From: ADAPT <cyanosis@igc.apc.org>
Subject: Disabled Homeless
Followup-To: alt.activism.d
Originator: rich@pencil.cs.missouri.edu
Organization: ?
Date: Mon, 14 Dec 1992 19:13:28 GMT

>From The Yellow Dream Machine B B S (U S A) 512/451-3222:
-------------------------
From: JOANN KOEPKE (Sunday) 12/13/1992 17:15 THE-504-CLUB--DISABILITY
To  : ALL

                    The Sisters and Brothers Keepers Center
                         200 Crockett St., Apt. 2-112
                             Austin, Texas 78704
                               (512) 444-6388
                               December 13, 1992
                                                

Austin American-Statesman
Public Forum Editor
P.O. Box 670
Austin, Texas 78767


Dear Public Forum Editor;

             
        As the joyous holidays approach again this year, I am 
most grateful simply to be alive. I am the one-handed, perser- 
vering pianist who was featured in this paper's Life-Style 
section, July 25, 1992, and while I am very proud of my musical 
talent, I have spent many hours recently grappling with how 
little protection my talent really offers me in a society, where 
while money does not buy talent, money does seem to be the bottom 
line way to obtain the means to stay alive.   After this past 
past year's serious crises with my multiple disabilities and
trying to survive in what I can only call a survival of the 
fittest world, I almost became another one of Austin's death 
statistics-- namely, one of the homeless who died on the streets 
of Austin. I have been on the streets before in better economic 
times because of serious problems with my disabilities. The 
economic crisis this year only made my vulnerability to being on 
the streets more stark and terrifying.

        Reading about Diane Mulloy's death in this paper three 
months ago had a great impact on me for many reasons. I had no
trouble identifying with the pain and exhaustion that she must 
have felt, while she was trying to survive on the street without 
the rest and care she so desperately needed. She was recovering 
from the effects of having tuberculosis.  Her death also made me 
realize how fragile  human status is in our society, sadly, 
including Austin. Many nights I would ask: Why did she die and I 
survive? I had no answer.  I did, and still do, however, realize 
that the only reason I have survived this past year was because 
some caring people chose to reach out to help me when either my 
own acceptance of society's stigma about being poor prevented me 
from asking for help or the realities of my disabilities simply 
made it impossible for me to ask for help.
                                     
       Diane Mulloy's death has made me very angry.  The deaths 
of the other 44 homeless persons who have died on the streets of 
Austin since 1990 have also made me very angry. The painful hours 
I have spent listening to and attempting to challenge some 
persons' dismissals of these tragic deaths with their  idea that 
persons choose to be homeless have simply left me with a numb 
sadness.

       Both my anger and numb sadness are meshed with a serious 
concern about Austin's failure to remember another part of the 
Nazi Germany atrocities--namely, that homeless persons, disabled 
persons,and war veterans were also systematically murdered in 
Nazi Germany. The murder of these groups were founded on the 
belief that human worth was based on usefulness, that these 
persons were gentically inferior and that these persons 
constituted part of the category of "life unworthy of being 
alive".  The murder of these people did not occur out of nowhere, 
but instead occurred because of gradual change of Germany's 
attitudes towards dependent persons. My concern, now, is that 
some of these same attitudes are prevalent in Austin.  Like much 
of Austin seems to have done, pre-Nazi Germany got frustrated 
with trying to rehabilitate dispossessed persons during its 
economic crisis and got even more frustrated with caring for 
persons who could not contribute to the economy.  Like some 
persons in Austin, Germany used eugenics to promote the idea that 
immigrants, poor persons and disabled persons were overbreeding, 
using up scarce resources and as result they became synonymous to 
a cancerous growth to society. Like many persons in Austin, 
Germany wanted homeless persons away from its commercial areas 
because aesthetics had become more important than human life. 
                                                      
       The Holocaust legacy has also transformed my feelings 
about my musical talent.  In Nazi Germany, my musical talent was 
one of the few ways I could have gotten a reprieve from a death 
sentence for the crime of having an "imperfect" body and mind. 
Such I found this past year. Even my musical talent could not 
compensate for the times when I could not force my body and mind 
to be useful.

    So as these joyous holidays arrive again this year, each day 
that I am able to do so I play one of my piano compositions, 
"Wordless Prayer To A Cruel World". I wrote this composition for 
the October 25 Memorial March to mourn the 45 homeless persons 
who have lost their lives on the streets of Austin since 1990. As 
I play this composition, I just hope that next year I am also 
able to write and play another composition called "A Prayer Of 
Thanks To A Kinder World", for a kinder world where no person is 
relegated to a cruel death on the streets.


 

                                             Sincerely,


                                           Jo Ann Koepke

* I am currently the Executive Director of The Sisters and 
Brothers Keepers Center, a center which I founded to address the 
needs of homeless with disabilities. 


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