Jon Hetherington from Oregon has been a fan of Beyoncé since her Destiny’s Child years and was looking forward to finally seeing her in concert at her Renaissance World Tour in Seattle. However, on his Instagram a couple weeks ago, he’d expressed concerns after a difficult experience when he’d seen Janelle Monáe. Hetherington has cerebral palsy and uses an electric wheelchair. The accessible transportation service he’d used apparently claimed 9:30 p.m. was just too late to take him home and he was almost stranded for the night.
“I’m tired of not having the access most people in my life do,” Hetherington posted on his liberatedbygaga account. “I’m tired of having to fit ableist standards because society wasn’t built to include people like me.”
“Beyoncé will be different,” a fellow fan responded. “You have my number. I'll do everything I can to help you.”
Hetherington kept his plans to see Queen B, but unfortunately, on the day of the show last week, when he attempted to board an Alaska Airlines flight from Eugene, Oregon, to Seattle, he was told that the aircraft couldn’t accommodate his electric chair.
There are no individual villains here but rather an inconsiderate system. Hetherington said the gate staff attempted to get his chair on board but the wheelchair was four inches too tall to fit into the narrow aircraft.
According to The New York Times, “the crew tried to find Hetherington, 34, another flight on a plane that could accommodate his wheelchair; an Airbus could do it, he was told, but the only one available would get him there 12 hours too late.” This wasn’t a Ms. Lauryn Hill concert, where he’d just have to wait another four hours before she finally got on stage. Beyoncé is usually on time.
The flight time from Eugene to Seattle is about an hour. Before anyone starts suggesting he should’ve taken Amtrak, remember this ain’t Europe. Travel time on the train is at best six hours and that’s just the 5:30 a.m. butt crack of dawn train. There’s an 8:30 a.m. with a connecting donkey bus that is more than seven hours. That’s provided the train isn’t significantly delayed and Amtrak makes Ms. Lauryn Hill seem prompt. The other departures would never get Hetherington there in time unless he traveled a day earlier, incurring more travel costs.
My son has cerebral palsy, but he can fly without mobility aids. And he enjoys scooting to his seat using the arm rests — so long as an aggressive passenger doesn’t knock him down trying to get past him, which has almost happened more than once. We’ve never faced a situation where he couldn’t fly because the airline was unable to accommodate him, but we know that’s a luxury many disabled people don’t enjoy.
“This is a systemic issue, this is ableism, this is what I’ve dealt with my whole life,” Hetherington told the Times. “I was demoralized by the whole thing.”
But when a distraught Hetherington shared the sad news on Instagram, the famed BeyHive swarmed into action.
Fans tagged Beyoncé and her management company, Parkwood Entertainment, in the video’s comments section. Somewhat amazingly, her representatives saw this and reached out to Hetherington, providing him a ticket to Thursday’s show in Arlington, Texas. The Times reports that “in addition to the concert, they also arranged for his transportation, including the flight. A representative for Beyoncé did not immediately return a request for comment.”
This time, Hetherington made the show in style.
“We partied, we sang, we danced… HARD,” he posted on Instagram. “BeyHive, you made this happen. You pushed and tagged like the internet has never seen. Tonight for the first time ever, I had a seat on the floor of a concert.”
Hetherington even got to meet Beyoncé herself but he won’t reveal her exchange. (Meanwhile, I’ll tell everyone who buys me a drink about meeting Liza Minnelli.) He also met the Queen B Mother, Tina Knowles, who looks amazing. What’s going on in that family?
“There is much that I will say in the coming days about what tonight means to me,” he wrote. “There are some things I’ll keep for myself. Truly an honor to meet you, @mstinaknowles! Thank you for all that you’ve done and given the world. We’re so grateful.”
When you live with a disability, it can seem as if the world was designed as though you don’t exist or perhaps even shouldn’t. You can never count on accessibility and there’s always the chance that, no matter how much you prepare, you’ll be denied a seemingly once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.
The BeyHive and the Queen herself showed how the world can be less cruel when we put our minds to it. We could use a lot more of this, but every single act helps.
[The Daily Beast / The New York Times]
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The failure, 33 years after the Americans with Disabilities Act was signed into law, to fix these things is yet another example of how many Americans are thoughtless blockheads. Quote from the History Channel: "Despite pressure from some church groups, who felt the ADA unfairly burdened them, the bill passed the House by unanimous voice vote and the Senate 76-6, paving the way for its signing on July 26 by President Bush, who said, “Let the shameful wall of exclusion finally come tumbling down.”
FUCK CHURCH GROUPS!
Ta, Stephen; it's usually Doktor Zoom who posts the Nice Times. This one brought tears of joy to my eyes. Why?
Let's begin at the beginning. My brother Mark, my parents' eldest and the only boy in the family who lived at all (another brother miscarried, and one was a stillbirth who would have been my brother Neil) was birth-injured by a nurse at Crown Heights Hospital (Beth El, where the rest of us were born, was quarantined at the time), the Butcher Shop of Brooklyn, and lived his ten and a half years with Cerebral Palsy. Dad went broke paying for medical and surgical bills; he had at least one stroke and was institutionalized around the time of my birth. I never got to know him.
Dad became a double amputee (over the knee) as (1) a complication from diabetes, and (2) a surgeon at St. Francis Hospital who was on a drunk after his wife died. He was able to walk with wooden legs, and was the only driver in the family, but spent most of the rest of his short life in a wheelchair. He did not live to see the ADA in any form.
When the family went on vacations, I carried the tape measure to see if motel room doors were wide enough for the wheelchair. I also hauled him in his wheelchair up the zillions of steps at the Trenton War Memorial so he could accompany me to a ballet performance. This is all very personal for me.
That all these years after the ADA passed, there is still no-to-minimal accommodation for the disabled makes my blood boil. If mobility-impaired people cannot use public transit, it's not really public. The long subway tunnel connecting the 6th Avenue line to the 7th Avenue line at 14th Street is closed while being remodeled to accommodate the disabled, and elevators are going in. Good on the MTA for its efforts, but this is not being replicated nationwide and it's disgraceful. Rant over.