Senator Tom Harkin: Reflects on Significance of 35th Anniversary of Signing of the ADA and What Commitment Remains to Advance the Lives of Americans with Disabilities

At Highmark Health, we believe what makes us unique makes us better. Our differences broaden our perspectives and foster a variety of skills to complement each other, creating a stronger and more vibrant workforce. It's this belief that earned us recognition as the Best Place to Work for the 10th year for individuals with disabilities in a survey by the American Association of People with Disabilities and Disability:IN. We'll continue to celebrate and benefit from the inclusion of all people. To find out more, visit highmarkhealth.org. Welcome to Disability Matters with your host Joyce Bender. All comments, views, and opinions expressed on the show are solely those of the host, guest, and callers. Now the host of Disability Matters, here's Joyce Bender.

Hey everyone, welcome to the show. I am all excited because this is Disability Pride Month, the 35th anniversary of the signing of the Americans with Disabilities Act. And all of you in the United States, such great listeners. As you know, this is like my 22nd year, and a couple months ago had my 1,000th episode. Unbelievable. You know why that is? Because of the great listeners, and that includes those around the world, from China to Australia. We have over 80 countries now listening to this show, and you all mean so much to me. As I always say, a seizure in the United States is like a seizure in anywhere in the world. So that's why when we have disabilities, we are all brothers and sisters. And you are going to be so thrilled when you see who my guest is today, because it is such an honor for me to have Senator Tom Harkin, lawyer, author, politician, more importantly, disability rights advocate. He is a true champion of disability rights, and it is an honor to have him with me. Senator Harkin, can you believe this is the 35th anniversary of the signing of the ADA?

It seems like it was yesterday, Joyce Bender. I just said, you know, one of the nice things about having God granted me this long life is that after 35 years, I can actually see what the legislation did and how it has improved lives, changed society, how it has sort of morphed into other countries, how we now have the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, so it's Con Conven— gone global. So again, it's disheartening to see— it's heartening to see the positive changes. What's disheartening, Joyce, is that in some areas such as employment, as you so well known because you've led in this employment effort for so long, it's— we still don't have equal employment opportunities for people with disabilities, both in America and globally. To me, that's the most disappointing thing that's happened in the last 35 years.

I must admit, you know, this is the 30th anniversary of my company. If you had told me 30 years ago, when I first got started, people were saying, "Well, you know, what will you do?" 15 years from now, because we all thought by then I wouldn't be needed that much. You know what I mean?

Yeah, yeah.

Because I used to say to people, oh, I'll be in India, or I'll be in, you know, Africa or somewhere. I never would have believed that here I am, and over 70% of people with disabilities are still not counted in the workforce. It is something I will never understand. But like you, Senator, I will never stop fighting the fight till I can't fight anymore. But a little bit of history for our listeners. You know what I always wondered, and I'm not sure about, is how did this idea first come to be? You know, the Americans with Disabilities Act. How did that all start?

Wow, Joyce, it goes back a long way. I think it goes back to the late 1960s, early '70s, after the Civil Rights Act of 1964 passed that banned discrimination on the basis of race, sex, color, national origin, religion. People with disabilities said, "What about us? We weren't included." And there began movements, things to happen. Well, at first there was the rehab— what we call the Rehab Act, the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, which banned discrimination in federal employment for people with disabilities. After that, we had the Education of All Handicapped Children's Act, which said that schools, uh, could not discriminate, uh, on, on the basis of disability. Uh, and let's see, what did we have after that? Uh, well, uh, oh, then we, uh, uh, we had the, um, uh, that— well, then that sort of drifted into the '80s. Finally, the disability community said, "Look, we need a comprehensive civil rights bill, just like the 1964 Civil Rights Bill, to cover people with disabilities." Comprehensive. And so that, that started going through the, um, through the 1980s, and then I was in the House, and I left and went to the Senate. The leader in the Senate at that time was Lowell Weicker from Connecticut, and I was on his committee. He was a Republican, I was a Democrat, and he was the first person to introduce the Americans with Disabilities Act. Well, then he got defeated, and our champion in the House, Tony Coelho, who had been the sponsor in the House side, left the House. And so that sort of left it up to me. I had been Lowell Weicker's chief co-sponsor of the bill. Well, now I'm in the majority and he's not there. So I picked up the bill then. And then in the House, people like Steny Hoyer and someone who has been overlooked so much, but who did so much for this bill was Major Owens of Congressman Major Owens from New York. They picked it up on the House side and ran with it on the House side. And over a period of a couple of years, we got it through. But that's sort of the long background of it. It didn't happen overnight, but it happened only because the disability community for over well, almost 20 years, never gave up the fight for a comprehensive civil rights bill that would include them just as well as it includes people of race, religion, national origin, sex, that type of thing. But the really, the, I would say the The gratitude, the kudos go to the larger disability community, like Justin Dart and Judy Heumann and so many people, and you too. I mean, my gosh, you were in the forefront of this too, Joyce Bender, back in those days. So that's, that's how it came to be. It was a great battle. It was a wonderful struggle and fight. Of course, struggles and fights are always good when you win, and we won.

That was great. Tell me, the other day I had Doro Bush on, and she— Doro, Doro Bush, President Bush's daughter. Oh yes, she was, and she was telling me how thrilled her father was, you know, when this was signed. But I wanted to know, what was that day like? Like, what was it like? I was not there.

Oh, I'm sorry, it was magnificent. And I'm sorry, I was talking about the long struggle and I talked about people in the House and the Senate, but I'm remiss if I don't mention that we had the backing of the President of the United States. Yeah, President George H.W. Bush started supporting this in the beginning, and he never wavered. He never did, and he appointed Boyden Gray, who is now deceased also, to help carry it through with Republicans in the House and Senate. He did a great job on that. President Bush was also very key in getting this passed. On that day, July 26th, it was a beautiful sunny day. It wasn't too hot and the sky was blue and a huge crowd. At that time, and I don't know if it's still true, at that time it was the largest gathering on the White House lawn for a bill signing ever.

I think that may still be true.

That may be, I don't know, but I know at the time it was and it may still be true. And, of course, the whole disability community, from covering all disabilities, a lot of us who had worked so hard for so long were there. Justin Dart, of course, rightfully so, up on the podium with President Bush. I mean, the joy was palpable. I mean, it was just Everybody was smiles. Everybody was happy. President Bush said the right things. He said, "Let these shameful walls of discrimination come tumbling down." Big cheer went up. It was just— people were hugging each other and crying. It was a day not to ever be forgotten.

What a great thing. I'm sure people were Jubilant, I'm sure they were. And you mentioned Justin and Yoshiko. Yoshiko, I always give her a shout out on the show. She still carries that spirit, you know, she still carries that spirit. But you have to say, all those people really put their heart and soul into working on this for a long time. And that's what it takes, doesn't it?

Yeah, it does. For something that comprehensive and that big, it takes a long time. And quite frankly, Joyce, it takes compromises. So we didn't get everything we wanted, but we got most— we got the majority of what we really wanted to get through. But it takes a lot of work.

Aren't we lucky it was back then? Because it would not get passed today.

It would not get passed today. I'm sorry to say that. It just wouldn't. It would get all bolliged up in politics. I mean, at that time we had people in both parties very strongly supportive of this. As I said, it was a Republican that was the first sponsor of this bill. A little like her. And so, and then the president, President Bush. Now, we had some outliers, of course. The National Federation of Independent Businesses never supported it and really geared up to fight it. But then again, we got the Chamber, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce on board. That outweighed the National Federation of Independent Businesses. We still had people that didn't, and some organizations didn't want to see it passed, quite frankly.

You all had the firepower. You had the firepower and you got it through. Senator Harkin, you personally, You are such a great disability advocate, but your personal story with your brother and nephew, would you mind sharing that?

Yeah, well, Joyce, you know, well, I'll say it again for your listeners again. I grew up with a brother, an older brother who was deaf, and I watched how he had been discriminated against in education, and job opportunities after he got out of school, and just simple things that people would try to ignore him. I remember once being at a grocery store with my brother Frank, and he was looking for something. I forget what it was. And so someone came down the aisle, uh, someone worked in the store, and, uh, he tried to communicate with this person, and this person was saying to me, "What does he want?" And I said, "Well, ask him, don't ask me." You know, it was like because they found out he was deaf, like they didn't even want to deal with him anymore. When he tried to get a driver's license when he first started to drive, Boy, that was almost insurmountable, but he did that. I mean, my brother was unique. He was always fighting for independence. He wanted to be independent, and through his life he achieved that. But I just thought, you know, this is just wrong to be discriminated against like that. And then, as you know, Joyce Bender, right? So I was still in the House of Representatives.. And I remember I got this terrible fateful call from my sister, and her boy, my nephew Kelly, had been sucked down a jet engine on an aircraft carrier and broke his neck and became quadriplegic. And Kelly is still alive today. I think, gosh, I don't know how old Kelly is. He's in his— he's almost 60 now, I guess, 60-something. But Then I saw how— I went out to their home. They lived in Colorado, and I visited him in the hospital when he was getting fixed up, and then back to his house in Loveland, Colorado. And his father had to widen doors, put in a ramp, change the bathroom, all kinds of things just for Kelly. And then we wanted to go out to eat one night. We were going to go to a Mexican restaurant and have Mexican food. He couldn't even get across the street because the curbs were there, and then we couldn't even get in the restaurant. I thought, wow. So then I had been focused on deafness and that communication disorders, and then I all of a sudden I thought, what about mobility? No buses, he can't get on a bus, can't get on a train. This is 1978. And he can't even get in a restaurant, can't even go with his parents to have a meal out. Wow, boy, that really hit me hard. Then I began to really think that, that this, that we needed something very broad, something to attack this. There's one other person, Joyce, that played a role in my thinking. So after all this, about early 1980s, I became acquainted with a young man, uh, who had Down syndrome, and he was in high school. His parents fought very hard to get him in a high school, and I went to watch him. He acted in the school play. He was the manager of the football team and took care of the uniforms and stuff, even though he didn't play football. And then I got to seeing how, because of an intellectual disability, he was discriminated against. Wow. So I went from communication disorders with my brother to mobility disorders, now intellectual disorders. I thought, wow, we really do need a broad civil rights bill. That's what propelled me on to that.

Wow, what a great story. From one to the other. Wow. Yeah. Well, that definitely had— I remember one thing, your brother never missed work, right?

I'm glad you mentioned that. I was always proud of him. He finally got a job. When he was in school, they said he could be 3 things. He could be a baker, a printer's assistant, baker's printer's assistant, or what was the other thing? Well, I forget. But anyway, so he didn't want to be any of those three things, so they said, okay, you're going to be a baker. So they taught him to be a baker. So he became a baker, and he worked at a bake shop. He didn't like it, but then a gentleman came in and conversation and hired him to work at his company. So Frank went to work for this company running a very specialized machine, and they made jet engine nozzles for jet engines. And Frank became— my brother became very proficient at it. I came home from the Navy once for Christmas. My brother Frank never got married, so I was home for Christmas one time. On leave, and Mr. Delavan, the owner of this company, always had a Christmas party for his workers and their families. Well, Frank asked me to go with him. I said, "Sure." So I went with him to the Christmas party, and Mr. Delavan got up, "Thanks everybody for a great year," and they had all this great food and everything. They called for Frank Harkin to come up to the stage. Well, this is quite interesting. So I said to Frank, he wants you up there. He didn't know what was going on. So he goes up there. Mr. Delavan told this story. He said, you know, I hired Mr. Harkin here, Frank Harkin here, 20 years ago, 20 years ago. And And it turned out he was one of the best workers I ever hired. And in 20 years, he was never late for work once and never missed one day of work in 20 years.

Wow.

And these are in Iowa winters when he had to put chains on his tires to get to work and things like that. And Mr. Delavan gave him a really nice gold watch for his 20 years. But just the idea that that somehow people with disabilities can't do the job or something. I mean, sometimes people with disabilities, as you know, Joyce, you know this probably better than I do, people with disabilities are oftentimes the best workers you'll ever hire.

Yes. Oh yeah. Your example, I know many people like that that have— I had employees this one person in a wheelchair. I had to keep calling him saying, hey, you need to go on vacation. You haven't taken a vacation. You know what he said to me? Work is my vacation.

Oh my, my, that is— yes, I, you know, and you and I can understand that, can't we?

Yep. Yes, we can. Yeah, work is my vacation. Um, and also something very special about you is the testimony that you gave, which I saw at the National History Museum, because you didn't just speak it when you gave that testimony. You did something that no one else had ever done. Do you want to tell our listeners what you did?

Well, Joyce, I, I, since I was the chief sponsor of the legislation I was on the floor when it passed, and so I gave the final speech on the Americans with Disabilities Act, and I gave it in sign language, American Sign Language. And so here I am standing there, and I remember Senator Kerrey from Nebraska was sitting in the chair. And you know, in the Senate, there's a court reporter that takes down on a little machine everything that's said. When I started speaking in sign language, I could see out of the corner of my eye the court reporter looked up to the chair, the person sitting in the chair, thinking he's going to call me to order. Bob Kerrey didn't know what to do either. He just let me go ahead. I gave my speech, the first and only speech ever given in sign language in the United States Senate. And I said, I'm doing this for my brother who's watching this, and I want him to understand it just as well as anybody else.

Wow. Oh, what a great example that was.

It was a real moment of pride for me to be able to do that and dedicate it to my brother Frank.

Yeah. Well, I'll bet you surprised a lot of people that day.

Oh, yeah. Nobody, they never expected it. Bobby Silverstein, who was sitting next to me, he knew it. I told him I was going to do it. I said, well, I'll have to see what happens. I don't know whether they're going to stop me or what are they going to do. Bob Curry, he was looking at me, I see him out of my eye, and I was watching him, and he was looking at the court reporter and sort of shrugged his shoulders, and he just sort of sat there. But then after I finished speaking in sign language, then I gave it in verbal, verbal English after that too, of course.

Oh, that was awesome. That— I wish I would have been there. That was awesome. Well, Senator Harkin, I have had people with disabilities calling me saying, okay, what do we need to do to fight back and get employment back on the mainstream, you know, what do we need to do? And you mentioned it took years, you know, fighting to get the ADA, but I think it's important that people with disabilities still don't give up and still have the fire and the fortitude because the day we do nothing, is the day it's all over. Do you agree with that?

Absolutely. We've just got to keep the fight up. We learned a long time ago, didn't we, Joyce, that if people with disabilities sit in the back seat, that's where they'll stay. Yeah. They'll just keep, keep, keep people with disabilities in the back seat. Yeah. No, people with disabilities should be in the front seat. And And it's just a constant struggle. But think of it this way, I guess, in a way to kind of soothe us a little bit, the, the discrimination against people with disabilities is as old as history. It's been around for thousands of years, uh, both in blatant discrimination but also sort of in subtle ways also. I mean, most of the major religions of the world treated people with disabilities as objects of pity, that— or some actually thought of people with disabilities, as Tony Coelho said many times, that people with certain kinds of disabilities were, quote, possessed by the devil. I mean, that's factual.

Yeah, no, that is.

Yes, we don't think that way now, but in the old days, yes. I mean, a lot of people that had seizures and stuff, people would say, oh, they're possessed by the devil. Well, uh, so we have this long thousands of years of history of discrimination And sort of, as I said, and even some of the major religions would say, well, we have to take care of you. We pity you. You have a disability. We'll put you away somewhere, and it'll be part of our generosity or compassion to take care of you. Well, And that sort of permeated all of society for so long. But what people with disabilities wanted, and what has been said so many times, is that the biggest detriment or holdback to people with disabilities was not their disability, but it was the structures that society put in place that prevented them from having a full and meaningful life and employment and education and mobility. It was the structural system of society, both in terms of physical structures but also in terms of, what would I say, intellectual structures, the view that people had, the sort of prejudices that people had for all those years. And we still have those, sad to say. We still have a lot of that lingering. So You think about this long march of history, and then you think about the last 30, 35 years. Well, you know, we did all right in breaking that long march of history. We've got a long ways to go, as you and I both know, but I think, I think we changed it for the better. There's always going to be some slide backs, There's always going to be people that don't think people with disabilities ought to be, shall I say this, so pushy. You know, God bless them, we should push even more. But I think that, I think we turned a corner, and now we just have to make sure that we continue. And there's always going to be slidebacks. Now, I don't mean to get political here, But when the present administration in Washington decided to go after diversity, equity, and inclusion, I said, whoa, wait a minute. First of all, I look at America. Aren't we a diverse society? Of course, we're very diverse. We're tall, we're short, we're thin, we're fat, we're white, we're Black, we're yellow, we're brown, we're everything. Different religions. We're a very diverse society. Equity— don't we believe in fairness? Of course, we've always believed that the law should treat people fairly and equitably. And inclusion— haven't we always wanted people to be inclusive? We don't want to exclude someone because of their color. We don't want to exclude someone because of their religion. We don't want to exclude someone because of their sex. We don't want to exclude someone because of disability. Yet when you tear down the sort of goals of making our workplaces and our schools more like America, diverse, equitable, and inclusive. That includes people with disabilities. Now Joyce, you know this better than I do. The people that have suffered the most from this doing away with disability, DEI, in our workplaces, in our schools, and other, under other areas, the people that hurt the most are people with disabilities. They're the first ones. That are excluded. Oh, we don't have to, we don't have to include them anymore. Well, now there are court cases that are ongoing, but a lot of times those take a long time to get through the courts. But, but I'm telling you, this, this doing away with the march towards inclusion especially was a gut punch to people with disabilities in America. And it's set us back. It's now, it's almost given companies and others the green light to say to someone with a disability, "We don't have to include you. We can put up a gate. We don't have to include you. We don't have to do anything to meet any goals of disability employment. I just, I'm telling you, I'm just so upset by this, and it just shows that we can't give up. We got to keep pushing and be pushy, and people with disabilities have got to continue to demand their legal rights under the ADA to be fully included in all aspects of society. That's what, that's what it was about, to be fully included in all aspects of society, not just employment, not just transportation, education, social environments, inclusion in any kinds of housing, any kinds of environmental aspects, anything. We have to think about how they're structured so that people with disabilities are not excluded but included.

Yes, because it's bad. And I, I will say that we don't want to go from being pitied to not even seen.

Yeah, yeah.

You know what I mean? We don't want to go from being discriminated to, I don't even see you, what you said, stay in the back of the bus, you know, what you said earlier. And what, see, we need Tom Harkins. That's the whole thing. We need people here leading.

I'm sorry, Joyce, I didn't—

I said we need people like you back here.

Well, yes, we need some more leadership. And we need, we need more Justin Darts out there and Judy Humans and others and Ed Roberts and Joyce Benders that will really take the leadership and really start demanding inclusion and equity in all aspects of our society. I just I just am very fearful of the steps we're taking backward now on this. It's almost— again, I want to be careful about how I say this, but because of some of the things the president, the present president, has said and his actions, it almost gives a green light to people to discriminate, that it's okay. You don't have to, you don't have to include people with disabilities. You don't have to put up with going out to a restaurant and having someone with a wheelchair sitting next to you at another table, or someone with maybe an interpreter interpreting right next to you. You don't have to put up with that. Well, quite frankly, yes, you do have to put up— we think you do have to put up with it for the benefit of all of society, that you have to make sure that, that people with disabilities are fully included in all aspects. Yeah, I must say this, Joyce Bender, people often ask me, um, what should have been included that we didn't include in the ADA? What would we miss? I think a couple things. One, we should have put some kind of goals and measuring sticks in there for employment. We didn't get that. Secondly, we should have included housing. We included buildings. For example, every building over 2 stories built in the United States, uh, within— after, after ADA passed, has to be accessible. It has to have accessible doors. It has to have accessible ramps. It has to have accessible elevators or escalators or other means, accessible bathrooms, all that. So buildings, fine. We're still bidding house— we're building houses all over America that a person with a mobility disability can't even get into, can't even use. And yet we know that the cost of building a house, whether it's single-family or multi-family or multi-unit condos, To make them accessible from the very beginning doesn't cost hardly anything more. It's just the design of it. And now what do we find? We find that a lot of elderly people now want to age at home. They want to stay in their own houses, but the houses are old, and they need now somebody to come in and make a bathroom or widen the doors or do things so they can get around. There's a whole new industry in America just to fix up houses for elderly people so they can age at home, stay at home. Well, that costs a lot of money. Well, why don't we do that in the very beginning? Why not design houses that are accessible? That's the one thing we missed. We still don't have it, and it's the one thing that bedevils me because we're still building houses that I always call it, we're building houses not so much accessible, but not even visitable. I don't know if you ever, I've talked about visitability in the past. People say, "Well, I don't have a disability. Why should I have all this in this house?" I said, "Well, you know, maybe your children going to school, maybe they'll have a friend with a disability, or maybe you'll become friendly with someone who has a disability in your workplace or in your church or in your social club. Maybe you'd like to have them over for dinner, but they can't even come visit you." You can't even have friends with disabilities come visit you if they can't even get in your house. So it's the idea of not just disability but visitability. I've had so many people tell me that, yeah, I have friends with disabilities and we have to go out someplace because I can't get them in my house. Well, we should have put that in the ADA and we didn't. Well, we tried. But the realtors and home builders, boy, they didn't like that. That was one of the compromises we had to make. We couldn't get it in.

You know what? And I agree with you on those things, Senator Harkin. I agree with you. But thank God we have the ADA. Thank God we have that. Yeah, you know, or, or we wouldn't be having curb cuts. You know, we wouldn't be able to get on buses. I mean, there were so many things we wouldn't be able to do. So what we have to do now is recoup, regroup. We have to regroup. As I tell everyone, I say, don't sit back. We have to move forward and we all have to communicate, you know, so that we can help each other figure out what to do.

Exactly. You're right on, Joyce. Right on. And we can't be separated out. No, we got to be together. All disabilities. As you know, one of the big hurdles that we had in getting the ADA was getting all the disability groups together. And we did get together and we've been pretty much together ever since. I just don't want us to get separated out.

Well, one thing you're doing that I want to talk about is the Harkin Institute. So why don't you tell everyone about the Harkin Institute?

Well, Joyce, when I retired from the Senate, we decided— my Ruth, Ruth, my wife and I decided to start the institute at Drake University in Des Moines. It's a nonpartisan policy development institute. Our flagship, our main division is the Disability Division, and we've done a lot in that area since then with our annual summits, again, focused mostly on employment of people with disabilities. We do other things too in the disability sector. And then we do other— we do health and wellness. We do financial security, Social Security. That's another thing that I'm worried about, and that is people with disabilities making sure that they get their disability payments and that they're able to be a part of the Social Security system. So we work on that at the Institute. You can read all about it at parkinstitute.org, and you can get that information. I will say this one thing that we're just starting. We've been planning it for a couple, 3 years. We are going to start providing, what might I say, support for architects and builders building buildings so that they can build them accessible from the very beginning. And we're going to be giving, uh, um, what am I trying to— certifications to buildings to meet like, uh, bronze, silver, gold standards of accessibility, uh, and, um, we're working with the Rick Hansen Foundation out of Canada. Uh, they do the similar thing. And so we're going to be now providing services. We're training people now. We're getting people trained to be inspectors. So a lot of people have heard of LEED certification for environment, that kind of thing. Well, we're training people to give a Harkin Institute certification for meeting certain levels of accessibility in new buildings. And for remodeling, if people's going to remodel a structure, it doesn't have to be a building, it could be a sports stadium, or it could be a, some kind of a recreation center, it could be anything. But to make it accessible, that we will offer the services both in the beginning as to go over plans and designs and make suggestions. We're working with, with an architect who designed our building who is a person with a disability. And then let's say that someone who has remodeled it, they want to get a certification, we will come in and say, okay, yeah, we get— you meet the minimum standards for ADA. You get— that's the bronze level. If you want to go up a little bit higher, you need to do this, this, and this. If you want to go up higher, you need to add this, this, and this to your structure, to your remodeling or your new building. So As I said, we're just starting that, but we hope that within a very few years we will be looked upon as the source for people who want to build buildings or remodel structures and make them fully accessible to people with disabilities, both mobility disabilities, but also maybe hearing and visual disabilities, even intellectual disabilities. For people to, for example, people with autism, for example, may need a quiet space for certain periods of time. And so that we have in the Harkin Institute, we have a space if someone's working there, or if we hired a student or someone that is autistic and they need a quiet place, well, we have a quiet place where they can work for certain periods of time if they need that. Just things like that that most people don't think about.

Anyway, that is awesome. I mean, that is really great. That is great. Now, how are you— well, we're getting the news out right now, but I mean, how are you making this known? How, how is that news getting out?

Well, little bit by little bit, we're doing our first building this late this summer, and then we will, of course, we did make a booklet on the building of our building, which I think is going to have the gold standard. In fact, we're unveiling a plaque this next Wednesday from the Rick Hansen Foundation to give us the Gold Certificate as the highest level of accessibility. So, and we'll— we came up with a booklet and we're sending it to architectural firms, contractors all over America to their source of here in Washington, D.C. to get the word out that if you want to have services by a qualified institute that's nonpartisan to come in and work with you at the beginning, or to come in now and say, here's where you are and here's what you need to do to become more accessible, well, we're going to offer that service also. But, but you're right, it's, it's kind of hard to get the word out, but it's going to take time. It will. I understand that.

I'll help you get the word out. I'm going to get that word out right now to everyone listening to the show. What you should do if you're listening right now, share this show. It's easy. Go to Spotify, Apple, Amazon. Almost every social media platform this show is on, or go to benderconsult.com. But you should share this with other people because this is a good thing. You know, Senator Harkin, I hope from you doing this it will start the ball rolling, right? Yes, you know what I mean?

Thank you very much, Joyce. Yeah, we need to get the word out. That's just basically it. Yeah.

Yeah. Well, I don't want to close though without talking about the work you do internationally. How is that going?

Well, it's going well. It's lately not— we're having some tough times because of all the commotion that's going on with our trade policies and everything else.

Oh yeah.

Oh boy. But we're still working internationally. With Humanity and Inclusion. I'm sorry, that's the name of the group. They're based in France. It used to be called Disability International, but anyway, they changed their name to Humanity and Inclusion. And so we work with them on our summits. That we have overseas. We aren't having one this year, but I hope we have one next year. We've been planning on going to Santiago, Chile, and we have already had communications there, and we hope to have our first International Employment Disability Conference in Latin America next year. In Chile. And the ones we've had before in Ireland and in France were both well attended, and the ones we have here in Washington have been well attended. But internationally, still pretty tough. It's just, it's tough going. What I'm heartened by is that in some of the summits we've had where we have brought people from other countries here, they've gone back and started their own organizations and things in those countries to demand that their countries adhere to the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. So we have sort of spawned some nice movements in other countries. So that's kind of heartening.

Yeah, that is, that is. I always, you know, I always say this, no matter where you are in the world, one person can make a difference. One person. Sure can. Anyone listening right now, around the world, from China to Russia to Finland, everywhere. Look what this man did. Look what Senator Harkin did. That one thing he did helped change the world. That— I'm sure, Senator Harkin, when you think about the fact that because of you, millions of people with disabilities have jobs can go to work. Just think about what you accomplished.

Well, that's very kind of you. Yes, it's very heartening to see it, but I always have to remind myself, Joyce Bender, I didn't do it alone. Yeah, I stood out and I got the bill passed, but it was the countless numbers of brave people with disabilities who laid down behind the tires of the buses who stopped the trains, who marched around buildings that weren't accessible, who just never gave up in this struggle. They're the ones I always say that really brought this to fruition. But, you know, and there are people like that all over the world. I run into them in every country that I go to if I'm doing disability work there. It's true in Japan, Philippines. I was just in South Korea last summer and meeting with people there. They have a great group in South Korea on disability employment and disability rights. So, and in Europe, we've got great groups going in, well, a lot of different countries. In Africa, I even went to Sharjah in the United Arab Emirates a couple years ago, and they have a group there now that's doing great work on both schools, including kids with disabilities, and employment. So little things like that are happening all over the world.

Yeah, well, you know I love you, Senator Harkin.

And you know the feeling is absolutely mutual, Joyce Bender.

Uh-uh, yeah, you know I love you. And we, as long as we're here, Senator Harkin, we will be fighting the fight to the very end.

Absolutely. Right?

Absolutely. All right, well, listen, we end every show with a quote, and I love this quote. It is, "We recognize that like all people, people with disabilities have unique abilities, talents, and aptitudes, and America is better, fairer, and richer when we make full use of those gifts," said Senator Tom Harkin. Thank you, Senator Harkin. Thank you for being with us today.

Well, thank you, Joyce, for your friendship for all these years and for your leadership on all you do to promote especially disability employment. Yeah, you've just done wonderful in getting people jobs all over.

Well, see, I have heroes, and Tom Harkin is one of them.

Ah, get out of here.

No. I made it. All right, everyone, remember to share this show with others. Uh, and in the words of Mary Brooker, when you get up tomorrow, remember, choose joy.

Voice America would like to thank you for tuning in. Please join us next Tuesday at 11 AM Pacific time and 2 PM Eastern Join us next time for another installment of Disability Matters, right here on the Voice America Variety Channel. We are the leader in live internet talk radio. VoiceAmerica.com.