This evening I was smoking an 18 year old cigar and read about aviators who flew before the Wright Brothers. They were called Balloonists back then. Nowadays they have have the dull distinction of being pilots with lighter than air ratings.

The author was probably long dead before much of a fuss was made about flying, but it meant something to him, and to the Bride and Groom he took aloft because they did not want to get married on the earth. Love transcends the earth, they felt. The Balloonist wrote:

No more, no more, the worldly shore

Unbraids me with its loud uproar

With dreamy eys my spirit lies

Beneath the walls of paradise

I got into a bit of a row with Josh during that CNN Hero voting. This site has done a lot of good and needed things for people too often forgotten, and Josh has my praise and admiration. But I felt strange voting more than once. I'm not from Chicago after all. Also, the prize, for this forum, was live chat, or some forum enhancement...I forget.

Was the site indeed the best cause among those open to voting? Was there some bigotry of a different sort reflected in the small number of votes for the fellow who helps Afghan widows? Do I even want anything to do with CNN - a once formidable pioneer in journalism now reduced to a 24 hour tabloid? They can call it 24 hour news, but it's the same hour of something less than news, broadcast 24 times. Yet the best things often happen for the wrong reasons. CNN may be a soulless husk of something worthy long ago, but it was the vehicle that brought most of us here.

All of that was reduced to nonsense though when our discussion took an unexpected turn. What is true heroism in getting the public to see people where they now see disabled people? I became an amp in '67, and those were times of protest. Vandalizing AB's (Able Bodied people) cars in handicap parking spots was normal for us. Protests were normal for us, as were public rallies. This became the 504 regs on handicap access, with enough loop holes to make the regs useless.

But this was Boston, Massachusetts, a state where Civil Rights protests received television coverage, at a time when Civil Rights were more than getting some schmoe fired or have to publicly apologize ad nauseum because he or she said something some group or another did not approve of. I was working on the Hill and felt fine standing up in a gathering of SSDI honchos and asking, "Why am I the only disabled person in the room?" In those days I was among the mild ones. The heroes were far more radical and I admired them.

Then Josh said the strangest thing in our email exchange. "I'm fortunate to have my disability now because it must be easier than when you were young." I didn't want to say it, but I had to be honest. Nothing has changed.

Yes, we had the Americans With Disabilities Act, but the percentage of disabled folks with jobs has not grown from the 30% it was before the act. It would be one thing if we were hated like the gays, lesbians and blacks, but our treatment is getting killed by kindness. We are eternal children; people who need help and compassion forever. That manner of bigotry remains. Matters of social justice have been abandoned for the past quarter decade. Protesters are depicted as strange fringe dwelling outcasts - losers - by the media today.

As the Black Community suffers from a lack of leaders - or heroes if you can get your mind comfortably around that word - so do we. So do the former middle class, displaced by the new Guilded Age, where the victims are blamed for not having gotten more education twenty years ago.

The genuine conflicts are buried beneath fictitious conflict fabrications like Red States and Blue States. These states don't exist but they create the illusion of division - a false struggle designed to preempt genuine issues.

These are neither the best of times, nor the worst of times. But if anyone supposes that the situation of anyone treated badly for wholly irrelevant reasons has improved over the past twenty years, perhaps then it's time once again to yank the antennas and windshield wipers off the AB's cars parked the wrong spaces...and let the air out of their tires again too. It's time, once again, to make a scene, and plenty of noise. Perhaps it can begin right here, right now in the corner of the World Wide Web.

Jonathan