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I don’t know if any of that I can really speak to with any use to you. One thing I
could say is that people like Ed Roberts are really important. When young people or younger
people or even newly disabled people, young people with disabilities or newly disabled,
older people with disabilities are coming to grips with their new situation or a difficult
situation or a world that doesn’t tolerate diversity very well and that’s one of the
things you could say about Ed is that the life he lived the way he lived it, how he
lived it, is a you know it’s a beacon of hope and it’s an example for people with
disabilities who are struggling in their everyday lives to try to find a way through it. Whether
they’re having problems with their spouses, or their siblings or their parents, the accessibility
of their communities. What Ed did and how he lived is important but it’s also it’s
important socially and historically but it’s also can be very important for individuals
who are grappling with their disability or their situation or their difficulties. And
a film like this can be shown and distributed and it can act in some ways as peer counseling
to people who don’t know what the way forward is or are overwhelmed by the way forward or
the situation they find themselves in is so difficulty that they feel despair. And here
was a guy who was told he’d never work. He not only worked he ran a Center for Independent
Living. He not only ran a Center for Independent Living he ran the state Vocational Rehabilitation
department of California. He would tell that he never lived alone or out of a medical facility
or out of an iron lung. This is a guy who lived at home, traveled the world. Probably
was to 50 different countries. In interviews that I did around the word when I wrote that
book it was in 1998, numerous people from in Thailand and in Southern Africa, South
America invoked Ed’s name. Somehow, somewhere they met this guy either at conferences or
when they had gotten a chance to visit the US they somehow found their way to Berkley
and met him. And they not just were touched by him as a person, but they saw what someone
with a severe disability who was constantly told they couldn’t do something, did. I
think that’s what I can say on that question. In some ways my personal story is not very
relevant to this because I mean I had a lot of advantages that others don’t have.