Spirit in Action

A Body, Undone

Christina Crosby became a quadriplegic in mid-life because of a bicycle accident, totally changing her life and introducing her to the ranks of the 'disabled'. Christina is very familiar, experientially and scholastically, with other minority roles, as a professor of both English and Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Wesleyan University.

Duration:: 55m
Broadcast on:: 15 May 2016
Audio Format:: other

[music] Let us sing this song for the healing of the world That we may hear as one With every voice, with every song We will move this world along And our lives will feel the echo of our healing [music] Welcome to Spirit in Action. My name is Mark helps me. Each week, I'll be bringing you stories of people living lives of fruitful service, of peace, community, compassion, creative action, and progressive efforts. I'll be tracing the spiritual roots that support and nourish them in their service, hoping to inspire and encourage you to sink deep roots and produce sacred food in your own life. Let us sing this song for the dreaming of the world That we may dream as one With every voice, with every song We will move this world along Today for Spirit in Action We'll have Christina Crosby, author of A Body Undone Living on after Great Pain But before we talk to Christina, we'll continue with our series called History and Our Best Future Featuring none other than Myron Buckles North Dakota born and raised Long time resident of Eau Claire, Wisconsin And retired last year from teaching history in high schools for 34 years You know Myron, my guest today for Spirit in Action is Qantar Pleagic because of a bike accident So the Americans with Disabilities Act, the ADA, has played and plays a significant role in her life and her being able to continue her work And it was, I think, passed right at the end of the 1980s Could you talk about our national movement to deal with what, in general, might be called our safety net And the provision of that generalized care and concern to various subsets of our population In this case, disabilities But there is any number of groups within our nation who have need for and recourse to some portion of the safety net What's your perspective in a broad historical sense of how the U.S. deals with these various subsets of our population? The Americans with Disabilities Act came about, I think, in large part because everybody knows somebody with some kind of disability The idea of warehousing and keeping people out of sight, out of mind simply became too much to bear and that politically the emphasis became to change it Now, I also remember that there were a number of groups that fought long and hard for that accessibility, people being arrested in wheelchairs in Washington D.C. We forget that, this was not just the good nature of the politicians People with disabilities and their advocates fought, I remember, for an entire decade to get the ADA passed And it's just a good example of once things are brought to the forefront of people's consciousness that change happens and change happens for the better I always laugh when I ride my bicycle and how nice it is to have those sloped curbs on and off the sidewalks and things like that to number one, it was for people with wheelchairs but it works out really good for lots of people Change tends to be like that When you make a change to help out the most vulnerable amongst us it actually improves the lives of everybody even though that wasn't the intention I tend to think that the same thing happened with same sex marriage is that people became aware, everybody knows somebody and as we move towards an acceptance our lives become better and more enriched the more we accept differences amongst ourselves I also remember that the controversy in my home state of North Dakota when the rules were changed to stop warehousing people with mental illness and putting them more in group homes in communities so they could be out and about and actually be part of society that the outcry was intense that the fear of people doing strange things and causing crime disappeared after a number of years when people began to actually mingle with people in society who have disabilities and the fear goes away and they actually become very productive members of society instead of being a burden and having to be warehoused in some facility somewhere out of sight and out of mind Did you have to deal with that in the classroom, Myron? and when the change happened with ADA I think that they started mainstreaming students instead of having the separate classes just for those who had disabilities mental illness, mental retardation, whatever they called those things The best classes that I ever had were the classes that were the most diverse whether it be race or disability or what have you and it makes sense in a social study setting you should learn to be social having people around and in the room and going through the same experience class wise that you are having and seeing the struggles and adaptations that can be made and can be made very seamlessly it was looked at in the beginning as such a burden and certainly there are burdens nothing is ever easy but once you get into the mindset of this is the way it is and these are students just like any others and we will do the best that we can for them it creates a much better atmosphere much less suspicion of differences and that's a very good thing That's Myron Buckles folks a man in tent on our common good and drawing on his rich knowledge of history to work for our best future you'll find each of these brief visits with Myron on the Nordenspiritradio.org website as history and our best future right now we go to our main guest for today Kristina Crosby Kristina had a bike accident which left her quadriplegic really tough transition for anyone I'm sure but certainly a drastic change for the very physically active whirlwind and go get her that Kristina was and still is but with new limits since 1982 Kristina has been a professor at Wesleyan University in multiple disciplines including English and feminist and gender and sexuality studies her new book is A Body Undone living on after great pain and Kristina Crosby joins us now by phone from Providence, Rhode Island Kristina thank you so much for joining me today for spirit in action I'm very glad to be with you this morning Mark it's my pleasure to speak with you you happen to be traveling I think right now that's what brought you to Providence, Rhode Island as opposed to Connecticut where you usually have work where Wesleyan University is what's taken you off to Rhode Island well I went to graduate school at Brown University which is in Providence and I still have friends over here who work at the university one of them has been a long time director of the Pembroke Center for teaching and research on women she's now retired her name is Elizabeth Weed but she knows well the current director who is Susan Stewart Steinberg and they asked me to come over and read from the book and I was very glad to do it is that Elizabeth as in the one who has her best friend was John? yes that is the person that's exactly right in the book I don't think I knew her by last name in the book right I don't use last names in the book I think the convention of memoir generally is to keep it to a first name basis so you're speaking from your book it came out just recently again folks the name is a body, comma, undone living on after great pain and you're a quadriplegic and how do you travel from Connecticut over to Rhode Island this is always require someone to travel with you? yes it does my lover Janet goes with me because managing to stay overnight as I have done would be somewhere between very, very challenging and impossible and I think would probably be kind of imprudent as well so we travel together I have the great good fortune to have a modified van so that I can drive myself it has given me the independence to live alone during the middle of the week because Janet works at Barnard College in New York City so midweek I'm by myself except in the mornings when my aide daughter Collier comes to help me so being by myself traveling alone is challenging not impossible but having Janet with me really is one of the most important things that she's doing to contribute to the support of the book and she's very much a supporter of the project and yielded the book and is glad to do her part I really feel like I got to know Janet moderately well through the book including the times when she gave you some pushback about hearing attitudes which makes me love her all the more she sounds like a wonderful person I feel kind of like I should bring her in on this because she's also been a bird on your shoulder watching the entire event as well oh my gosh yes as many as this I was riding my bicycle on October 1st in 2003 and caught a branch in the spokes of the front wheel which just stopped the bike in some inconceivably short amount of time and threw it sideways to the pavement and I went with it and hit my chin I didn't get another scratch on me it was really quite remarkable and I've got fast reflexes so it happened very suddenly and that obviously was very bad from my face but also hyper-extended my neck by pushing my neck back and that broke cervical vertebrae which scraped my spinal cord which is how I ended up being paralyzed so you know that event was a really defining one of my life it happened just three weeks after I turned 50 and as a result we've been living with the consequences of that which is significant paralysis as the title of the book says living on after great pain when Gail Leander Wright first proposed that I interview you I was a little bit skeptical because I could imagine the book being about there's a lot of pain that sucks and you know obviously there's much more to look at than that my concern is how do we make the world better and people who inspire us in that direction so that's why I have you here Christina thank you and part of that that inspired me to have you here was both your teaching I mean besides being English teacher you teach feminist gender and sexuality studies and the fact that you have your anabaptist roots in the church of the brothering all of these made me think that there's some deep insights I finished reading the book this last weekend finally and so I think I've got a pretty good picture yes I imagine you do most people are perhaps most interested in which bike or which helmet shall I get so I don't go in that same direction that's great actually and I don't tend probably to ride as fast as you used to do so I maybe don't worry about these things quite as much but was your thought one month after it's like oh my goodness if only I'd had a space suit on this wouldn't have happened well I'm just so grateful that nobody hit me that it wasn't the fault of anyone other than perhaps my distracted attention who knows how it happened I was cresting a hill so I was not going fast I did have new shifters on the bicycle that day so I imagine that I was looking at the shifters instead of directly in front of me to see the branch and didn't see it in my peripheral vision I remembered nothing but the accident but it happened I think because I was distracted and changing my gears as I came up over the crest of the hill and was wanting to gear up to keep my cadence steady I was a pretty serious rider and had ridden the same that particular route hundreds if not into the thousands of times before so it's one of those accidents it happened it's an accident I was wearing all the proper gear and I had on a helmet I had on a reflective vest what I didn't have was any information on me about who I was so when I was hurt inconceivably to me I did not lose consciousness and even though I had terrible facial injuries and was able to say my name I was not able to say anything more than that other than apparently I said repeatedly I don't feel good but I was airlifted to the Hartford Hospital the acute care there sort of got me cleaned up so there's no I don't think that there was any avoiding of this particular accident it happened there's no temptation on your part to blame it on trees in general and maybe the ants could have done it right? yes they could have just dragged that branch right out there no I would you know sometimes I'm so angry that I hurt myself this way and that my life changed so radically as a result sometimes I'm so angry I can hardly contain myself it's true I just get furious but as I said I'm very very glad that I'm not serious at someone who was negligent or who could have avoided doing whatever it was that caused me to have the accident you know I make the statement that you know maybe blame the branch or the trees or something somewhat tongue-in-cheek but also with the awareness my mom died when I was 9 and she was drunk driving by herself it was 1963 she goes through the windshield and dies and it happened to happen where there was a fork in the road and I remember kind of dramatically I mean I was 9 but my dad as we were writing to my uncle's house afterwards you know crying and saying he'd cursing the person who put that fork in the road and at 9 I was thinking someone dropped some silverware in the road and somehow that blew it right right right but you know he's cursing the problem because the responsibility was really my mother's you know so externalizing projecting saying someone else did it I guess we are fortunate that there wasn't someone else you could blame about it did that lead to a different way of thinking about it yourself I mean sometimes people take the blame in themselves or some people just say well you know that's life I think my response was more life I understand distractedness I do and I think that that's probably what was the root cause when I went out for that bicycle ride I was the chair of the faculty at Wesleyan which was a post that I got elected to by the other members of the faculty I was actually happy to do the work because I had long been interested in trying to foster the Wesleyan that I could imagine and this was an opportunity for me to represent the faculty to the administration I was preparing for my first three day weekend with the trustees present and I had led the first faculty meeting of the semester about five weeks no not even less than four weeks earlier so I just felt a lot of responsibility and was I think anxious about this upcoming meeting and I knew that I would be sitting for three days and eating and drinking and not getting any exercise and so when I learned that my bike was ready it was in the shop because it needed those new shifters I was very glad and went to get it quite happily and went off on my ride and I think the combination of thinking about the upcoming days plus the new shifters that's my guess if we're going to look for a cause I think that's what made the accident happen so I think what we could do is connect this with the evils of technology and therefore the anabaptists of the men and night or Amish or something strain maybe they have a better grasp on avoiding those evil technology I do know that's a tremendous oversimplification of their viewpoint by the way I yeah well it's very interesting to me that Amish communities make their decisions about what technology to admit and what technology to Sean by reason of maintaining a community so you can see Amish kids Amish men and women on in-line skates if you live in an area that has Amish people in the population as I did growing up so you can have in-line skates but you can't have a bicycle because of bicycle with a bicycle you can ride a hundred miles in a day it's no longer what Raymond Williams who was a scholar of 18th and 19th century British life no longer what he would call a knowable community so a knowable community in the 18th and early 19th century was a community that was bounded by the distance that a horse could go in the day and not even very many people have horses it was the distance you could walk in a day so a knowable community was 20 miles maybe at the max so to understand decisions about well we can have a telephone but it has to be down at the end of the lane and shared by everybody in the community well that makes sense to me so it's always a question of what values you have and how that directs your consumption of commodities and what goods are there in the world to take up and which are good for you in fact and which actually harmed the quality of your life well and that's especially relevant in your case as a quadriplegic technology has made a super difference I don't know if you've written the book without the fact that you've got the technology that allows you to do that kind of thing or that you have a wheelchair that can get you around or adaptive motor vehicles all of those things how do you as opposed to the Amish or someone look at technology does that play a role in your life it does I've not been an enthusiastic adopter of technology as a college professor I got my first computer in the mid-80s and it was really because it was a much more efficient way to write I had literally cut and pasted my way through my dissertation writing so I certainly appreciated the ability to edit text that the computer offered but I was never one to turn immediately to technology I think there are ways in which it can screen us from face-to-face interaction that I value but I'm very fortunate that voice activated technology has been developing since the mid-80s really I know this because my brother had MS and needed to use voice activated software for his work as a lawyer so he was one of the very first people to use the software that goes under the brand name of dragon naturally speaking why the dragon I have no idea but it's called dragon naturally speaking and it's a program that allows you to dictate and the program learns from the mistakes that it makes to build up what's called a user profile which is a sense of who you are as a speaker and what your vocabulary and writing style is so the fact that that technology has been in development for now decades is a great enabling feature for me. Yeah I can imagine how many books have you written? I wrote a book called the ends of history Victorian and the woman question which was about the ways in which 19th century British people thought about history as being bounded by gender that history really belonged to men and was the world of consequence and struggle and pain and grief and that women properly speaking were outside of history because they were the keepers of a world that was not so written by conflict and I thought about this when I read George Eliot there is a sentence in the mill on the floss the happiest women like the happiest nations have no history she's quoting Thomas Carlisle there who was a British writer who said the happiest nations have no history meaning no wars no conflict nothing to write about so women were the space of no history except when they were unfortunate enough to be in some sense involved in public life which was considered the wrong place for them. Except by the Greeks Liz Estrada is a very good example of the alternative. Yes it is. Women can supply a lot of energy in the right direction. Unfortunately that's been more and more accessible to us over the last hundred years certainly hundred years maybe as that repression of women and actually from my point of view and you can correct me if you think this doesn't strike you as true I think one of the equalizers has been technology. Oh absolutely yes I think that's true because physical strength physical prowess used to be the absolute dividing line between men and women and technology is narrow that it's also true that once one thinks critically about these physical differences you realize that there's a great then diagram where there's a shared and there's an overlap area where men and women actually are very similar in terms of physical ability. It's the outliers that make the absolute difference and the outlier is what's you know it's used in our minds to imagine an absolute difference of gender when I don't actually think there's the I think that that way of differentiating is a simplification of the complexity of our lives. Folks we're speaking with Christina Crosby. She is professor of English and feminist and gender and sexuality studies at Wesleyan University since back in 1982 her recent book is a body undone living on after great pain. Christina I would mention that being a professor of English and having the broad sweep you were talking about Victorian times Elizabethan I think was was worse one of the lines that got drawn in between that allowed for suppression of women. I mean it's a crazy idea that comes because you've talked to the serpent ate an apple then women are cursed right and all of that insanity but even more so my sense and I say this as a male I think women are stronger than men in terms of sex it's one of the sources of power that women have had historically and then to make sex a symbol of shame and something that has to be hidden therefore in some ways dilutes the power of women and allows men to control it. That's my sense of historically I don't know if any of those ideas make sense to you. You have been a champion I think of not being sexually inhibited. And so I think in multiple ways that promotes equality. What's your take on that? Well I think it's very interesting that freedom has helped to be such a prominent value in the United States and yet when we talk about sexual liberation now it's seen as being somehow truly beyond the tale that we would imagine that sex could have anything to do with freedom when in fact I think that sex does have to do with freedom with our freedom to enjoy our bodies with the sense that sex is in fact an embodied pleasure that can be a wonderfully cohesive element of our lives together and to imagine that liberating sexuality would somehow liberate us into a life of being liverteens is to say that sex in itself is somehow wrong when Janet has written her first field in graduate school was religious studies and she's thought a lot about the ways in which communities create ethical value. In her view and I think that this is a very productive way to think about it. Sex is actually productive of ethical value because it draws us into relationship with each other and that's the site of ethics is relational life. So the question really is what makes a good life and I think that sexual pleasures can be part of living a good and full and rich life. I'm with you there and you write in the book about how that's changed since you're active and I guess that must have been about 12 years ago now I 12, 13 years ago this has changed for you we're going to come back to that but I want to chart some of your progress again besides being a professor of English or professor of feminist and I want to chart what gets you there. I guess you're identified as a lesbian and clearly by the time you're at college this is already clear or one of the things you noted. Let me see when you were at Swarthmore you wrote a column called the feminist slant. I did and by the way Swarthmore I'm headed there in what two and a half weeks I'm part of a Quaker international folk dance street believe it or not. That sounds wonderful to me. Our second stop on our tour is Swarthmore so I'm going to be there in just two and a half weeks and do you have any advice for me what I should check out when it's Swarthmore? Well it's a very beautiful campus and it is actually a campus itself is an arboretum so there are many flowering trees at Swarthmore and I would just encourage you to take time to walk around the campus if you could manage that and if you're fortunate enough to get good weather because you'll be there at one of the best times to see the beauty, the physical beauty of the place. And was the chair swing there the big tree chair swing was that there at the time you were there? Oh yeah, yes, yes and those the Adirondack the white Adirondack chairs dotted over that lawn of the first building that the college built called Parrish Hall there has been buildings since obviously I haven't been there for a long time I graduated in 1974 but the physical plant still has all of the buildings that I was familiar with and came to just appreciate the sheer beauty of the buildings there which are both the dining hall and the library are beautiful architecturally I think. So you went to Swarthmore and along with other students you founded Swarthmore gay liberation you wrote the feminist slant I mean obviously I know Swarthmore is a Quaker college Quaker influence, Quaker ethos and somewhere in the bones of it did your folks find it good for you to go to a Quaker college since you were church of the brethren or how did that go? Well yeah I think that for both of them it was a place that they could easily imagine my flourishing in and they were correct about that my father came to eastern Pennsylvania for his education he grew up in Ohio and he did a master's in history at Haverford and I think that that time in his younger life was one of the I think those were two of the happiest of his years was when he was working at Haverford and he had the library at the University of Pennsylvania at his disposal because there's a five college consortium that links UPenn and Haverford and Brydmore and Swarthmore and I said five there must be something else there but it was a very happy experience for him and the Quaker heritage at Swarthmore was actually really important to me I took one of the very first classes ever offered in women's history it was taught over at Brydmore and I wrote only Cretia Mott and it's the only time I've ever done archival work and I worked with her letters that were held there in the library the piece library that is part of the Swarthmore College Library it was a very important thing for me to do I remember sitting there in a carol and handling her script and thinking oh my gosh she was writing these words about the emancipation of women and her abolition work she was strong for the abolition of slavery a wonderful activist and to be able to write on her and have her papers right there at hand was a very special part of going to Swarthmore and she would have been writing those probably 130, 140 years before you were there yeah generations and generations yeah so you're growing up with your family and I assume you're not identified I mean that you're not identified as lesbian at home that this emerges when you're at college at home it's the Church of the Brethren atmosphere your parent your father and your mother had taught at Juniata College and your your father was teaching there a Church of the Brethren school you went away to college were they dismayed when you came back or when they finally realized that you were lesbian no they were not I mean it was harder for my father than my mother my mother my father grew up in the Christian church he grew up in a very different theological world than the one that he came to live in with my mother my mother was reared Church of the Brethren and he went to Cincinnati Bible College out of high school because he was training for the ministry and I think there discovered that scholarly work that reading and writing was very very attractive to him and figured out how to go from Cincinnati Bible College to a B.A. granting institution where he got a regular liberal arts B.A. and from there went to Oxford the study for his M.A. so he made an extraordinary transition in his life from rural poverty he grew up very very poor in Ohio rural village poverty the Christian Church tradition which is a very different tradition from the Church of the Brethren one that believes in a much more dogmatic biblical understanding and so on at any rate I don't want to go into all of that history but he had a harder time he was also I think it was harder for my father he was my father my mother was a woman and you know boys and their fathers girls and their mothers but relations are different you can only just consult your own knowledge of the world to see how that is but they were both very very loving parents and supported me absolutely there was never a question of their withdrawing their love and their support and I was very fortunate in that regard my friends had a harder time with it and as I say in the book they all wanted my parents to be their parents my parents would open and generous and loving people and embraced my friends and my and me when I came home from college with the announcement they knew or you know my parents knew before I told them I was living at home actually when I was in my first year of college because I began college at Juney out of where my parents taught where my mother had taught until my brother was born and where my father continued to teach until he retired many years later so I did my first year of college there and fell in love with a woman while I was living at home so you know they they saw what was happening they were grown-ups I even though I felt very grown-up I was not a grown-up I was 17 years old you know they were unusually generous and open people I think Jane and Ken Crosby there's a story you tell from back when you were 10 or 11 that is it tears at the heart to hear it you grew up being physically equal to your brother thinking of yourself kind of as some kind of psychic twin of his so if he throws you're gonna throw and if he's gonna run jump play whatever you're going to do equal and you're doing just fine on that but you also as happens frequently with twins or psychic twins included I suppose most siblings I grew up in a family of 12 kids so I know all about yes you do there was a lot of fighting that went on between you and Jeff you describe the the fight and why don't you relate what that was about and really what I want to know is what was the lesson for you out of that oh why the lesson so hard to know the answer to that question it's in a chapter called violence and the sacred which is drawn from it's a silent quotation of the chapter of the title of one of Rene Girard's books of historical anthropology and what I learned reading Girard is that in his understanding twins are an inherently unsettling figure in any social world because it's unbalanced there's no third term that would adjudicate between the twins when there's conflict so that you can see in the Bible with Esau and Jacob the contest between them and the way in which their father ended up blessing one and not the other we can go back to Genesis and Cain and Abel there's real competition between twins Girard argues that the sacred is a third term which allows for adjudication here so that violence will not be unending because with twins violence can be unending they'll continue competing with each other and against each other and it can be very destructive so God chooses one or the other and that kind of the medic violence in which a violent act the gets a violent act is broken because there's a third term that chooses one and elevates one over the other I chose to go back to that text for my title because Jeff and I did compete all of our young lives we were playmates always and we didn't have the same we had the same knits we had the same balls we had the same croquet set we had the same basketball we had incredible we played always together and we always competed because we were playing sports for a game and that competition could morph into fighting quite easily rough housing could become a genuine fight between us and it happened often enough that I think that it was disturbing to Jane and Ken I can imagine though that it would have been I also believe that I was probably the aggressor more often than not I was younger I was 13 months younger I was the girl that I was larger than my brother other physically larger and I think that I really was aggressive and we fought a lot and one morning when we were fighting my father was you know wakened by it it was a Saturday or a Sunday Saturday I'm almost sure and he came storming out of the bedroom and dragged us into the living room and said fight fight it out fight until you're done and my mother was just distraught this was I think probably the one of the worst scenes that she could imagine and it was there being enacted in in the living room and Jeff and I fought until he was victorious and that was the result that my father needed to have happened I don't remember how I reconciled with my family what I remember is that I ran upstairs to my bedroom locked the door and don't know what it took for me to emerge and come back into a family that had had that degree of violence because my parents didn't raise their voices to each other you know that they never fought in our presence you know sometimes I think that that was a gift and sometimes I think it was not because I think we have to learn to fight to learn to fight productively that fight I think was a destructive fight and my father felt it I believe as a destructive fight because when he was dying the last month of his life he apologized he assembled the family we all forced that around the kitchen table and he apologized for this he remembered it all those years later as obviously so do I so it was very hard but families have conflict real conflict well when you fight you need to be able to fight productively and that's the thing that Janet and I have figured out over time I think it's one of the most valuable lessons of my adult life so the fight that my brother and I had the fight was I don't think a productive one I think was destructive I don't know that it produced further harmony in our household I doubt very much it did then I do know that it's a painful thing to recall that it was painful for my mother and painful for my father that he would assemble us to apologize in his last month of life tells me that he carried it with him for his whole adult life so I think that there are better ways of addressing questions than by fighting into one person is victorious because that simply is going to be unstable that you won't have solved anything I found it all the more peculiar but maybe because of his roots as a general Christian as opposed to Church of the brothering that he would advocate that you fight go fight you know fight to the end whatever yeah well he and my mother had a lot to talk about when they were courting because he came to junia the after he had returned from World War II where he had served there was a call for chaplains to serve in the military and he joined and my mother I don't know whether she would yes I think she would she would call herself a pacifist and my brother registered as a conscientious objector when he had to register for the draft in her family I don't think there were any of the men who served they all did alternative service none of them served in the military this were on me so they have different backgrounds and I think that my father he traveled very far in his life to go from the poverty of his youth to the world that he lived in that he and my mother made together so they were not the same they were not the same nobody's the same as someone else were all different from one another it's a very hard thing to learn how different we are but we're all the same in number of aspects one of my favorite quotes is from Lenny Bruce we're all the same schmuck true enough before we continue on Christina I want to mention that you are listening to Spirit in Action which is a Northern Spirit radio production we're on the web at northernspiritradio.org with over ten and a half years of our programs for free listening and download there's comments please add yours when you come there's links so you want to find Christina Crosby's book Abadi Undone follow the link from northernspiritradio.org you know how to Google as well I'm sure there's also a place to donate that's how this full-time work is supported even more important than that though I'd say remember to support your local community radio station the stations who carried these programs which are invaluable in bringing an alternative view and voice and sound and sound and music to your ears we need these alternative voices and so please start by supporting your local community radio station again Christina Crosby author of Abadi Undone living on after great pain is here with us today I wanted to get to a topic Christina that I mean it pervades the book from several different views in one way it's referred to as discrimination since you are under-plegic now certainly you are very aware of the difference that the ADA the Americans with Disabilities Act made for many people including yourself and a lot of us just as we get old I mean it doesn't have to be a specific illness rather than living that gets us there but being non-gender conforming you're aware of the discrimination that happens I also saw a couple comments in the book about class and how the awareness between you and your caregiver the class difference that that makes there's so many ways in which discrimination is the sin of our age and for good reasons for a number of individuals what can you say about discrimination overall in your particular case well I lead a very abundant life it's important to say that and say it repeatedly because I have the advantage of a secure job I work half-time now I was able to return to my teaching and my scholarship but only half-time Janet has a secure job she's also a teacher at Barnard College and the scholar who has written a number of books so we have good rich lives we have lives in which I am able to pay for the help that I need that's very unusual among people who are living with the kinds of physical challenges that I face many many people did not have work that they could return to many people never are able to find employment if they have a body or a mind that is not the usual body in mind so there is systematic discrimination against people who are different in mind or body and I think that that's where the disability lies that's what's disabling is the discrimination is our narrow standards of measurement or success that exclude people and exclusion is a terrible thing for a human being we are very social creatures and we actually need each other in ways that I think I want my book to bear witness to so yes I think that discrimination is one of the settings ends of our time and that it's important for me to say the ways in which I am very fortunate even though I have suffered a loss of a body and a way of life that I value very much I also have enormous benefits. One of the things that I'm aware of that I mean you talk a fair amount about your suffering the tribulation you went through but you also include the stories of John who was Elizabeth best friend Jeff your brother Jeff and his multiple sclerosis and his erosion of his abilities so you're not setting yourself apart as I'm the only one who suffering your track parallels overlaps with you learn lessons from the people that you interact with. One of the things that I wonder if it's different I'm wondering what your perspective is on this I don't understand the book. I'm a male I've grown up as a male I've been trained as a male in our society and one of the messages that we hear we see the difference with respect to little boys and girls a boy you know ignore the paint shrug it off grow a pair that kind of message women and specifically little girls we cuddle them little boys get their owies kissed but little girls get protected from getting owies I think it's a very athletic person until the time of your bike accident obviously we're pushing the limit somewhere in between there what's your perspective on pain and the female male perspective on it well I think that boys are made to suffer I think that everybody suffers from the kinds of specious differences that are drawn between boys and girls I think that masculinity is a very hard lesson to learn and I think that it would be much better for us all should we be able to not imagine that boys are made one way and girls are made another way and that boys should learn to suffer their physical pain and endure it without whimpering and that girls should be protected from suffering in the first place you can't be protected from suffering none of us can be protected from suffering to imagine that boys should be able to live without compassion for one another is a terrible thing so I wish that we were able to understand the ways in which everybody is hurt by these sorts of long-standing but I think unnecessary distinctions you know there's so much more I want to talk to you about Christina I know you've got deadlines and we have to move on so I want to thank you for so candidly sharing your experience the fruit of your heart and bodied experience that you share in a body undone living on after great pain and I really appreciate both the personal and spiritual and philosophical insights that you bring as part of your book and it's just part of your life I'm thankful to you I'm thankful to Janet as a faithful partner supporting you through this I'm thankful as a community that you're being upheld to share your gifts with the world and I hope you continue to go on and do it for many more years thank you so much for joining me for spirit and action Mark thank you so much for having me on the show it's been a pleasure speaking with you find links to Christina Crosby on the Nordenspiritradio.org website big thanks to Andrew Janssen for production with a song about disabilities written by Larry Penn we had a two-part memorial song of the soul program on Larry last year but his song has spread all over including this version of "I'm a Little Cookie" performed by John McCutchen we'll see you next week for spirit in action I'm a little cookie yes I am I was made by a cookie man I'm my way from the cookie pan a little piece broke off of me a little piece broke off of me a little piece broke off of me a little piece broke off of me a little piece broke off of me I can't taste 'cause it's good or as a regular cookie can I'm a little chocolate but I am I was made by the chocolate bar man and I'm my way use the chocolate stain I got a little bend in me I got a little bend in me I got a little bend in me I got a little bend in me I'm a but I can taste just good or as a regular chocolate bar can (music) now I'm a little cookie roll yes I am I was made by a cookie roll man I'm my way from the tootsie roll man I got a little twist in me you know I got a little twist in me uh-huh I got a little twist in me uh-huh that I can taste just good or as a regular tootsie roll can now I'm a little gumdrop yes I am and I was made by the gumdrop man and I'm my way from the sugar pan I got a little dip I got a little bend in me I got a little bend in me uh-huh but I can taste just good or as a regular gumdrop man (music) (music) oh I'm a little cookie yes I am and I wasn't made by the cookie man I'm my way from the cookie pan a little piece broke off of me now I ain't as round as I might be but I taste good just wait and see and I can look back as white as hot as regular cookie can (music) the theme music for this program is turning of the world performed by Sarah Thompson this spirit in action program is an effort of northern spirit radio you can listen to our programs and find links and information about us and our guests on our website northernspiritradio.org thank you for listening I am your host Mark Helpsmeet and I welcome your comments and stories of those leading lives of spiritual fruit may you find deep roots to support you and grow steadily toward the light this is spirit in action with every voice with every song we will move this world along with every voice with every song we will move this world along and our lives will feel the echo of our healing [MUSIC PLAYING]