Search

Tom Harkin retired from the U.S. Congress in 2015 after deciding not to seek a sixth term as a Democratic Senator from Iowa. Before joining the Senate, he spent ten [...]

I have no idea how much I weigh. That's because I never come across a scale that's wheelchair accessible. The last time I recall getting on a scale was when [...]

I am about to break a promise I made to myself. Long ago, I made a solemn vow (and sealed it with a pinkie swear) that I would never, ever, [...]

Last summer, on a sunny Sunday, I went to a baseball game at Chicago's Wrigley Field. All in all, it was a fine day. The Cubs even won rather easily. [...]

I have a very strong reaction to advertisements for investment products. The bedrock message of these ads is that you can't count on anyone else to take care of you, [...]

Why do conservatives hate Medicaid so much? What has Medicaid ever done to them to make them feel so threatened by its existence? Maybe what offends them so deeply about [...]

Thirty-three years ago, on July 26, 1990, the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) was signed into law. But even today, stories abound of disabled folks being forced to assert the [...]

One of my friends is quite deft when it comes to juggling his life. In addition to working and doing all the other things he has to do every day, [...]

Ruth Conniff Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Isabel Wilkerson's epic account of the Great Migration, The Warmth of Other Suns, was the deeply reported history of people who came north during the [...]

Door-to-door public transportation: Just imagine what that would be like, if you dare. Instead of trudging to a nearby bus stop or train platform, getting off at the closest point [...]

Of all the high-profile midterm elections outside my state in 2022, the one that interested me most was the race for the U.S. Senate in Pennsylvania, between Democratic Lieutenant Governor [...]

A couple months ago, I heard a report on the radio that legendary filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard had died. I thought I heard them say the cause of death was assisted [...]

There's a television commercial that makes me cringe more than any other. It features former baseball star Frank 'the Big Hurt' Thomas trying to convince aging men to buy a [...]

Every now and then, I post help-wanted ads to hire a new person to join my 'pit crew.' That's my trying-to-be-funny name for the crew of people I've hired to [...]

Things are pretty screwy in Michigan these days. Democratic Governor Gretchen Whitmer is out on the campaign trail gushing about the $400 auto insurance rebate that Michigan voters are supposed [...]

My sister, Cris, divorced her husband, Dave, in 2008. But their relationship changed only on paper. They continued to live together as an intimate couple in the house they owned [...]

An interview with Tom Harkin, former Senator from Iowa, is presented. Topics include his decision to retire from the Senate after four decades, his proudest achievement—the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), frustrations during his Senate tenure, and the Harkin Institute's work on disability issues, retirement security, labor, and a pilot project on universal basic income. Harkin reflects on his family's influence on his advocacy for disability rights.

I have no plans to fly anywhere anytime soon. And that's OK with me. My relationship with flying has always been love/hate. Actually, it's more like a will-ing-to-tolerate-out-of-necessity/hate relationship. I [...]

There are about eight million people in the United States who aren't allowed to have a monthly income higher than $794. If their income goes above that amount, they can [...]

Dearest Readers, I have been writing for The Progressive since 1984. It all happened quite by accident, after a friend of mine wrote a feature about disability rights that was [...]

I miss street protesting. It's good for my soul. It's been one of my keys for maintaining good mental health. But I've found that street protesting is a bit like [...]

The article addresses the challenges faced by disabled individuals in voting. Topics include the lack of ADA compliance in many polling places, with 60 percent of locations having barriers to entry or voting apparatus issues, the discrepancy in accessibility standards across different types of polling places, such as schools and churches, and the problematic closure of polling places due to ADA noncompliance, as highlighted by a 2020 National Disability Rights Network report.

When I was growing up in Chicago, most of the kids in my neighborhood either walked a few blocks to the local public school, John H. Kinzie Elementary, or to [...]

There's one good thing I can say about the pandemic: It has made the obvious, well, obvious. I'm grateful for that. The media have given a lot of coverage to [...]

I know well what it's like to be arrested for taking part in a raucous protest. I've been arrested for committing acts of civil disobedience at least twenty-five times, or [...]

We're entering the Biden-Harris years, which-considering how punch drunk we all are from the last four years-are destined to someday be known as the Golden Age of Basic Human Decency. [...]

I should be ecstatic, but instead I feel cheated. On Election Day, the voters of North Carolina's Eleventh Congressional District elected Madison Cawthorn to the U.S. House of Representatives. Cawthorn, [...]

About three months before the last presidential election in 2016, a Bloomberg poll revealed that, of the countless crass and cement-headed things candidate Donald Trump had said and done, the [...]

Recently, I received one of those urgent emails beseeching me to take quick political action. You know how it goes. The email explains an issue, then it tells you to [...]

Here in Illinois, we have these things called state-operated developmental centers, or SODCs. I think that acronym is way off base and needs to be updated in the interest of [...]

I have a friend who's a Republican, which is exceedingly befuddling to me. I can't fathom why anybody's a Republican these days--especially this guy, who's as disabled as I am, [...]

Im boycotting Domino's Pizza. I know boycotts are supposed to involve enduring a noble sacrifice so as to demonstrate one's firm and unwavering resolve. But not ordering from Domino's is [...]

I'm pretty crappy at making political predictions. Three years ago, I predicted with cocksure confidence that there wasn't the slimmest chance in hell that the squatter currently occupying the White [...]

The state-operated boarding school from which I obtained my high school diploma was called the Illinois Children's Hospital-School. If that name makes you want to laugh, please do. Don't be [...]

If you're wondering what life is like for many disabled folks in the United States, think about those television commercials for amusement parks like Great America. You see people of [...]

Yeah, OK, so it's true that the squatter currently occupying the White House doesn't go around saying the same ugly stuff about disabled folks that he says about other people [...]

Protesting outside the White House is weird. I've done it several times and it always leaves me with a strange emotional mix of swelling righteousness and sinking futility.I feel especially [...]

Judy Heumann is an iconic disability rights activist and a leader of the famous 504 Sit-in of 1977. During the sit-in, more than 100 activists occupied the San Francisco office [...]

Crippled: Austerity and the Demonization of Disabled People (Verso Books), by Frances Ryan, reads like a horror story--made even scarier by the fact that it's nonfiction. Ryan, who is disabled [...]

If we adopt the policy of building insurmountable walls to keep certain people out of certain places, things can get out of hand mighty fast. We might even have to [...]

My wife often accuses me of being shameless. She means the good kind of shameless. I take it as high praise. I appreciate her saying I'm shameless. I only wish [...]

Once a month, Ed got a haircut. An expensive haircut. It cost half his monthly income. There was nothing fancy about Ed's haircut. No frosted tips or anything like that. [...]

Tonight's performance of Mary Poppins has just ended in downtown Chicago. The audience files out at a slow, contented pace from beneath the blazing marquee. It's a well-groomed, perfumed crowd. [...]

I'm worried. Maybe it's time to escalate this protest. All we're doing is quietly handing out flyers to people as they enter church for the 5 p.m. Saturday Mass. This [...]

In my 36 years of coaching football, I have asked a lot of questions on the teaching techniques of defensive backs. Probably the one that bothers me most is why [...]

PHOTOS BY TOM OLIN I didn't think the Capitol Crawl would be an historic event and wasn't even sure it was a good idea at the time. Dozens of ADAPT activists crawled up the Capitol steps. The Littlest Activist All the Way to the Top is a children's book that tells the story of Jennifer Keelan, the little girl with CP who climbed the Capitol Building stairs with other ADAPT activists. Many ADAPT activists say this demonstration in the Capitol Rotunda was more effective than the Crawl. [Extracted from the article]

Attorney Leonard Weinglass stumbled onto fame when he found himself side-by-side with William Kunstler representing defendants in the Chicago Eight trial in 1969. Today, at age sixty-two, he is still [...]

Goethe called his works 'one long confession.' This desire for psychic purging may have motivated him to write Faust, the allegory of every man's fight between conscience and a quest [...]

Before the Americans with Disabilities Act was law, here in Chicago and around the country we would protest the inaccessibility of public-transit buses by parking our wheelchairs in front of [...]

I approached John Hockenberry's Moving Violations with considerably more mixed emotions. Hockenberry has been in a wheelchair since a 1976 car accident. For more than a decade, he has been [...]