A Fundamental Question: Disability, Fear & How Far Have we really come?

I recently watched the little known film “The Music Within” based on the life of Richard Pimentel one of the great champions of the American with Disabilities Act and a pioneer in employment policy. The film looks at the trajectory of his life from young child dealing with a mentally ill mother to his tour in Vietnam where he lost a good part of his hearing to his journey to becoming a disability activist.
Where Pimentel made his mark was developing the first training manual for hiring people with disabilities called “Tilting at Windmills” in the mid 1970s. This was revolutionary for its time because it shed light on a community that had been ostracized for far too long. It provided government agencies the blueprint to hiring persons with disabilities.
In watching the film I kept thinking to myself even though Pimentel really set the groundwork for the enactment of The American with Disabilities Act how far have we really come in hiring, retaining & creating productive environment for workers with disabilities? In continuing to ponder this question I realized there are some real correlations between the time that Pimentel was working on “Tilting at Windmills” and now. During that time Vietnam vets were returning home many newly disabled and trying to adjust into civilian life find work and just live a productive life. Today in the midst’s of a war in Iraq and Afghanistan there are soldier returning dealing with the same issues as their counterparts did close to forty years ago. We have to begin to ask ourselves the questions, how far have we come in hiring, retaining and developing workers with disabilities. In a post Americans with Disabilities Act era are we any better than we were in the Vietnam era? The simple answer is yes, however, it is never really that cut and dry. There have certainly been strides made since Pimentel’s training manual was published and the enactment of the ADA but with a shifting demographic and most business inability to grasp that these types of hiring practices is not just but about good will but rather a valued business decision that will have a tremendous ripple effect far beyond this much continued parochial view point that still persists about the disability community it is only then that we will make strides. A universal design model that shows what is good for people with disabilities in fact impacts society as a whole.
We must continue the work that Pimentel started and create new opportunities that show we are not just limiting this to a disability issue but rather a see it as a human one.