Conference For People With Disabilities: Fill & Download for Free

On December 26, 2018, my daughter Briana choked on a piece of cake, and banana. Particles of the food entered into her lungs and caused Aspiration Pneumonia. Within days, she became septic and developed Acute Respiratory Disorder (ARDS). ARDS has a mortality rate of 52 percent but people with 5p- syndrome, like my daughter, are at a higher risk of death because of missing genetic material on the fifth chromosome.Briana on the mend at the hospital- still smiling!Briana was on full life support for about three weeks and hospitalized for four months, 3 of which consisted of a battle against the ever-changing bacteria that infected her body. Because her breathing ceased, the doctors intubated her for three weeks. Briana lost her ability to swallow due to the lengthy intubation, and she had to be tube-fed.Briana was born at Swedish Hospital in Seattle on February 4, 1983, twelve days before my 24th birthday. She was born with a rare chromosomal anomaly called 5p- syndrome AKA Crid-du-chat. Severe developmental disabilities is a primary characteristic of the syndrome. My husband at the time, Chris, and I took her home and loved her in the same way we loved and cared for our first daughter, who is three years older than Briana.Briana's life has value. As she lay in the hospital hooked up to machines, and a PICC line, the importance of her life became magnified. My daughter, Briana, matters. She has value in our society. She is not second rate, second on the totem pole, or the one I'd rather lose; her life is precious to me, and I am proud to be her mama bear.Please don't quantify her existence; but if you do, get it right. Briana is an enlightened soul who lives amongst us mortals. She is here to teach us about compassion, unconditional love, patience, judgments, and attachments. To be open to her lessons allows us to grow into complete spiritual beings beyond the ordinary human experience of stagnation.My daughter spreads love wherever she goes, and it's remarkable to see how people react to her openness and unfiltered way of being. Being her mom has taught me that we all have a story of hardship, but most of us carry it around hidden inside, like warriors without recognition. I've learned not to judge people; we are all trying to survive in this lifetime, and doing the best we can. Some of us need more help than others, and it is our duty as compassionate human beings to help those less fortunate than ourselves; to be mindful of the delicate nature between life and death.Briana survived ARDS. To jumpstart her will to live, I promised her a Disneyland trip, and a vacation to Portland, OR where the 5p- Society held their annual conference for families of people with the syndrome.Briana on the train in Portland during the promised tripOnce she got her appetite back, she kept saying, "I want pizza."My response to her request began with a story of how Chris rolled out the dough, seasoned the sauce, and layered Italian cheeses on top of it.Briana would giggle as we both reminisced about her dad, who passed away nearly two years ago."Briana, if you wanna eat pizza, you gotta swallow!" I'd say. And we'd practice over and over again.Briana is eating and thriving. She is the cutest most lovable person I know, and I am so grateful she's still with us and teaching me how to live every day.Visit Five P Minus Society to learn more about 5p-syndrome

Americans are not as ignorant as some people think, so I resent the fact that the question implies that all of us are ignorant.That said, I’ll answer this question anyway, and state the most ignorant person I ever interacted with was a woman I met while attending a conference a few years back.I was giving a workshop where I led a group of volunteer service workers in an activity related to supporting people with disabilities.Over the course of the workshop, I repeatedly stated that there was a dire need to keep advocating for equal rights and access to various services.During our lunch break, one of the attendees came up to me and said that they disagreed on the basis that that “you people” (meaning people with disabilities) were covered by the ADA.I disagreed, and cited the Civil Rights Act as an example of a flawed piece of legislature that did not “fix” the issues.The woman countered that I was wrong, stating that disability issues were not the same as racial issues. The only issue they faced were access to buildings and services.I disagreed, but kept it civil, stating my perceived similarity between the two groups.This seemed to bother her quite a bit, and as a consequence, when the workshop resumed, she began to derisively snort in response to some things I said.At the end of the day, I confronted her and asked her what was wrong.She laughed and told me that I had no idea what I was talking about and that I was clearly a racist because all I talked about were disability issues as if they were the only underserved population in our society.I reminded her that the whole point of my being there was to talk about disability issues.She said that it wasn't.Then I pointed to the schedule of events on her itinerary and her jaw dropped. She walked out without saying anything.I assume she had attended the wrong workshop.

There are many.That Jews were sent to concentration camps. They weren’t[math]^1[/math]. Barring only a brief period in 1938, and excluding the very end of the war, Jews were sent exclusively to labour and to death camps.That the Wannsee Conference was where the Final Solution was decided upon. It wasn’t. The widespread murders of Jews began with the invasion of the Soviet Union. The conference in Wannsee provided nothing more than a rubber stamp.That Auschwitz was in Poland. It wasn’t. Maybe I’m being pedantic, but Auschwitz was in a region of Germany that prior to September 1939 had been part of Poland.That Auschwitz was the primary site of extermination. It wasn’t. Auschwitz-Birkenau was the most efficient of all of the death camps, but some two million Jews were murdered in Chelmno, Belzec, Treblinka and Sobibor. (Majdanek was also classed as a death camp, but the number of Jewish fatalities is relatively small, and is overshadowed even by many labour camps.)That victims of the Holocaust were tattooed. They weren’t - at least, not all of them. Tattooing only ever happened in Auschwitz, only ever with those selected for labour, and not exclusively. There are many survivors of Auschwitz who were not tattooed.That the Jews were the only victims who were gassed. They weren’t. The very first victims of gassing were people with disabilities. The original gas chambers at the first death camps were used on Russian POWs. Many concentration camps had gas chambers as well, and under Operation 14f13 even those that didn’t have gas chambers (such as Buchenwald, for example) nonetheless supplied local gas chambers (such as the one at Bernburg) with inmates who were no longer able to work.That murdering Jews was the chief crime against humanity for which the Nazis were responsible. It wasn’t. Their first experiment with mass murder was the murder of Poles during Operation Tannenberg. Their first experiment with industrial murder was with the murder of people with disabilities under Aktion T4. Had the war ended at the beginning of 1942, they would be best remembered for the murder of some two million Soviet POWs.That the Nazis were planning to murder Jews from the beginning. They weren’t. In fact, the only demographic that the Nazis spoke about murdering as early as the 1930s were people with disabilities. The decision to murder Jews en-masse was not taken until 1941.That the Holocaust refers to the murders of Jews by gas. It doesn’t. Approximately 50% of all of the Jews who were murdered during the Holocaust were murdered outside of death camps altogether - either through starvation, disease or (more frequently) bullets.That Jews who were murdered were turned into soap. They weren’t. Experiments with soap production were undertaken in Stutthof (incidentally, not with Jewish victims), but they were not a success.That the Nazis kept the Final Solution a secret from their population. They didn’t, but they did try. The enormous number of people who needed to be involved, both on an operational and a logistical level, precluded the possibility of its ever being a secret. The goings-on within death camps might have been preserved from the average person, but that people were being murdered in large numbers was a matter of common knowledge.[math]^1[/math] This point seems to be confusing a few people in the comments, so I would like to clear a couple of things up. The best source on this subject, in my opinion, is Nikolaus Wachsmann, Kl: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps (New York, 2015). He describes how, prior to Kristallnacht, Jews had never comprised more than a few dozen concentration camp inmates. That suddenly changed in November of 1938, when Jews found themselves the majority of the concentration camp population.The SS didn’t really know what to do with these “November Jews”, and most of them were released. In Buchenwald, for example, the number of Jews dropped from 10,000 in mid-November to just 1,534 on January 3, and then 28 on April 19. By the time war broke out in September, the total number of Jews in German concentration camps was almost back to pre-pogrom levels, and did not rise again until 1942.When it did, Jews were exclusively sent to a new type of concentration camp, and one that the Nazis referred to as an arbeitslager (“labour camp”). These came under the general jurisdiction of Oswald Pohl. They were not sent to the old type of concentration camp, although such camps continued operating until the end of the war, and effectively functioned as open-air prison complexes.Those Jews who were sent to labour camps were, for the most part, sent to Auschwitz or Majdanek, both of which greeted new arrivals with a selection process that determined their ability to work and treated them accordingly. Those unable to engage in hard labour were murdered.In addition, Jews were also sent to camps for which there was no selection process. These camps were also administered by the SS, but not by Oswald Pohl. They came under the jurisdiction of Odilo Globocnik and were referred to as vernichtungslager or as totenlager (“extermination”, or “death camps”). Auschwitz and Majdanek were different to other camps within the concentration camp system in that they were also death camps, but were administered by Pohl instead of Globocnik.At the very end of the war, the Jewish population within concentration camps climbed again, as Nazis sought a way to move the populations of labour camps further into Germany and away from the approaching Allies. Even at this late stage, Jews still did not comprise as many as 30% of the entire inmate population. When those allied soldiers arrived, they found many Jews who were starving, bedraggled and riddled with disease. They were recent arrivals to the concentration camp; they had not been there during the war.Some people have suggested that this distinction is not important. Who cares what the Nazis called these places, and who cares who was running them. What’s important is that millions of people were murdered, and drawing a distinction between the types of places in which they were killed is a form of hair-splitting.I thoroughly disagree.The truth is always important. Language is critical. Understanding the difference between the [old style of] concentration camp and the labour camps that came to exist from 1942 actually improves our understanding of the Third Reich, of the Second World War, of the genocides perpetrated by the Nazis and their collaborators, and of the Holocaust in particular.If nothing else, it helps to understand how a Holocaust denier like Paul Rassinier, who was an inmate of Buchenwald and Mittelbau-Dora, could make the astonishing claim that Jews weren’t even being persecuted.It also helps to highlight the absurdity of the denialist claim that there was a swimming pool in Auschwitz, and therefore no final solution. The “swimming pool” was in Auschwitz I, of course, which was a concentration camp. Jews were all taken to Auschwitz II (Birkenau) to determine whether or not they would get to work in Auschwitz II or III.