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I think I came already geared, and I got a big mouth, and it gave me a chance to shoot off my big mouth,
and it's legitimate now, now I'm getting paid to do it. So it was good, you know,
where else could you have a job that would allow you to voice an honest opinion?
I don't mean to imply that I just went around shooting off my mouth but I'm sure a lot of people did feel that way,
you could voice what you really felt because I wasn't beholden to anybody. My funding didn't come from the legislature,
my funding didn't come just from the United Way, although a good portion of it did
and United Way never slowed me down from my advocacy work,
they never said well you better not say this, they said use your judgment on where you're going.
You know who you can push and who you can't push and what you have to do.
But to their credit I'll have to admit I never saw them try to really control the...
well they did try to control fundraising 'cause when they were doing theirs,
they didn't want anybody to compete with them. But I was doing that on a broader scale.
So you can complain about a lot of things, rather than just one individual or one group of individuals...
this was mental retardation. Mental retardation covered housing, employment, education, vacations,
travel on the planes, you know, everything. So that's how it came about.
But of course, the same thing happened with disabled people on the planes,
you know, at first they didn't want to take us, then you couldn't sit here and you couldn't sit there,
they couldn't accommodate you and now you have wheelchairs all over the place
and those senior citizens, they sure enjoy using those wheelchairs door-to-door, don't they?
Wait until the Boomers become senior citizens, you watch what they're going to get us to do for them.
So it grows as the need is there and as people are willing to speak up,
but if they don't speak up, I'm afraid this last bunch
will be the last group of advocates we'll have in this country. And that's fearful, that's terribly fearful.
Not only for the disabled people but for the country as a whole.
Because if, I can't remember who said it I probably should put the quote to memory or at least its author, you know:
When they came for this, I didn't say anything because I wasn't one of them,
when they came for this, I wasn't one of them, when they came for the Jews, I wasn't a Jew so I didn't worry about it,
so when they came for me, there was nobody left to talk for me.
So we better all stand up and talk when we see somebody's in trouble
because if nobody does then we'll all be gone and there won't be anybody left to stick up for us.