If disabled people are being considered as equals, think what this means in their search for jobs. They come with their heads held high. And they are getting hired.

I wonder about the basic causes of this psychological turnaround in America. Could it be a result of the entire civil rights movement, spreading to handicapped people as well as to other minorities? Could it be advances in rehabilitation, which have brought people out of back bedrooms and into mainstreams of society? Could it be the entire movement to make our towns and cities accessible?

Whatever, disabled people are here to stay. Their voices are clear.
We are learning to listen to them.

RESULTS: NOT ONLY JOBS, BUT MELTING INTO MAINSTREAMS

Much has been going on these past ten years in encouraging disabled people to enter the labor force and in encouraging employers to give them the chance to work.

How well has it all worked out? What are the numbers?

These are questions almost impossible to answer. One of the reasons is the very success we are enjoying.

Let me give you a thumbnail picture of how statistics are gathered about handicapped people. A carefully chosen sampling is selected. People are asked: "Do you have any condition which interferes with some major aspect of your daily life, such as working or keeping house or going to school?"

For many disabled people, the answer would be a clear "yes." These

would be totally blind people, totally deaf people, people in wheelchairs, amputees, some others.

These are.

But for many more disabled people, the answer is not so clear. people with hidden disabilities such as epilepsy under control; or people with partial sight or partial hearing; or people with less severe disabilities. Do they count themselves as disabled or don't they?

Studies show that if they are employed, they are not likely to count themselves as disabled. Their disabilities do not loom very large in

their minds. But if they are not employed, they are likely to count themselves as disabled. For unemployed people, disability does loom

large.

So when many disabled people go to work, they stop considering themselves handicapped; they no longer are counted as disabled. The more success we have in placing handicapped people, the less the numbers show it.

A dilemma.

The only way out is to recognize that our efforts are meeting with success. We, and this entire country, have to accept that fact on the face of it.

IN SUM

Laws that prohibit discrimination.

A new emphasis on proper preparation

for employment. An acceptance of the fact that accommodations do have to be made for many disabled workers. New voices being heard in our country, the voices of disabled people themselves.

All these add up to a decade of change, a decade that marks a watershed between what used to be and what will be.

What will be is not all honey and light. Problems have not ceased.

But what will be is exciting. I will take it any day over what used to be.

Thank you for your attention.

Mr. YATRON. Thank you very much, Mr. Posner, for being here today and substituting for Mr. Russell. Tell him that I can certainly sympathize with his situation and wish him a speedy recovery. I just got over pneumonia myself. So tell him that we will look forward to seeing him some other time. We are happy to have you here.

Our final witness today is Louise McKnew, director of the National Spinal Cord Injury Association. She has worked closely with this committee in her former capacity as staff director of the Advisory Commission on Public Diplomacy. Ms. McKnew, Mike Finley, the subcommittee staff director, who has known you longer than you both may care to remember, assures me that we have saved the best for last.

Ms. McKNEW. Oh my goodness.

Mr. YATRON. Ms. McKnew, we say welcome to the subcommittee. STATEMENT OF LOUISE MCKNEW, DIRECTOR, NATIONAL SPINAL CORD INJURY ASSOCIATION

Ms. McKNEW. Thank you very much. It is indeed an honor to be back here. It is a different incarnation, however, under which I come to you this time.

I will try to be very brief, and if I can put my full statement in the record I would appreciate it.

Mr. YATRON. Without objection.

Ms. McKNEW. I support the concept of the U.N. Decade and your initiative. I think it is an extraordinary opportunity for all of us. I would like to offer two suggestions, if I may. One addresses the general concept and verbiage and another addresses a very specific action.

I do have a problem with the term "disabled person." In my opinion there is no such entity. It is a unifying term, to be sure, but it is also an arbitrarily segregating, isolating one. Further, it is a misleading term, one that pits comparative strengths against a norm that does not exist.

There are disabling conditions, there are persons who live with inhibiting or limiting situations, there are those whose previous or potential capabilities have been reduced. But everyone is able, in some form, in some thing, in some instance.

I speak from experience. My own son sustained a spinal cord injury in an accident 5 years ago. He is now a quadriplegic. Life now poses for him an enormous challenge, one filled with sustained trauma, life-threatening consequences, and an unrelenting response of negativeness from his environment.

But he is very able. He drives his own van, he chooses his own friends, he forms his own opinions, and he laughs at his own jokes. He is a bright, ambitious, articulate and caring young man, and he is now finishing his junior year at Yale, the first student ever to go to that institution in a wheelchair. He is very able. So too are hundreds of thousands of other people to whom we have attached this prejudicial adjective that simply does not fit.

The language we use serves both to cause and mirror our attitudes. If we want to change the environment physically and psychologially, we should first change our minds. Barriers begin in the

mind long before they are built on the ground. This decade offers us a wonderful chance to alter attitudes, changing the notion that 35 million Americans are disabled. "Disabled" refers not to people, but to our perceptions and to the places, the plans, and the projects we design to serve us all.

So much for rhetoric. My other suggestion seeks results, specific identifiable and doable results.

The subject, not surprisingly, is spinal cord injuries, which paralyze upwards of 20,000 Americans each year, as many as used to be paralyzed by polio. Every 24 hours another 60 Americans are forced into wheelchairs. One in every 400 Americans now lives with paralysis from a spinal cord injury. That is 500,000 of us.

It is not a disease, it is not a defect. You cannot catch one, you cannot inherit one, you cannot pass one on to your children. It just happens, indiscriminate, accidentally, and suddenly.

We are talking about a national threat of epidemic proportions. Financially, psychologically, and medically, the consequences are catastrophic. Lifetime costs to sustain one quadriplegic can total $5 million. Estimates for the total cost to the Nation for all spinal cord injuries range upwards of $6 billion.

That is only half the story. The other half promises that there is nothing hopeless, forever, or permanent about spinal cord injury. Researchers predict cure. We are on the threshold of an extraordinary phenomenon. The paralyzing process which follows an injury will be stopped, and existing paralysis will be reversed. The impossible is now a promised inevitability.

I would like to give you just some examples of what is going on in the laboratory today:

Transplants of nerve tissues are growing across injured sections of the spinal cord;

Bridges of nerve fibers are effectively bypassing the injured portion of the cord;

Inserted embryonic nerve cells have divided and grown down the length of the adult cord;

Pharmacological substances are now interrupting the paralyzing process immediately postinjury;

Computerized stimulation techniques are returning atrophied muscles, weakened bones and diminished cardiovascular capabilities back to full strength; and biofeedback techniques and technological refinements are restoring functional control to previously useless muscles.

Within this decade we can bring these discoveries out of the laboratory and deliver them to the people for whom they were intended. Organ transplants from body to body are now routine, and the artificial heart is fact. We have reduced a room-size computer to one no bigger than a pearl, and we can effectively threaten the viability of our planet with the push of a button.

Remember the thrill when we put a man on the Moon? We can experience exactly that same thrill when we put him back on his feet. What an incredibly exciting project, to cure one of the most destructive, devastating and disabling of human conditions. We have now in front of us not just the challenge, but the chance.

The United Nations declared Decade offers international support, sustained over time, with the explicit goal of "conquering major disabling conditions." Your congressional commitment of interest has been made, offering a national resolution to implement this goal. The National Organization on Disability has offered proven leadership in developing community partnerships and programs of action.

We have all the ingredients. We have the resources, the reasons and the resolve. Now all we need is to go after the result. Within this decade we can put paralysis in the past and prove that the age-old predictions of hopeless, forever, and incurable are merely myths. We have done it before and we can do it again.

For the National Spinal Cord Injury Association and for myself, thank you.

Mr. YATRON. Thank you very much, Ms. McKnew.

Mr. Winn, did you have any questions you would like to ask?

Mr. WINN. I would like to ask Mr. Broshar-first I want to comment that the panel had some unusual but very constructive comments.

But I would like to ask Mr. Broshar, as a former builder-developer, I am not aware of any coordination among the various groups, between the architects, the National Association of Homebuilders, the AGC, and the various groups involved, except through some mutual publications.

Are you aware of any coordinating group as such?

Mr. BROSHAR. Your question, Mr. Congressman, I think deals with

Mr. WINN. Design is the specific issue.

Mr. BROSHAR. We have liaisons and we do have staff coordination of our programs. I think there is also a good level of sharing of information and exchange. We do not have a concerted program in dealing with the accessibility process as such.

Mr. WINN. You also mentioned the landscape architects, but AIA would probably deal with more facets of the construction industry than any one other organization that I can think. Might it be possible that your organization can act as the coordinator, sort of selfappointed?

I am well aware that there are individual builders and individual home builders and commercial builders that are not aware of any organizations. Most of those are smaller contractors who have to live with the specifications and the regulations of the cities and the counties, whatever their jurisdiction might be.

Would that be plausible in any way?

Mr. BROSHAR. I think it is plausible. We have looked on the National Center for a barrier-free environment as really being that organization. We are one of the co-founders of the organization. They have gone through some difficulty with their funding in the past few years, and our organizations have increased their funding. As I mentioned in our testimony, they have had to seek additional corporate funding, and that has been a little difficult in this past year. We are confident that they are going to weather it, and we are committed to helping them come through this difficult period. I really feel that is their role and we feel we want to support them in that regard.