Early on, I promised to write about how the intiative came about. It all began with two people I met over 20 years ago, Mimi Jones and Michael Duner, who were law school classmates of mine. Both were quadriplegic, Mimi from a bout with childhood polio, and Michael from a college auto accident. Both were unable to turn the pages of our case books, except very slowly and with incredible effort. I got to know them as a tutor, but more as their friend. Though physically so limited, they were the two strongest people I have ever met. I was profoundly moved by their tenacity and ability to endure a law school experience that most able-bodied people considered to be difficult.
In my third and last year of law school, Mimi and Mike asked me to help get a mechanical lift built in the moot courtroom. It was an issue of civil rights, pure and simple. It was a violation of those rights for students with disabilities to be shuttled off to small classrooms to have their trial or moot court experience. Truth be told, it was a fight. Months went by and, despite our efforts, no lift. We organized, involved the press, and found the money, which supposedly was not available. The lift was built, and the courtroom was made accessible to all students. I believe it still is.
That experience lit a spark in me. I saw that advocacy could bring about real life change for people. Maybe more important, the gift of Mimi Jones and Michael Duner humbled me in ways that I've remembed most every day for the past 20 years. They both passed away too early in life, but they taught me that the mirror image of disability is ability, and that it's not what you cannot do that defines you, it's what you can do. And it's not about whether you have obstacles in your way. It's what you do to go through or around those obstacles.
I still find myself drawn most intensely to the issues of disability that helped define my law school experience. My cause now is mental disability and mental health, another civil rights issue, pure and simple. The initiative is a way to fix the obstacle of the broken promise of the state that it would adequately fund a system of community mental health services when it emptied the state mental hospitals.
And that was the beginning. That's why I do what I do, and that's why I'm the lead proponent on the initiative.
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