Posted on 09/07/2010 12:00:33 PM PDT by MissTed
Trashing the muscular dystrophy telethon is like dissing Christmas. It ticks people off.
Even if the offender is a former Jerry's Kid.
Laura Hershey was born with a form of MD and spent her poster childhood appearing helpless at fundraisers. She became a celebrity in the '70s as the face of the condition in Colorado. She remembers being a prop in the TV studio that was broadcasting local parts of the telethon.
"To whole families driving by to drop their contributions in a giant fishbowl outside the studio; to the camera's blinking red light; to the anchorman who squatted next to me, holding a huge microphone to my face; to everyone, I gave the same cute-and-grateful act because that's what they wanted," she once wrote.
Hershey no longer does cute or grateful. She has lived longer and far more fully than she says the Muscular Dystrophy Association led her to expect.
Now 48, the writer and mother has spent two decades protesting the telethon that she and other disability-rights activists see as an annual insult. They are all for raising money. The trouble, they say, is Lewis' message.
As critics see it, the frenetic comic has perpetuated a myth that living with MD isn't worthwhile. The videos of little Kate being pushed in her wheelchair or of poor Jack being schlepped up and down stairs by his burdened father distort assumptions.
"For most of us, our losses, gains, sorrows and joys are simply part of a rich human life. The telethon works very hard to convince people that our suffering is extraordinary," Hershey has written.
"It might make you feel sad and guilty, so you write a check," adds Julie Reiskin of the Colorado Cross-Disability Coalition. "But if you're looking for someone to hire or date, you're not going to choose a person you think is helpless and can't contribute."
Hershey remembers being approached as a kid by a man who recognized her from TV. He said he hoped they find a cure. She realized then that she almost never even contemplated that possibility, let alone hoped for it.
"I told him that," she says. "I don't think he believed me."
Defenders of the telethon call her a heretic. Even her own mom, an advocate in her own right, winces at her picking on a guy who's 84 and has done so much.
Hershey fights the attitude that people who need help have no right to say how they'd like to be helped. Disability isn't a private problem as portrayed by a telethon that asks nothing from government or the country as a whole. The disabled don't need people to cheer themselves up by donating money. They don't need Charo coochie-cooing for charity. They need programs like Colorado's that pay for aides to help them live independently. Some states have no such programs. Others are slashing them.
Why should those with MD get more help than those with other conditions? And why should anyone have to play the part of Jerry's "kid" to get what's needed?
Hershey was one of the first to protest the telethon in 1991. One year, she and others wheeled into a corporate donor's office and refused to leave. In 2001, they got arrested outside the local broadcast. When Lewis received a humanitarian award at the 2009 Oscars, they marched in L.A.
Protesters decry Lewis' assessment of living with MD as being "half a person." He once said in response, "Pity? (If) you don't want to be pitied because you're a cripple in a wheelchair, stay in ya house!"
There's no organized protest in Colorado this year because activists have been working to fend off severe budget cuts.
Carrie Ann Lucas, a lawyer with an MD-related disease, has programmed her TV to block her four disabled daughters from channel surfing onto the telethon.
"They don't need to hear how horrible and wretched they are and that they won't amount to anything," she says.
Hershey, for her part, planned to tune in briefly. She checks out the telethon each year "just to make sure it's still as bad as I think it is."
So she prefers Government assistance instead. Bet I know who she voted for.
Who does she think she is? Dean Martin?
No good deed goes unpunished.
From what I understand, Jerry Lewis donates enough grease from his hair each year to keep almost 57% of the country’s wheelchairs running smoothly.
Ever look at AIDS research funding?
“Disability pride”.
Is that like the lesbians who conspired to give birth to a deaf daughter?
What a whining idiot.
God bless Jerry for all the money he’s raised for MD over the years.
I’ve given to the MDA telethons in the past. And I will probably do so again.
But any money I do donate is IN SPITE OF Jerry Lewis.
He’s a slimy foul-mouthed Vegas lounge lizard. He disgusts me.
So the way I understand her is that she doesn’t want people to contribute of their own free will but to have the money ripped from them by the government and given to her and other MD patients.
That statement is an oxymoron if I have ever seen one.
That statement is an oxymoron if I have ever seen one.
When I was a kid I hated the telethon because school started the next day (today functionally) so when the Jerry Lewis commercials started that meant fun summer was going away. The last time I bothered to turn it on I found the finely orchestrated sobfest kind of annoying, it’s all so blatantly manipulative.
I need a taxpayer-funded program to hire some servants for me, too.
That's what it sounds like to me - it's too demeaning to admit she's accepting charity, so she's claiming the taxpayers owe it to her somehow.
I didn't think "Jerry's Kids" were of dating or employment age, but maybe times have changed.
Good grief, it's a charity. I never once (even while watching hours of the telethon as a very young boy) thought of them as anything other than being dealt an unfortunate hand, and thought it was nice that people were willing to give millions to help out. Lewis himself can be an ass at times, but so what?
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