profession listening to the advice of bioethicists like Princeton’s Peter Singer, our culture is quickly losing reverence for the sanctity of life and everyday allowing the starvation/dehydration of children born with disabilities and adults considered worthless to society. Singer who champions the cause of animals claims that children are born without awareness and that "the life of a newborn is of less value than the life of a pig, a dog, or a chimpanzee.” He advocates allowing parents and medical professionals the power to starve/dehydrate children born with severe forms of spina bifida, which, he says "can affect as many as one in 500 live births" and children born with Down's syndrome, which too is not a rare event.” Unless we confront these issues now, we may never return to a space where all life is valued, protected, and honored. We are moving from innocence to sin, for who will protect those citizens that cost more than government institutions are willing to spend. Was not government instituted to care for the public through social services and social programs?

Disability advocates want community supports which empower the individuals to live in ‘the most integrated setting’ as promised by the 1999 U.S. Supreme Court decision Olmstead vs. LC/EW. We want government to comply with the Americans with Disabilities Act, creating the support network that allows for the aging and disability populations to be an inclusive part of the community without first having to go through institutional care. We want a support structure which does not bankrupt families trying to aid a family member. A study published in the journal ‘Health Affairs’ estimated that medical bankruptcies affect about 2 million Americans every year. Half of all U.S. bankruptcies are caused by soaring medical bills and most people sent into debt by illness are middle-class workers with health insurance. Fewer than 1 percent of all bankruptcy filings were due to credit card debt.

People with disabilities and the elderly community will always be an integral part of the collective whole. Will our country decide now certain people are not worthy of life when still returning from Iraq and Afghanistan is a whole population of severely wounded soldiers, with life-long permanently debilitating injuries. Will our country turn their backs on those who had been injured fighting for our freedoms risking their lives based on decisions made by the leadership of our country.

We must not abandon families in their most crucial time of need. We are judged as a society by how we treat the least among us. They/We and their/our families deserve the best America can offer as we give the best of ourselves to America. Long-term care must empower individuals to live the best lives that they/we can with the circumstances that they/we must deal with. We propose MiCASSA and MFP are the answers to fixing our broken system of health care management, long out dated, and long in need of repair.
Government should reflect the wishes of the people, and the wishes of the people are to live in their/our own homes. We are guaranteed equal stature and protection by the very documents our country was founded upon. We cannot allow the very institutions put into place to protect citizens to devalue and dehumanize a certain part of the populace. We want our governor and all governors to expedite their Olmstead mandates and help move people out of the institution and back into the community where they/we belong. We want the Waiting Lists for community supports to be unlocked - many for years have been waiting for assistance. Join Georgia advocates from June 19, to June 22, 2005, as we march across Georgia informing people of these important issues. They affect us all and should we get what we want, it may just save the quality of your life one day. Help us to help you.

For more information contact Cheri Johnson Mitchell at (678)755-6015.



www.endeavorfreedom.org

Watching the evolution unfold.

For four years I lived in a van, wandering our countryside, staying weeks, months at a time in the different national parks dotting America. I spent these quiet, idle moments contemplating the largest questions my mind could imagine to conceive and ponder. In those four years I established myself and having published my first book; Look Somewhere Different at the age of 22, I now found that I had a voice and an audience to hear it. This dynamic changed my writing style profoundly, for I gave deep thought to the messages that I would convey through the streams of letters scrolling across pages of description and conveyance.

When I broke my neck in '94, following losing our breaks and going off a cliff in California, I found myself having to reassess, reevaluate and remold my life to pick up what was left of the unbroken, and gather myself anew. That period of my life lead me to involvement with ADAPT and Not Dead Yet and the struggle for the rights of people with disabilities to exist in a qualitative way. And so for nine years I have written for different disability magazines, extablishing myself with a voice in four states here in the Southeast, reaching a community that spreads out like a spider's web of phone lines connecting us all together in internet-instant, to eachother's thoughts and rantings.

Never did I expect that I would learn about the events of September 11th, 2001 after three years had passed with the effects of the attacks being singed to my memory, imprinted to my soul. And so, now I have a choice whether to tie myself to this revalation and share it with the world or carry it, quietly within me, hoping to share the information with others who know. And so, I wander in this quandry day after day, moving slowly and slowly to the side that puts all worry to pass and does what any great patriot would do and put the word out that we are under attack, domestically and the terrorists are within our own government. Who knows where to from here? But I have great hope that those that oppose war and love life will take back this country and make it great for the whole world to see that we are proud to be Americans where we at least know we are free though limited in current Patriot act form


Zen Garcia

The Waking Up of America

The Globalists are on the run trying to cover up loose ends that they have left all over the place. The world is waking up a lot faster than tthe Amerrican people who like hibernating bears will not wake up until hunger starves them from rest. However I have seen people in my deeply red state hungry for information that is not reported by mainstream news. At least they are starting to stir even though the thought of their government funding, training, and plotting terrorism on they the american people and the rest of the world is still something they can't begin to grasp.

They in fact become hostile to anyone who challenges the accepted policies of the neo-con PNAC Bildeberger agenda; even though they don't agree with the in the face facts or the on the streets reality of that agenda. Most Americans are not for illegal unjustified wars, extraordinary rendition or the use of depleted uranium in combat; especially when they find out that it stays radioactive for 4.5 million years and affects all of us globally. It will take just a little more something like a war with Iran, forced conscription, or pan-american merger with Canada, Mexico, Central America to push Americans over the edge and beyond the point of denial to where they cannot slumber silently away into the night.

The once entertained by bullshit t.v. crowd begins to stir ,seeking the information leading to freedom, the veil will lift and true patriots will inform the masses of the crimes being pepetrated to them and in their name. And when they finally learn and are able to accept that yes parts of our government are responsible for not just the attacks of September 11th, 2001, but the earlier WTC attacks of September 11th, the Oklanhoma City Bombing, and even Waco. When they learn this, it will be like the sun rising, inching slowly over the horizon dispersing night in quick revelation.

Namaste

Zen