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Lillibeth Navarro
CALIF - Executive Director
Tuesday, January 31, 2006
From All Sides
As a child, there was once a big flood that truly frightened me and I remember the traumatic experience of watching the water as it was fast closing in on the bed I was laying on and because of the polio, I could not just get up and run. I was lying helplessly on a mattress that was about to float away fast with the dangerous current when my late Dad quickly scooped me up and carried me to higher ground. The endless proposals of cuts to the entire gamut of disability services and poverty programs this year remind me of this nightmare.
I was at a hearing a while ago testifying against the proposed bill to legalize physician-assisted suicide in California and had to articulate why our lives are worth protecting. I testify every so often at Access Services hearings against the proposed cuts to the same-day service, night-owl and standing rides that take many of us to work or to the doctor or to some family function and articulate why it was worth saving our transportation. Last year, I participated in a conference call to strategize against the $600 million-cut to HUD Section 8 funding that would render thousands of disabled people homeless. This year also marks the 9th year I have been fighting the outrageous cuts to the In-Home Supportive Services Program to keep disabled people from living in oppressive institutions and have to find a new spin to my “Save our IHSS” speeches. This week heralded more cuts to the poor contained in the proposed federal budget that will for sure, trickle down painfully to the masses of the poor, disabled and homeless. Where is the end to all this? Can we ever get out of this perpetual exercise of justifying why we even deserve to breathe?
When a particular minority group is always asked to justify their existence, their right to health care, to transportation, their right to housing, their right to a personal care attendant, there is no other word for it but discrimination.
We know that the budget crisis is $9 billion-real and the poor have demonstrated as much ownership of that problem as any responsible family member about their own family budget. They already are doing more than a heroic job of belt-tightening. Who can live in California on an $810-a-month income? The poor do! With that meager amount, thousands of them find a way to get food, shelter, clothing and other needs! How do they do it? A whole study is yet to be done to find the astounding secrets of the poor that live on crumbs but shame on those who think that the poor can sustain more of these cruel cuts!
If we are not vigilant, this merciless current of cuts is going to wipe out the poor like the devastating tsunami wiped out a large portion of humanity. For with every new cut applied against the struggling poor, they bleed a little more toward desperation or death as the proverbial safety net gets eroded to smithereens. Who can rescue our poor the way my father rescued me as a child from that dangerous flood? The voters of this country, the political activists who have a social conscience, those who care to advocate and organize, those who care enough to get so mad as to do something about this economic tsunami coming our way.