BENGALURU: Former US senator Tom Harkin has been a longstanding champion of people with disabilities and is in the city for the India Inclusion Summit. He talks to STOI about the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), Clint Eastwood, and Donald Trump.
Tom Harkin looks - well - like a Hollywood version of an American senator. With his white hair and folksy way of speaking, it's not surprising that Harkin played a cameo - as himself - in a Hollywood movie: 1993's Dave, the Kevin Kline-Sigourney Weaver starrer, a retelling of the Prisoner of Zenda with the American presidency replacing the throne of Ruritania.
Harkin is in Bengaluru for the India Inclusion Summit 2017, an initiative aimed at finding ways to help utilize the talents of people with physical or mental disabilities and create a more inclusive society. Harkin himself has long been a champion of people with disabilities. His elder brother Frank lost his hearing at an early age, after suffering from spinal meningitis. "In those times, if you were deaf, you couldn't go to school with the rest of the kids. You had to go to a special school. And they told Frank that he could only become a baker, though he didn't want to. Well, so Frank went to work in a bake shop in Des Moines, Iowa. Now, there was this man who would stop by the shop every so often and he would try to talk to Frank. So Frank told him 'Look, I'm deaf. Write it down'. So they kept communicating that way. One day, the man said 'I sure like your stuff. How do you like baking?' And Frank replied 'I hate it!'," says Harkin. He laughs at the memory.
"Then, the man asked Frank what he wanted to do. Frank told him that he wanted to work with machines and stuff like that. The man looked at Frank and said, 'That's what I do. I have a plant here that makes jet engine nozzles'. He hired my brother. So, my brother went to work there. The man, his name was Delavan, of the Delavan Manufacturing Company. He talked to his foreman about my brother. They put him on to some machine. Then, Delavan came by about a month later, and asked his foreman how Frank was doing. The foreman said 'That guy's fantastic! Makes the fewest mistakes, everything is just perfect.' Delavan later told me that it occurred to him that the production line was noisy place - bells ringing, drills running, people shouting - but what made my brother's work so good was that he couldn't hear any of it - and he could concentrate on his job. 'The next thing I did," said Delaven, 'was that I went and hired more deaf people. Better for my bottom line'," says Harkin. "In ten years, he hadn't been for work late once. Sometimes, the best person for a job is a person with a disability."
"He was an interesting guy, Frank," says Harkin. "An interesting person." His voice trails off, as he stares into space, remembering.
It wasn't just his brother's experiences that made Harkin a champion of people with disabilities. "A nephew of mine became quadriplegic, a result of a car accident. He called me up one day - he'd just gotten into college - because he was unable to take a course because the class was on the second floor of the building. There were no elevators and he couldn't take his wheelchair up the stairs - and the college authorities wouldn't let him take the course. All of a sudden it hit me. He couldn't even go out to eat with his family - there were so many obstacles: kerbs, stairs, narrow doors - and now he couldn't even take the stairs. That got me thinking - there was more to this than deafness," he said.
Harkin became a vocal proponent for a broad anti-discrimination bill, which eventually became the Americans with Disabilities Act, one of the earliest and farthest reaching pieces of legislation in support of disabled people. Harkin authored the final bill, and gave the part of the speech introducing it in sign language, saying that he wanted his brother to understand.
Now, the ADA is under attack, from Trump's Republicans. And the face of the attack is Hollywood star Clint Eastwood. After one of his resorts in Carmel, California was cited in 1997 for accessibility violations under the ADA, Eastwood advocated before Congress that the ADA should be altered so that businesses would have a 90-day period to fix non-compliance complaints. Now, Republican politicians want to push the ADA Education and Reform Act. This bill would require disabled people to communicate to businesses with accessibility violations, allowing them 60 days to respond and then another 120 days to address the problem. That is, if you want to go to a place with a hotel that doesn't support disabled people, you need to wait half a year before you can finally visit the hotel. "I'm hoping we can fight off this challenge," says Harkin.
But the current assault on Harkin's signature legislative accomplishment is emblematic of Trump's Republicans. As for Trump himself, Harkin hopes that the 45th president is a temporary aberration. "We've always had, in the history of our country, people who were disruptors and bombthrowers - like Joe McCarthy and people like that - but none of them ever became president - none like Trump. His poll standings now are the lowest of any president ever, since polling started. They're not going to get any better. In the last election that we had, a few days ago, our party (the Democratic party) did very well. I think even people who voted for Trump are saying 'that's not what we want'. I think this is going to turn," he says.
But it will take a while.
"In the past, within Republicans, we had liberals and conservatives. Among democrats, we had liberals and conservatives. Today, Republicans are all conservatives, Democrats are all liberals, and the people in the middle have mostly gone to the Republicans because they're mostly conservatives. But what I think is going to happen is that you'll have a Republican party, a Democratic party and a third party. And the third party will be the Trump people. The Republicans will be conservative, but legitimately conservative. And I think these two parties will work together to isolate the Trump people. But that will take at least 10 years. If these people, the Trump people, continue to rule the Republican party, they will be a minority forever. Our demographics have changed dramatically. We just need the Supreme Court of the United States to declare gerrymandering unconstitutional: These white racist, misogynist, homophobic people, they will be isolated," he says.
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