House Appropriations public hearing.
As planned, I’m spending the day at the General Assembly. As I write this, I’m perched on a chair in the back of House Room D, where a finance committee hearing on the budget has just begun. A half dozen people have spoken before the committee thus far, all of whom are caretakers for disabled individuals, generally children, and they have pleaded for state funding that will make it possible for their dependents to be cared for.
Such is the nature of family healthcare that the packed room is largely full of women, many of whom have physically or mentally disabled children in tow. Consequently, the speechifying is punctuated by outbursts from those too young or developmentally disabled to know that neither shouting nor moaning are normally tolerated in these chambers.
The testimony is heart-wrenching. One woman, a single mother, choked up repeatedly while attempting to explain her situation. She’s a school bus driver, and her son, of high school age, is severely developmentally disabled. He attends high school, but his inability to regulate his own behavior or understand what constitutes normal behavior requires his mother to come fetch him on a pretty regular basis. Her salary does not permit her to hire a caretaker for him, and the regularity with which she needs to miss work to care for him has left her in a tough spot. She’s at an impasse; she can’t keep her job if she has to keep leaving, but she can’t keep a roof over their head if she is unemployed. She would just like the General Assembly to provide the funding that would make it possible for her son to have some sort of care that would enable her to work.
Several of the speakers are mentally disabled. They have slowly, cautiously told their stories about how they were regular people, sustained a brain injury or developed a degenerative disease, and have since struggled to live a normal life. One person has been completely impossible to understand, but most have gotten their message across well. One girl, a nineteen-year-old, explained that she had an accident several years ago that left her with a brain injury. She couldn’t make it through high school, but she got her GED and is now in community college. She struggles, but has found that she can do well with the help of an aide (presumably taking notes, helping her from class to class, organizing her work, etc.) The trouble is that she can’t afford much money for an aide, and so she’s having a difficult time getting competent help. She asked for just a little bit of money so that she can afford to get better help.
Most of the members of the committee are paying close attention to this occasionally-riviting testimony, some 45 minutes into it, though Del. Watkins Abbitt is more absorbed in his laptop. Most members have, at times, traded a few words with the person next to them, or put on their reading glasses and studied something on their desk. The Richmond Times-Dispatch’s Jeff Schapiro has spent the duration at the front of the room, leaning over the counter and looking rakish.
There’s an odd duality to the event. On the one hand, many of the speakers are pouring their hearts out, confessing to their deepest struggles and pleading for just a little bit of help to avoid becoming completely reliant on public services or, worse, homeless. On the other hand, the passivity of the elected officials has made me feel — rightly or wrongly — that surely this is what they hear ever single day. Surely they cannot help but become numbed to this sort of testimony over time. I’ve only been sitting here for an hour, and I’m already finding that I’m tuning some people out. I wonder how many of these representatives already know how they’re going to vote on regulated budgetary matters, and to whom this testimony is consequently useless. It must be a very difficult thing for many in the audience to come to the General Assembly, given the nature of their disabilities and, indeed, the simple cost of traveling from the far reaches of the state. (In fact, most people are leaving after they speak.)
I’m on the knife’s edge of boredom. When I pay attention, I’m often fascinated. Yet I keep tuning out, perhaps as a defense mechanism. These stories are sad, and I can’t help these people. It’s tremendously frustrating to listen to, and I think it’s easier to dismiss them and their concerns as being none of my own.
I’m one head injury away from being in the same situation as anybody in this room. There but for the grace of God go I.
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