Summer work
Elshtain, Eric P.
REPORT FROM TENNESSEE SUMMER WORK DO TOO MANY RIGHTS MAKE A WRONG? tephen doesn't talk and has little control of his body. Most of the time he stays in bed or resides in a wheelchair with straps...
...Stephen stopped crying only once, when I told a nurse to stop treating him like a child...
...At this point in the discussion, Don became agitated...
...One of these counselors, Don, was a thirty-year-old seminary student...
...And then he laughed...
...Don quit working at the camp not long after this incident...
...Stephen's foster mother came to the hospital and told me that this sort of accident had happened before—the chair was old and unstable...
...On a typical, muggy August day, I happened to be pushing Stephen in his chair...
...the moment of Stephen's joke...
...In fact, Don was amazed that I wasn't being sued already, or that I hadn't been slapped with at least an abuse charge by Stephen's guardians...
...He uses and is used by his wheelchair...
...The day following the accident there was a counselors' meeting with a representative from the ARC who had witnessed the accident...
...He laughed at my wide-eyed look of incredulity...
...He didn't want to be responsible for any situation involving a child with a disability lest he be deemed "liable...
...He had been at the camp for three weeks but was still skittish around the children with autism, the eight-year-old who had had a stroke when he was eighteen months old, the two teen-agers with mental retardation, and Stephen...
...There is a large plexiglass tray fixed in front of him, and a padded guard placed between his thighs, pressed into his groin to keep Commonweal him from sliding down...
...a forum in miniature...
...Their primary responsibility was toward the "normal" children rather than toward those with "special needs...
...the moment of a working out of the accidents that befall us...
...Furthermore, why hadn't I been chastised by anyone...
...But I think his concerns are symptomatic of several broader social issues: the loss of a language for responsibility and the loss of a sense of duty...
...In the summer of 1991 I fed him, cleaned him, pushed him around, talked with him...
...The next issue will be dated September 11...
...For Don, responsibility translated into blame and legalities: you push me, I sue you...
...What sort of constitution might really speak to Stephen's needs in such a case...
...He brought up the question of our responsibilities toward the children, abled and disabled both, noting that all the counselors were expected to pull their weight with the children at the camp, regardless of which "entity" had hired them...
...The terms used are of victims or those being victimized...
...Our engagement, after time, went far beyond the yeses and noes he indicated with the strained movements of his head...
...He, too, had seen the whole thing and, as he said, it was "an image that will stay with [me] forever...
...We were moving at a clip that was close to being a jog when one of the chair's foot rests came loose and jammed into one of the small front wheels of the forward-heavy chair...
...the responsibility of freedom unfettered by the skittishness of self-interest...
...When I saw Stephen an hour after our ordeal—after I had my timeout and after he had been fed by another counselor—he cocked his head and pursed his lips in the grimace he reserved for times when he was especially peeved...
...Our "constitution" was unwritten...
...He has cerebral palsy...
...terse sentences, mine...
...Our rapport became a code of facial expressions, his and mine...
...He saw himself as a potential victim...
...in poetry at Columbia University in May 1992...
...The accident was "something that happens," not unlike a child falling off a swing or getting hit in the head with a softball...
...I had been hired by the Association for Retarded Citizens (ARC) of Davidson County as part of a pilot project being implemented in the county for the "injection" of children with disabilities into mainstream day camps...
...But in a situation such as the one I have described, the proper field of action (Mill again) becomes quite complicated...
...On certain levels, someone like Stephen needs a proxy to insure his freedom...
...We administered nothing but ice until we reached the hospital...
...Where Don would have spoken of his inalienable right not to be put in a situation where there was the possibility of injury or risk, Stephen merely suggested, through his dark humor, that I be more careful the next time we decided to take a little jog...
...Not one that deals merely in the language of rights and the role of victims...
...I met Stephen, who is fifteen, when I was working as a day-camp counselor on the campus of Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee...
...A joke at my expense...
...When things grew still, Stephen's forehead was on the cement, the padded half-circle pressing on the back of his head, and I was lying on the ground next to him...
...Commonweal 14 August 1992: 9...
...Here the atomistic terms of individual rights are reinforced by a legalistic framework...
...There, x-rays were taken of Stephen's neck and an abrasion on his forehead was treated and bandaged...
...My duties in the program were first toward Stephen, then to the other children with special needs, and finally to the "normal" children...
...Four of the seven counselors in the program had been hired by the camp rather than by the ARC...
...We toppled, the momentum throwing Stephen forward and me into the air...
...In his view, the individual is the owner of a certain number of rights, rights which are in tacit conflict with the rights of other similarly righted people...
...The forum for resolving conflicts over varying rights is the courts...
...ERIC P. ELSHTAIN Eric P. Elshtain completed his M.F.A...
...He "didn't have the ARC In keeping with Commonweal's usual summer schedule only one issue is published each month during July and August...
...Most of the time he stays in bed or resides in a wheelchair with straps around his ankles and one wrist, shoulder braces, torso supports, and a padded half-circle at the back of his head...
...and an array of communicative strategies...
...My arms and legs and Stephen's ensconced body were for an instant a tiny body politic, bound by responsibility and trust rather than rights and liabilities...
...It understood the risks that are largely overridden by talk of rights but which are reasonable in a discourse of duty: The risk of responsibility...
...the solution that can be found when two people, or a community, or a country, arc duty-bound, not rights-separated...
...to protect him legally" in such a circumstance...
...We were instructed to look for signs of concussion...
...Back at the camp, I was advised to take a "mental health" timeout: "There's really nothing like the guilt after hurting a disabled child," I was told, and I found it strangely comforting...
...Today, the "appropriate region of human liberty," to use a phrase from John Stuart Mill, has been squeezed into spaces of self-protection...
Vol. 119 • August 1992 • No. 14
