Jesse Thorn runs a blog dedicated to helping young gentlemen dress like grown-ups. This weekend, though, he took a moment to honor the memory of Ed Roberts, an early leader in the fight for disabled Americans to be treated as equal Americans. This is a moving piece—and, frankly, a great explanation of how federal mandates can be used to spread individual liberty. Freedom isn’t free. Sometimes, we pay for it with taxes that help cities install curb cuts.
This guy is Ed Roberts. He was my dad’s best friend until he passed away in 1995, when I was 14. Ed got polio as a child, and it rendered him a quadriplegic. When he gave me wheelchair rides, he was steering with a joystick and one finger. He had to use a respirator at all times, and when he was at home, he was in an iron lung …
He led the Independent Living movement, starting as a student at Berkeley in the mid-60s, then later as part of the first Jerry Brown administration in California. Disabled people had always been hidden away in the dark corners of society – Ed helped prove that it didn’t take much from the rest of us to given them the chance to lead full, independent lives. Just “reasonable accommodations.” In the 60s, Ed flew across the country, from Berkeley to DC, without his respirator, endangering his life so he could testify before congress about the rights of the disabled …
There are some people who would prefer to think of the world in the abstract terms of a precocious eighth grader, and would prefer not to think about collective responsibility or about the advantages they’ve been handed. I learned from Ed that that BS doesn’t fly. I also learned that sometimes being a gentleman means putting up your dukes – even if those dukes are rhetorical. In Ed’s case, of course, they almost always were… though he wasn’t afraid to run over someone’s foot in his chair if he had to.
Put This On: Ed Roberts