Now is the time to act to protect the disabled
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I said that in my previous life, I was a multitasker effortlessly, a fast-speakers and a thinker faster. I was speaking engagement across the country and in the speeches of my most powerful in planes and taxis. In my previous life, I was Rabbi Lynne Landsberg. And even though I am still Rabbi Lynne Landsberg, the rest has changed. In 1999, I sustained traumatic injury of the brain, if my SUV slid on a patch of ice and wrapped around a tree. When I woke up slowly from a six-week coma, I was not able to forget that people must live. With years of intense rehabilitation, umgelernt like me to walk, talk, focus, and more. Now, I walk with a cane stick, speak slowly and with the help of small tasks. Before my brain injury, I was part of a minority, the strong and articulate of the American Jewish Community. Well, I am part of a minority, and the second time a day victims of discrimination still powerless just to be heard and people with disabilities. I began to identify with the second largest minority, if I have a year in a wheelchair. In restaurants, servers increasingly asked my husband what I wanted to place an order, wrongly, that I could not read the menu or decisions for me. Even now, when I am in a meeting, social situations and companies with a cane stick, people are often ignored me. I shudder to think what the job interviews should be the same as for other people with disabilities. Even with the curriculum vitae show that they are qualified for the job, they must convince employers that the malaise is due to their disability is not an obstacle work ethic. Unfortunately, thousands of Americans unacceptable acts against disability in the context of discrimination in the workplace every day. Two thirds of unemployed people with disabilities want to work but can not find work. What is serious, 97 percent of the time, the courts will decide, employees, the challenge of fighting discrimination in the workplace, there is often, he has a chance to prove that discrimination has taken place. In 1990, religious groups, throughout the nation worked to the success of the adoption of the Americans with Disabilities Act, a symbol of civil liberties designed, in part, to ensure equal protection work for people with disabilities. |