There’s a quality that liberal social-protest dramas tend to have in common. They’re usually about revolutionary moments we’re come through and are on the other side of, so they can encourage the audience to feel — with a touch of sanctimony — that yesterday’s revolution was never anything but today’s common sense. That’s been true of many movies, even some fine ones, about the Civil Rights movement or the gay rights movement. It’s true, as well, of a film about the fight for union rights like “Norma Rae.”
Cut to five years later. It’s 1977, and Section 504 has been passed into law by the U.S. Congress; it passed by a few votes from people who, the movie suggests, barely knew what they were doing. Nevertheless: a victory, right? Not quite. Section 504 will not become law until Joseph Califano, the U.S. Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare under President Jimmy Carter, signs it into law. And he’s hedging; he doesn’t want to do it. Why not?
Judy Heumann, living in San Francisco, is helping to organize a nationwide series of protests by disabled people against the oppression they’ve been living under. Section 504 is now law; they just want the HEW Secretary to sign it. Yet what they’re really fighting is the oppression of being treated as cripples — a hard-wired social prejudice that dictates, quite often, that they can’t go to school or get a job. (Judy talks about how they wouldn’t let her into school until she was 10 because she was considered a “fire hazard.” Which is often the excuse.) And the only way they’ll be able to do any of those things is if the federal government coughs up the money because it understands what disabled people need to live a full life: ramps that go alongside stairways, street curbs that provide spaces for wheelchairs, and the demand that educators, and employers, do not look at disabled people and see a problem but, rather, a person with all the potential that implies.
