Month: March 2021

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YOU’RE INVITED: Apply for Book Launch Team Membership

Application Form
Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

Be on the team that launches—ALWAYS AN ADVOCATE: Champions of Change for People with Dwarfism and Disabilities—a book documenting radical changes in organization, respect, and equal access for thousands of people with dwarfism and disabilities.

Find out  (1) what it takes to lead a charity that changes lives; (2) how laws were passed to stop a morally bankrupt practice; and (3) who knocked down barriers to equal access in buildings and facilities, public transit, schools, and so many more?

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As a book launch team member, share the answers found in the third book of my trilogy and show how positive changes are possible in our chaotic world.

Apply now and through April 29, the day wrecking cranes began tearing down the Berlin Wall at the Brandenburg Gate in 1990. Be active in the disability movement that continues to break down environmental, attitudinal and system barriers.

Consider the benefits of being a team member:

  • Receive a complimentary autographed copy of Always An Advocate.
  • Exclusive, private, and direct communication with me as the Author and other team members.
  • FUN! Contests with prizes reserved for book launch team members!

Never been on a book launch team before? No worries. If you agree to do the following, you can do it:

  • Subscribe to my weekly blog (if not already a subscriber).
  • Accept Angela’s invitation to join the book launch team’s secret FaceBook group.
  • Agree to visit the team’s group at least once a week to support book marketing.
  • Read a pdf copy of the book prior to the release date. 
  • Post a favorable book review on amazon.com when requested by Angela at the beginning of the book launch month. (If you can’t recommend it to others, no hard feelings, but please agree not to post a negative review.)
  • Share book news on your social media platforms; consider posting a selfie reading the book.
  •  Share your enthusiasm for the book with your LPA chapter, district and any disability organizations that you belong to.

Other book launch team contributions include, but are not limited to, the following:

  • Recommend Always An Advocate to family, friends, coworkers and anyone else who will listen.
  • Post a favorable online book review on retail outlets where books are sold, such as Barnes and Noble and Books A Million.
  • Post a favorable book review on Goodreads.
  • If you have a blog, post a book review or interview with Angela.
  • Ask your local library to order copies of Always An Advocate.
  • Gift a copy to family and friends.
  • If you belong to a book club, suggest they read Always An Advocate.
  • Write and submit a book review for your local paper.
  • Anything else the team recommends.

To apply for membership on this book launch team, please text me at 772-834-3951 or private message me on FaceBook with your email address and I’ll send you the link to my website where you’ll find the simple, one page application form. Remember to submit your application on or before April 29th.

Categories
Guest Inclusion

Celebrate People Blessed With Down Syndrome

Faith & mother

World Down Syndrome Day is 3-21-21. Down syndrome (Ds), named for Dr. Langdon Down, is the diagnosis for those blessed with a triplicate of the 21st chromosome. We celebrate this amazing group of people every March 21st because God doesn’t make mistakes; the triplicate didn’t slip his attention. In fact some people with Down syndrome will tell those of us with a typical duplicate #21 that we are the ones missing something.

That missing bit of genetic material may be why the world is such a cruel and serious place. People with Ds are vanishing at an alarming rate.

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Just as life expectancy for people with Ds has expanded to 60-70 years old, babies are being terminated just because they have Ds. Iceland has virtually eliminated births of babies with Ds through abortion. Norway is close behind.

Personally, I was not expecting to have a child with Ds. I wasn’t expecting a baby at all at 42 years old. But 23 years ago, Faith burst into our family and nothing has been the same since. She survived a C-section five weeks premature, weighing just three pounds, and was born with a serious heart defect. We were quickly thrust into the medical world: Faith had closed heart surgery at four months and open heart surgery at eight months, all before hitting the ten pound mark.

When things looked up medically (our fighter would survive!), I learned about physical therapy, speech therapy, feeding therapy, occupational therapy, early intervention, and play therapy. As school age approached, I educated myself on inclusion and decided Faith should be included in a general classroom instead of being segregated in a special classroom. When no Christian schools in our area would accept Faith in kindergarten, which hurt deeply, she enrolled in the public school. What a mission she had there! She touched so many lives of students, teachers, and administrators, and continues to be somewhat of a local celebrity because of all the people she impacted. I’m proud to announce that Faith was the first student with Down syndrome to graduate with a standard diploma in our county!

All of this has been a huge trial to my faith. A lifelong Christian, I was hurt and felt God was punishing me when I thought I had been doing His will. It took some time to get over the hurt, anger, and loss of trust. When the church school our older children attended refused to admit Faith, we left after over 20 years there. But we didn’t leave our faith, and found a church preschool willing to try.

As a young woman, Faith has a boyfriend, she loves her dance classes and voice lessons and has performed in many recitals and plays. With the support of her big sister and brother-in-law, Faith got involved in our original church where she joined the praise team, altar guild, and Bible study (we ended up following her back there). The isolation of the past year has been difficult for this social young woman, but she will bounce back because she’s a fighter.

This post first appeared on Angela Muir Van Etten’s blog on March 22, 2021 at https://angelamuirvanetten.com/. Readers are encouraged to share the post, but are asked to include the website link.

Categories
Celebrations International

Presidents Meet on St. Pat’s Day

Lincoln Monument

When Bobby walked towards my desk in the New Zealand Embassy library in Washington, DC 40 years ago, for some inexplicable reason my heart beat faster. I was unnerved by the proximity of his brown eyes gazing directly into mine at the same exact height. I don’t remember a thing he said.

Bobby was all smiles as he came closer to me, a petite 27-year-old with a rare type of dwarfism. I looked nothing like the four feet tall, plump, middle-aged woman he had imagined.

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As president of Little People of America, Bobby was on official business meeting me, the president of Little People of New Zealand. I was visiting America on a Winston Churchill Fellowship from the NZ government to research disability civil rights laws and public relations programs designed to improve attitudes towards people with disabilities. My intention was to interview Bobby as part of my research, but it became much more than that.

Our talks began with a three-mile trip to the Lincoln Memorial. Not so easy for this 32-year-old man raised in the small town of Jupiter, Florida. His two months living in the DC area was not enough for him to adjust to driving his over-sized car, that barely fit in traffic lanes, around the confusing DC road system. He got lost and flustered. And the more lost he got, the faster he drove. He even asked me for directions—someone who had been in DC for less than 24 hours and couldn’t see out the car window. He relaxed when we finally pulled into the Memorial parking lot.

We walked across the street and Bobby extended his hand to help me up a curb. However, he continued holding my hand after both my feet were set on the sidewalk. Not ready for such a bold move, I let go of his hand. After all, this could hardly be called a date.

I didn’t need his hand as we rode the elevator to avoid the 57 step climb to President Lincoln’s statue that towered above us at more than six times our height. Like millions before us, we were inspired by the display of Lincoln’s words from the Gettysburg address: all men are created equal. We knew what it was like to be treated as second-class citizens and shared a life mission to achieve equality for people with dwarfism and other disabilities.

Pizza was our choice for the evening meal. Corned beef and cabbage never crossed our minds until a drunken Irishman saw the arrival of two little people as good luck. He invited himself to our table to share Irish jokes. I was impressed with Bobby’s diplomacy when he persuaded him to move along and declined the offer to join him at the Saint Patrick’s Day parade.

Instead, Bobby returned me to my guesthouse where he was more interested in kissing me good night on the cheek than kissing any blarney stone.

And no, it wasn’t love at first sight; that took two weeks.

This post is a condensed excerpt from chapter 1, My Heart Beat Faster, in Pass Me Your Shoes: A Couple with Dwarfism Navigates Life’s Detours with Love and Faith. The book is available on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and Books a Million.

Categories
Dignity

Dwarf Tossing Throwback

Prohibited
Image by OpenClipart-Vectors from Pixabay

Dwarf tossing masquerades as a ‘sport’ when barroom bullies compete for prize money awarded to whoever throws a dwarf the farthest. From 1985 to 2012, it was like a perennial weed and you never knew who would sow the seeds—a newspaper columnist, a bar owner, a business promoter, a dwarf wanting to be tossed, a radio station seeking publicity, a dwarf challenging the constitutionality of a state law ban, or a state representative filing a bill to repeal the ban as obsolete.

From the beginning, Little People of America (LPA) successfully advocated against dwarf tossing in establishments licensed to serve alcohol as a morally bankrupt practice offensive by any standard of human decency.

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The debacle was grounded in Chicago with a public relations campaign and with legislative bans in Florida and New York in 1989 and 1990, respectively.

So when Representative Workman sought to repeal the Florida law during Dwarfism Awareness Month in 2011, he was deluged with resistance. LPA demanded that the bill be withdrawn and bombarded him with:

  1. protest letters from little people, family and friends, and disability organizations;
  2. negative media attention; and 
  3. 4,834 signatures on a change.org petition that each triggered a ping when landing in his email inbox.

Prior to his bill, Workman had never met anyone with dwarfism! But after four weeks of relentless advocacy, he became acutely aware of all that is wrong with dwarf tossing:

  • It generates harmful stereotypes that often marginalize even the most highly qualified and educated people with dwarfism as they try to enter the mainstream employment market. LPA President, Gary Arnold, and American Association of People with Disabilities President, Mark Perriello
  • It objectifies the dwarf community making the individual who is tossed like a shot put or a javelin thrown in a track and field event. LPA President, Gary Arnold
  • In a day and age when society is confronting bullying, it is a shame that this bill takes us backwards. It enables bullying. LPA Vice President of Public Relations, Leah Smith
  • We feel the pain all the way down deep in our bones when we have to fight for our basic dignity as human beings. LPA Advocacy Director, Joe Stramondo
  • Civil liberties are not put at risk by upholding the ban, but are supported by it.Reality TV Star, Bill Klein
  • A career in dwarf tossing is likely to secure the tossee a check from the Social Security Administration or a plot in the cemetery. LPA Advocate, Angela Van Etten
  • It creates an environment so toxic that little people fear ‘copycat’ behavior and being thrown against their will. LPA Advocate, Angela Van Etten

When two past LPA Presidents—Robert and Angela Van Etten—confronted Workman in his office, he acknowledged that his bill set back little people decades with ‘freak show’ imagery and a return to the 1930s era of circus show entertainment. Although he refused to withdraw the bill, he agreed not to promote it. And the bill died in committee on March 9, 2012.

This post is a condensed version of chapter 13, A Perennial Weed, in “ALWAYS AN ADVOCATE: Champions of Change for People with Dwarfism and Disabilities” coming in Fall 2121.

To read more of my writings, please visit my website at https://angelamuirvanetten.com.

Categories
Transportation

Tired of Waiting In Airports?

Waiting at Airports

The average person spends about an hour a day waiting. But if you have a disability, waiting only one hour in an airport would be miraculous.

Waiting begins at check-in. Although seat assignments, boarding passes and baggage tags can be issued in advance, mobility devices require in person check-ins to  answer safety questions and make departure and arrival arrangements for riding the device to and from the airplane door.

Waiting continues at the airport security checkpoint. Typical passengers reportedly wait 28 minutes in security lines, but people with physical disabilities often wait longer.

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We wait for someone to lift our carry-on bag onto the conveyor belt and pass a bin in which to place items for scanning or examination. And then we wait for an agent to direct a bypass from the metal detector for a personal pat-down and test for any trace of explosives on our hands or mobility device.

The Transportation Safety Administration (TSA), TSA PreCheck™ program, expedites security inspections with removal exemptions for shoes, belts, light jackets, laptops and 3-1-1 compliant liquids, but travelers and their medical equipment are still subject to imaging and inspection. Plus the TSA PreCheck™ background check, fingerprinting and personal interview are conducted off-site prior to traveling and cost at least $85. Not worth the effort for occasional travelers and definitely a problem for people like me whose fingerprints are no longer legible.

After security clearance, there’s waiting in line for a cup of coffee or a restaurant table. Despite the generous number of stalls, there’s often a line in the bathroom. It’s especially annoying when waiting outside the accessible stall occupied by a nondisabled person changing their clothes and doing hair and makeup. Transit layovers involve lots of waiting in gate lounges and restaurants. Media, meditating/praying in the chapel, people watching, reading, shopping, writing cards and emails, and sleeping fill the time.

People mistake our priority boarding status for less waiting. But when deplaning, they learn we’re last off. We wait for baggage handlers to bring our scooters to the jetway. On a good day, the scooters are brought to us; on a bad day, instructions are ignored, the scooters are delivered to baggage claim, and we must wait for a skycap. Arriving early in the morning or during peak hours means a long wait. For example, when our plane arrived at Heathrow airport in the UK at 5:00 a.m. we had to wait one hour before any transport staff came on duty. The upside is that by the time we make it to baggage claim our bags are either circulating on the carousel or have been off-loaded. The downside is that off-loaded bags are often taken to a storage area where we wait for staff to retrieve them.

Yet those who wait for the Lord Will gain new strength; They will mount up with wings like eagles, They will run and not get tired, They will walk and not become weary.

Isaiah 40:31

To read more, go to my website at  https://angelamuirvanetten.com where you can subscribe to my weekly blog and find several retail links to my book, “Pass Me Your Shoes: A Couple with Dwarfism Navigates Life’s Detours with Love and Faith.”