Day in Washington Disability Policy Podcast.  I Dream of Missouri - A Disability Response to the Events of Ferguson.

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Audio File: http://dayinwashington.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/I-dream-of-missouri.mp3

Transcript: Hello and welcome to Day in Washington. Day in Washington is your Disability Policy Podcast exploring and discussing issues of interest to the disability community. Today, I want to deviate a little from my usual legislative and regulatory analysis and talk to you about whats going on out there, in the real world beyond the papered Capitol Hill offices of Washington DC. I want to talk to you about Ferguson, Missouri.

I dream of Missouri. Having spent more than ten years of my life there, having family still living there...in many ways, even though I've now spent nine years in the Washington DC metro area, I still think of Missouri as my home state. But the Missouri I dreamt of last night wasn't of Midwestern hospitality, family values, and strong communities. It is a Missouri where the streets burn with tear gas and its citizens cower in their homes fearful from their own government. It is where peaceful protesters are treated as deadly threats and where media and both traditional and non-traditional are corralled and controlled.

When a young man dies it is a tragedy. When a community speaks out and is forcefully silenced, it is a tragedy. When the nation responds not with immediate anger at the injustice or calls for action, but instead with platitudes and calls for calm, it is a tragedy.

Teargas, and less-leathal weapons, because none are truly non-lethal, no-fly zones and martial law. Detaining press, preventing people from assembling peacefully.This is not the America that many of us know - the land of the free and home of the brave. The land where a rag tag group of rebels overthrew the great British empire. Where abolitionists took the nation to war to ensure freedom. Where civil rights was a movement that helped a nation grow up and truly envision that promised equality. We glorify our rebels and protestors of history and yet today, we call them potential threats to safety and dangerous. We criminalize and dehumanize them.

No, it isn't the Missouri I knew. But in truth, it is the Missouri that was likely always there. It was always there and most of us...most of us choose to pretend that the inequities in our communities and neighborhoods don't exist.

To the President, to Governor Jay Nixon, to legislators and policymakers I say:

This isn't a politically expedient issue. It was the issue of expediency that in part caused the tangled ugly events of this week. Matters of race and disparity and inequality and injustice aren't expedient and they deserve more than recognition of it as the heartbreak of a single family.

This is more than the initial incident, the death of Michael Brown. But to speak of it only as a single heartbreak is to invalidate the feelings of fear and anger of an entire community. Their response tells us about the heartbreak of a community. It tells us about the feelings of helplessness in the face of perceived injustice and of the oppression protest.

This is a community who didn't trust and didn't have faith in the system. This is a community that saw no other way.

Mr. President, Governor Jay Nixon, legislators and policymakers, this is about responsibility and accountability. This is a failure of the system YOU represent.

The system failed. It failed Michael Brown.

It failed Eric Garner, 43, who had asthma, was pulled to the sidewalk onto his chest and restrained in a chokehold by an officer, a chokehold that killed him.

It failed Ethan Saylor, 26,