Contention 1: Transit Immobility

(Begin relatively slow)

Imagine you woke up tomorrow and there were no cars. You didnt have one, your neighbor didnt have one, your cousin in Vermillion didnt have one. Also no bikes, vespas, or motorcycles. No highway transport of any kind, except for the occasional delayed and underfunded ambulance. So you could get to medical care sometimes. But what is the list of things you are completely unable to do ? If groceries arent close, thats shot. What about your pharmacy ? Im one of the lucky ones. By accident of location I am close to church, banking, pharmacy, and groceries.) What about clothing, shoes, or dental care? Glasses? Never mind the out of reach luxury of visiting friends, taking in a movie, or going to the park. Out to dinner? Forget about it. Thats the kind of life that many many people with disabilities live in Lorain County right now, and have since 2009 when paratransit and fixed transit disappeared from everywhere in Lorain County except Lorain and Elyria in 2009. (With some exceptions that Ill detail in a moment.) And please dont bring out that tired old saw: We dont have that problem in Lorain CountyI never see any folks with disabilities in my business anyway so its not my problem. The *reason* you dont see us spending our time or money in your businesses, houses of worship, or homes, folks.is because we *cannot get to them.* If we cannot get to then, how would you ever be able to accurately grasp the scope of the problem? Some of us do not have friends or family with accessible transport that can step in. Its not like theres a lift van in every garage. We cannot walk where we need to go. We cannot defray some of our own cost to society as we would very much like to do, by full or part time employment, because how in the heck do we get there? One of my neighbors lost a cool job because her transport source became inaccessible to her. There was a meeting last week for us to voice our opinions about this. Be heard. Irony of Ironies, Couldnt get there to talk about why I couldnt get there,,,,,

That narrative comes from Jean Flynn in 2012

Jean M. Flynn, June 29, 2012, Lorain County Transit- an unacceptable situation http://midlifeandtreachery.wordpress.com/2012/06/29/lorain-county-transit-anunacceptable-situation/, accessed 7/12/12

First person accounts of disability are necessary for effective critical inquiry. Only through reflexive interdisciplinary methods can we begin to authentically understand Disability Life Ferri, 11 Associate Professor, The Center on Human Policy, Law, and Disability
Studies, Syracuse University, (Beth, Teachers College Record, Disability Life Writing and the Politics of Knowing, Volume 113 Number 10, http://syr.academia.edu/BethFerri/Papers/661249/Disability_Life_Writing_and_the_Po litics_of_Knowing, accessed 7/12/12)

Seeking to interrupt the dominant scripts of disability (Ferri, 2008) and to delve more deeply into the "interplay between ableism and other aspects of [identity and] culture" (Baglieri, Bejoian, Broderick, Connor, &Valle, 2011, this issue), scholars in disability studies in education (DSE), like scholars in other critical fields of inquiry, increasingly employ interdisciplinary methods in their research and teaching. To counter a critical understandings of disability in special education discourse, for example, scholars in disability studies often incorporate fiction, film, popular culture, and first-person narratives into their teaching and scholarly work. These works are valued for their ability to help us to "imagine disability otherwise . . . and move beyond overly deterministic normalizing discourses of cure and care" within clinical and popular discourses (Ware, 2002, p. 146). Autobiographical narratives as a form of "counter discourse " (Couser, 1997) are valued for their ability to "talk back" to dominant understandings of disability as deficit (Mintz, 2007). Disability life writing locates "disability as a complex social, political, and embodied position from which an individual might legitimately narrate [his/]her life experience" (p. 17). These kinds of narratives "do cultural work. They frame our understandings of raw, unorganized experience, giving it coherent meaning and making it accessible to us through story" (Garland-Thomson, 2007, p. 121). In other words, these texts should be seen as a form of social critique . Of course, the publishing industry, like the film and television industry, privileges sentimental and emotional stories that position disability as loss, or triumphal stories of individuals overcoming adversity through sheer force of will or determination (Couser, 2002). Such stereotypical portrayals of the inspirational "super-crip" who succeeds against the odds seem designed to make "disability palatable to an ableist" audience (Mintz, p. 17). According to Couser, however , autobiographical works that are counterdiscursive are written from the "inside of experience," in ways that are self-consciously political and challenge conventional meanings ascribed to disability (pp. 109-110).

Our position cannot resolve physical disability, but it can shape the cultural response to persons considered outside the norm. Society is shaped around the figure of the abled, strong-body individual and sweeps under the rug those who are outside the ideal. This violence continues systematically at both the psychic and physical levels Bagenstos, 2000 (Samuel R., Law Professor at Harvard, 86 Va. L. Rev. 397, April)
Erving Goffman's notion of stigma is a useful tool here. Although "stigma" refers colloquially to animus and prejudice, Goffman used the term to refer to a broader problem. He described the condition as an "undesired differentness" from what society deems to be "normal" or expected. 153 Under Goffman's approach, the core aspect of stigma occurs when prevailing social practices treat particular "undesirable" traits as universally discrediting. As Goffman emphasized, those who deal with stigmatized persons "tend to impute a wide range of

people with stigmatized traits are not considered to be among the "normals" for whom society, and its institutions, are designed. 155 This stigma is as much about social attitudes as about the traits themselves; even if an individual can "cure" a stigmatized trait, she may still not be accepted in the community of "normals." 156 Goffman's construct of "stigma" provides a useful tool in giving content to my subordinationimperfections on the basis of the original one." 154 As a result, based understanding of disability rights law for at least two reasons. First, Goffman's analysis strongly influenced the thoughts of many of the disability rights activists on whose work I rely. 157 Second, that analysis provides a way of connecting the animus-and stereotype-based discrimination experienced by many people with disabilities with their more systemic neglect in the design of the environment. It therefore provides a way of treating the three basic manifestations of disability discrimination under a single rubric, and it provides a way of predicting which types of impairments are likely to be associated with systematic deprivation of opportunities. Because Goffman wrote primarily about individual interactions between "the normals" and "the stigmatized," his notion of stigma most directly helps to describe the prejudice and stereotypes people with disabilities experience in such interactions. 158 It is especially useful in explaining the "spread effect," under which an impairment to a particular life function is seen as universally disabling. 159 But Goffman's analysis of stigma helps to describe the society-

people with some impairments are likely to be systematically neglected by social decisions, and why those people are likely to be the same people as those who experience animus and stereotyping. 161 If stigma means that an individual is not considered to be one of "the normals," then people with stigmatized impairments are likely not to be a part of the social "norm" considered by those who design the social and physical environment . Even if
wide neglect of people with disabilities as well. 160 In particular, it helps to explain why [*439] the environment's "designers" do not harbor prejudiced or stereotyped thoughts about people with stigmatized conditions, they are likely not to consider their needs in the same way that they consider the needs of those who are "normal." Disability rights advocates have long made this precise point about "disability." 162 They have

"the entire physical and social organization of life" is frequently structured as though everyone were physically strong, as though all bodies were
argued that

shaped [*440] the same, as though everyone could walk, hear, and see well, as though everyone could work and play at a pace that is not compatible with any kind of illness or pain, as though no one were ever dizzy or incontinent or simply needed to sit or lie down. 163 This phenomenon is most obvious in the built environment. Architects design structures with a model of the "normal" user in mind, and that model has typically been a person without any discernible impairments. 164 This "assumption of able-bodiedness as the norm" 165 can be seen in buildings with unnecessary stairs, doorways that are too narrow to accommodate wheelchairs, and entrances that

the phenomenon of neglect extends beyond the decisions that have constructed our physical architecture. It affects our patterns of social organization as well . Among other
fail to provide any detectable warning for people with visual impairments. But things, it affects the structure of jobs and the means by which businesses and governments deliver services. 166

Why have those who constructed our social and physical environment failed to consider people with disabilities as among the "normal" users ? One explanation might look to the very history of [*441] prejudice and stereotypes noted by Congress. For much of our history, people with a variety of physical and mental disabilities were "shunted aside, hidden, and ignored." 167 People
with impairments ranging from epilepsy to blindness to mental retardation were segregated from the community in a collection of congregate institutions. 168 Such segregation "perpetuated unwarranted

assumptions that persons so isolated are incapable or unworthy of participating in community life." 169 Even among those who were not institutionalized, people
with disabilities frequently did not work, patronize businesses, or use government services outside of the home. 170 (In some cases, they were required by law to stay at home; as late as 1974, some major American jurisdictions still maintained "ugly laws" that prohibited "unsightly" people - a category that encompassed people with disabilities from appearing in public. 171 ) A person designing a particular building, production process, or job description could thus be forgiven for failing to think of people with disabilities as potential customers or workers. The designer might have had no particular negative attitudes toward "the disabled." Indeed, it might never have entered her mind that people with disabilities might wish to use her building or work in her business; she might simply have had no available model of people with disabilities as ordinary people with ordinary needs and tastes. 172 Al [*442] though people with disabilities have become more and more integrated into society at large in the last two decades, the history of exclusion may have a particularly long "tail." Buildings and processes designed without people with disabilities in mind may be used for many years to come. And prejudice and stereotypes - which have themselves been fed by the absence of people with disabilities from the larger community 173 - may linger even longer. 174

The historic exclusion of people with disabilities from "normal" society has interacted in complex and reciprocal ways with broader ideological currents. Lennard Davis has argued that the notion of "norms" dates only to the development of a science of statistics in the early nineteenth century. 175 Until then, Davis contends, the place now occupied by the "norm" was held by the notion of an "ideal," which was understood to be unattainable by any human. 176 But the [*443] newfound "concept of a norm, unlike that of an
ideal, implied that the majority of the population must or should somehow be part of the norm." 177 Early statisticians made this point expressly: They argued that social institutions should be built around the broad middle group of persons who fit the social norm. 178 As Davis demonstrates, their arguments both

provided justification for, and drew strength from, an ideology that accorded a morally privileged position to the middle class . 179 More darkly, they fed the eugenic ideology that led to the institutionalization and sterilization of many people whom we now label "disabled ." 180 The nineteenthcentury notion that institutions should be designed for the "norm" persists. But our vision of "normal" human attributes has become increasingly idealized, as the eugenics movement (which sought "to norm the nonstandard" 181 ) may have been the first to demonstrate. Rob Imrie's account of modernist architecture points out the effect that such an ideology of the
"norm" has had on our built environment. In seeking to make form follow function, and to "tie buildings back to the scale of the human being," modernists harbored a particularly able-bodied vision of who "the human being" was. 182 Imrie illustrates this vision by pointing to Le Corbusier's "Modular," which "utilized the proportions of the (able) body to enable the architect to create the built spaces." 183 The "Modular," a diagram of a muscular six-foot tall man, was "the person for whom functionality in building design and form was being defined." 184 Many inaccessible features of today's buildings, Imrie argues, trace directly to modernism's exclusion of people with disabilities from its idealized version of the "norm." 185 [*444] As we move to a new millennium,

we seem to believe as strongly as ever that everyone should fit an "ideal" body type. Although there are surely a variety of reasons for this development, the most notable are a
consumer/advertising culture that idealizes beauty and a widespread belief in the ability of modern medicine to enhance our mental and physical lives. 186 As a result, the ideological currents that exclude

people with disabilities from our notion of the "norm" stubbornly remain with us. In this view, "disability" is a group status, but it is not one defined by anything inherent in the members of the group. Rather, the attitudes and practices that exclude people with "disabilities" from many opportunities to participate in society are the very ones that create the "disability" category. Although individuals em [*445] braced by the category have vastly different impairments and
limitations (indeed, some have no impairment or limitation at all), what is crucial is that society treats them as

essentially similar. 188 In Wendell's words, "widespread

perceptions that people with disabilities are similar in very significant ways create the category, "people with disabilities.'" 189 The widespread acts of "discrimination, segregation, and denial of equal opportunity" directed at people with disabilities have effectively marked that group as a "dependent caste."

The eugenic gaze cast by the status quo relationship to disability culminates in the genocidal impulse the institutional spaces of exclusion epitomized by transportation policies legitimize state-sponsored violence Hughes, 2002 (Bill, Professor of Social Policy at the University Glasgow, Disability Studies, p. 60-62)
dominant framework for understanding disability in the modern period has been the medical model. From the early nineteenth century onwards, biomedicine legitimated the view that biophysical abnormality or maladaptation leads to, or is the cause of, social abnormality or maladaptation. In other words, to be defined as a flawed body is simultaneously to be defined as incapable of adequate social participation. The corporealization of disability meant, in practical terms, the segregation of those so labeled. The logic of the medical model runs from diagnosis to social
The response. In causal terms, there seem to be three linked elements in the chain: impairment leads to disability, which in turn leads to confinement or institutionalization. The social respond to the flawed body particularly in the nineteenth century was anthropoemic. This concept refers to the expulsion or exile of alien persons. The Victorian penchant for

excluding people from social participation on the ground of

what today might be called difference was summed up by Foucaults (1969) notion of the great confinement. The segregation associated with confinement was not only equivalent to a custodial sentence often

was also the sentence of a social death, which was in itself a sort of tacit legitimation for the denial of human rights and the application of oppressive practices of care (Barnes 1990). These institutional spaces of exclusion, into which disabled people were cast, were, after all, civilized by medical jurisdiction. The very authority that had objectified disabled people by reducing them to their
for life but impairments now had the opportunity to define disabled peoples needs and, in many cases, act in locl parentis. [continues] The

medical model of disability is, and has been, strongly associated with the potentially reactionary, theme that biology is destiny , and is embedded in popular
culture by the naturalization of the view that natural aptitudes determine life chances. Nurture is causally impotent in the social world, it is natural endowment that is the most efficacious variable. At its worst, in the nineteenth century,

the medicalization of disability dovetailed with what Foucault called the racisms of the state (1979: 54), with the Darwinist and eugenicist perspectives which promised to cleanse the social body of impunity, imperfection, degeneracy and effectiveness. [continues] The concept of fitness was used,
in such contexts, as a criterion for making humanity defined in terms of aesthetic ideals of embodiment into a relative term.

Modernity is riddled with such eugenic conceptions of social hygiene. They are based on the view that disabled people are either unfit to be in society or to reproduce. The eugenic gaze proposes collective solutions to the contaminant that disabled bodies represent, but does not propose collectivist explanations. It is imprisoned in the repertoire of socio-biology and social Darwinism, and treats disability as an error of nature that should be righted. When wedded to a rigid concept of heredity , biological reductionism may at its worst translate into a politics of genocide.

Only repoliticizing transportation infrastructure can shift responsibility to the institutions that maintain exclusion and can open space to expose our complicity in ableist structures of knowledge
Koch, 2008 (Tom, Adjunct Professor of Medical Ethics at the University of British Columbia, Spaced Out in the
City: the Wrinkled World of Transit for Those With Limited Mobility, Disability Studies Quarterly, Vol. 28 No. 2, Spring, http://dsq-sds.org/article/view/94/94)

Making my way slowly toward the geography building I wondered about the nature of impairments and the limits

What did it mean to be a 20-something, wheelchairmobile car driver in a city; how was that different from being a middle-aged,
they impose, the world they create.

sight-impaired fellow with a cane? Was my world in fact restricted because I cannot drive? Is it in some way limited by my reliance on transit? Having written about disability ethics I was familiar with the broad arguments of both physical limits and their social construction (Koch 2001; 2006a; 2006b). Here, however, the broad issues were focused in the built environment and there the data seems sparse. The problem is clear: "people adjust their preferences to what they think they can achieve" (Nussbaum 2006, 73). But to what extent might my impairments

unable to drive, and perhaps to use a bus, a limit that forces the real problem in thinking about this problem is the method in which we think about transit, the methodology constructed to frame questions and seek answers about accessibility. Understanding, and perhaps reconstructing, our view of the
limit what I saw as achievable. How is being us to adjust our goals and does that limit our lives? The more I looked the more I came to understood that environment as a traversable surface became the goal of a project whose origins were personal and broadly conceptual but whose end is concrete and pragmatic. Literature: Geography There are two pertinent literatures here, one is geographic and the other a "disability literature." Many have described in a general way the affect of physical limits on urban access and mobility, the broad differences between "enabling" (Gleeson 2002, 201) and conversely inhibiting environments. Eric Britton described the changing circumstances of his mother's life as her

Parkinson's disease progressed (Britton 2002); I described the limits social and physical my father experienced in a "geriatric decline" (Koch 1990). Reginald Golledge has written extensively, alone and with others, on "disability, barriers, and discrimination," from the perspective of the blind (Golledge 1994, Marston,

limits on urban accessibility based not on the physical characteristics of the person alone but on the structure of transport systems that connect the built environments in which we live. The consensus seems to be that what Porter called "the simplistic
Golledge and Costanzo 1997). Within this broad literature is a subset concerning equation of impairment with disability" is unsustainable when, as she discovered, a quadriplegic with a motorized wheelchair and adapted motor van was more mobile and "independent" than many with less extreme physical limits (Porter 2002, 12). My observation, clearly, was not unique.

What Porter calls "transit disability" defines in a general way limits to urban access based on one's mode of transportation and the inability of some bus travel, for example, to match the access of others, especially automobile use. But what is meant by this, and how it is to be
understood, is unclear in Porter's work or that of other researchers. The problem was framed in a general way in 1993 by Golledge who suggested, as Church and Marston have noted, that

"even when considering the exact same geographic space, people with differing abilities must use, access, and travel through that environment using different routes, such that the conception and use of that space is 'transformed' for different users" (Church and Marston 2003, 12). The problem, therefore, is not simply in the location of this or that barrier but in the space created by different routes and different modes of travel for users with different capabilities . While this makes intuitive sense, it flies in the face of decades of transportation studies. There space is assumed to be democratically uniform and constant irrespective of the mode of transportation or the abilities of users . Its topology
is typically expressed as a collection of lines (streets, bus routes, airline routes) and points (street intersections, bus stops, airline terminals) that permit regular access to and egress from across the regular and unchanging space of the city or state (Taffe and Gauthier 1973).

The systems we use to design urban systems and measure their accessibility all rely on this idea of a space that can be measured in simple and regular units of time and distance such that ten miles will
take twice as long to travel as five miles. By the late 1960s, a series of algorithms had been developed in which graph theoretic modeling was employed to design interactive systems at a range of scales (the city, the nation, and

based on this idea of a single and regular space accessible by all Those equations remain the very essence of our thinking today (for a review see Church and Marston 2003). But what if persons with mobility disorders , and persons who cannot drive, in fact are relegated by the transit system to a very different space? How might this different space be understood, its origins described? Geographies
the world) (Haggett 1967). of disability, while rich in "the everyday geographies of people with disability, chronic illness, and psychiatric problems" ( Dyck and O'Brien 2003) hold no answers to the broader problem. This paper details an attempt to come to grips with this idea of non-regular spaces as a function of mobility limits and transit systems. It offers no answers and is less a report of "work-in-progress" than a pre-study whose outcome is a proposed means of defining a methodology that might better express the variable spaces in which we live. This paper describes the first stage of a research initiative, one that grounded in individual experience will lead, hopefully, to a more complete and complex spatial metric capable of describing transit modalities and the method they construct

different spaces affecting users differently. Through a careful consideration of a single case, questions are raised and methodologies proposed for future application . Disability and Impairment While concrete and geographic in its subject and analysis, the result will certainly bear upon the greater issues of social exclusion and inclusion of persons of difference. For more than a generation debate has continued over the degree to which
physical limits and the social context in which they are enacted influence daily life activities and life quality. A "social disability model" argues, to paraphrase Tremain, "disablement is nothing to do with

the [physical] body, impairment is nothing less than a description of the body" (Tremain 2005, 9). My impairments low vision and mobility restrictions are physical realities but any limits they present in daily life , in this trope, result form a failure in social infrastructure support, the real "disablement." In considering the space created by transit modalities, the nature of that infrastructure itself becomes the subject. Once a principal proponent of the social disability model, British sociologist Tom Shakespeare recently has argued the dichotomies of disablement/impairment, of physical realities and social barriers, are too simple. "Disability studies would be better off without the social model, which has become fatally undermined by its own contractions and inadequacies" (Shakespeare 2006, 28). It is not that social realities are unimportant, Shakespeare insists, but that they exist within a context in which the physical difference is real and not necessarily society's responsibility to address. A vast literature has grown around the poles of disability and impairment, of clinical reality and
social responsibility, one rich in theory if not in pragmatic answers (for a review see, for example, Koch 2006a, 2006b). The technical literature in this area typically takes an "activity-based approach" (Marston, Golledge, and Costanzo 1997). Grounded in the regular space of classical transportation modeling in which space is constant and regular, Kwan, among others, has experimented with network-based approaches that develop space-time accessibility measures, a point-based approach in which travel networks are divided into origins and destinations, points on a map or graph, between which distance is calculated in one or another metric (time travel, cost of travel, etc.) (Kwan 1988). Two problems were immediately apparent. First, the assumption has been that

while travel across existing urban networks may be more expensive or more time consuming for some the system is accessible to all. Whether that is true is unclear, however. One may as easily argue that physical limits create absolute barriers, spaces that cannot be traveled. Methodologically, an activities-based approach trips to the doctors, to shop, to the
record store is necessarily individualistic and therefore eccentric. While useful as a starting point, the goal must be a broader analytic whose subject is general and not specific. How might that broader analytic be expressed? Thus, the study of an individual case or cases should serve not as a description of "transportation disability" but as a springboard to a general problem of "transportation space" as eccentric and fluid. How might that transposition from individual to general be achieved? Urban Barriers One stream of work seeks to identify barriers to access in the local environment, those elements high curbs, busy traffic intersections, steep slopes that impede access for those with mobility limits. An example of this focused, large-scale approach is a study by Kitchen in association with members of an Irish "pan-disability organization" (Kitchen 2002). Working with the Newbridge (Ireland) Access Group, Kitchen developed a map of largely preventable environmental barriers gradients, ground surfaces, high curbs etc that impeded travel on individual streets and the buildings in them. The collaborative project involved contributors with various physical distinctions who together categorized the urban barriers that were mapped within a small, eight-block area. The focus of their investigation was not access to the area but accessibility of buildings and sidewalks within it. The goal of the work, and similar projects elsewhere, was to identify those local, micro-geographic barriers that made otherwise accessible places inconvenient or inaccessible. "Overcoming space requires expenditure of resources, energy, and time, a charge that nature (including humans) attempts to minimize subject to constraints and other objectives" (Miller 2007, 203). Even if access is theoretically possible if getting there is too time consuming, too expensive, or too arduous those places are, effectively, "off the map." This work is typically restricted to a fine scale of concern, a few city streets and their buildings. Its relation to the city-at-large might be supposed but was unconsidered. A research program emerged that would use mapping technologies as one of its tools. First, it would be useful to carefully record my daily travel patterns, the "daily activities" and the times and methods of travel to work, stores, leisure destinations. Secondly, these origin-destination records could be compared both to my own, pre-surgical patterns of activity and to the travel times, as a measure of accessibility, of the average, motorized Vancouverite. This data would hopefully would lead to a more rigorous, general analysis of "transit disability" and what it means, a new way to make concrete the broad problem of accessibility and distance

barriers. Daily Activities Listing Between 2002 and 2005 a series of recurring destinations were recorded in my daily travel journals. These included travel time from home to the Dept. of Geography, University of British Columbia, where I served as an adjunct professor of medical geography, and to Simon Fraser University's downtown campus where I was an adjunct professor of gerontology. There were as well trips to the food markets on Fourth Avenue (I lived on Thirteenth), Granville Island, and Commercial Drive. At another scale entirely daily activities included trips to a local coffee shop, neighborhood supermarkets, and other non-work locations frequently visited prior to my osteoarthritis. As a non-driver, these trips were largely undertaken on the public transit system except for a period of seven months in which post-surgical limits made bus travel on crutches impossible. During that time I was unable to get on local buses whose entry steps were too high for me to use. In Greater Vancouver the Coast Mountain Bus Company operates an integrated system of bus and electric trolley services under the provincially funded Translink agency serving the 21-municipality region that is Vancouver and its suburbs. Across the region the bus system is linked to an expanding light rail transit system with stations in downtown Vancouver and on Vancouver's Commercial Drive. On the general bus route two or three different styles of bus are in use, some with steep steps, some that kneel, making access easier, and others with full wheelchair capability. A subset of bus routes at the time of this work was wheelchair accessible. Since the study began in 2002 the number of kneeling and wheelchair accessible buses has increased on an annual basis and the number of wheelchair accessible routes has slowly expanded. The first map, therefore, would have to be blank, a map of the city I could not access except by taxi because I was unable to use public transit and cannot drive. Once I could both walk four blocks to the nearest bus stop and board the bus on crutches, the travel journal that would provide the data for my maps could be constructed. For each trip made I noted (a) walking time to a bus stop (b) time waiting for a bus (c) time traveling on a bus and (d) time from the destination stop to the destination itself. While on crutches, and then on a cane, my walking was approximately a third slower than that of the average walker. Informants walking the same route at the same time of day required an average of 6.5 minutes to walk from Arbutus and 13th to Arbutus and 9th (Broadway), I required 9.5 minutes to traverse that same distance. Later testing with others including a person with familial dystonia found the onethird time differential a fairly constant difference although several seniors on four-pronged walkers I timed took even longer. For comparison, I used bicycle travel time based on my own, prior travel journals and those of an assistant as well as travel time by automobile recorded by an assistant. The automobile is the assumed mode of travel in Vancouver although efforts are made to wean drivers from their cars to public transit. The bicycle was included as a potentially important indicator of the argument some might make that poverty is itself a disability as real as any physical limit. For those without the $2.25 (Canadian) one-way fare price, and without a car, the bicycle provides an alternative form of transportation. While extremely coarse, it serves as a first measure of the mundanely-abled for whom automobile use and transit use were unavailable. Differences were quickly evident at two very different scales of concern. These included variable access ranges at both the level of the metropolis and the level of the immediate neighborhood. The first involved non-neighborhood trips to work and other more distant locations. The second occurred at the very fine scale of the neighborhood. At this scale the result was a series of substitutions in which formerly frequented locations were abandoned for other, closer stores within a maximum four-block radius. The Metropolitan Scale Within an hour driving time of my home accessibility reached from the southern ferry terminal in Tsawassen, British Columbia's Gulf Islands, to the northern terminal at Horseshoe Bay that serves Bowen Island in How Sound, the Sunshine Coast, and Nanaimo on central Vancouver Island. Bus and bicycle ranges were more restricted, permitting access only to the central city. The oval shape of the transit systems general reach reflects the light rapid system that stretches from east Vancouver, a 32-38 minute bus trip from my house, to eastern suburbs. The more regular range of the bicycle commuting circle is based on my own cycling records, those of bicycle commuting friends, and a general assumption of an average speed of twenty to twenty five kilometers an hour in non-rush hour traffic. The conclusion is presented in Figure 1, a map of coarse ranges, based on an hour's travel time, for the three transportation modalities. Clearly, these reflect different access potentials. Destinations include, to the west, the University of British Columbia, and to the east, Commercial Drive shopping area from which the light rail transit system can be accessed. To the north of the central city are Simon Fraser University's Downtown Campus and the maritime Seabus terminal permitting access to North Vancouver. Included as gray lines are the major bus routes that traverse the city it symbolized with gray lines. Major roads not covered by the system are symbolized with white lines. The map serves as an imprecise if useful descriptor of the variable effect of transportation modalities across the urban system. It does not propose different spaces but rater suggests relative ranges based on transportation modes within a single constant space. As Kwan has claimed, "Individual accessibility is determined not by how many opportunities are located close to the reference location, but how many opportunities are within reach given the particularities of an individual's life situation and adaptive capacity" (1999, 212). Clearly, transit modality defines accessibility, providing predictably greater access within a finite time frame to a larger range of places than the bicycle or the public transit route. Thus, while reflecting my own eccentric travel the general differences in range at least theoretically serve to identify general differences from any point in the system for the varying travel modalities, the specific range shifting east or west, north or south, depending on the originating location. The simple transit modality range map does not express differences in travel time between locations embedded in the map, however. Implicit in the range map is one of travel time as a constant, albeit occurring at different but still constant rates (30 km. an hour for cars, perhaps 20 km. an hour for buses, and less for the bicycle). The daily activities log showed distance when measured by time to be a non-linear, complex space, however. Figure 2 is a table that catalogues the differences in travel time between representative locations in these ranges by modality. Reported times reflect the average duration of multiple trips from my home at Arbutus and Thirteenth Avenues based on my own and my informants' travel. Interestingly, within the immediate neighborhood represented by the Granville Island Market and those on Fourth Avenue the difference between car and bike was relatively minor. Between car and bus, however, the difference at the local scale was significant. In effect, the inability to drive meant that what for others would be brief excursions for example to Fourth Avenue markets became, for me, significant trips requiring significant expenditures of time. Further, these locations assumed an ability to walk at least four blocks with minimal discomfort. While on crutches, however, and on the first months with a cane, this assumption was unrealized. The approximately six-block distance from the nearest bus stop to the Granville Island market was too great to be attempted safely. It was added to the list only after post-operative recovery was well advanced. The difference in travel modalities are expressed graphically in Figure 3 through a simple scaling technique that gives some idea of the effect of travel modality on trip times. Each single arrow is ten minutes travel and multiple arrows are additives of ten minutes, or a fraction of it. Everything is close when travel is by automobile, further when travel is by bus. The bicycle is a surprisingly effective substitute for the automobile for short-range trips, albeit one that was unavailable to me. Effectively, travel time constraints permitted, at most, one interurban trip by normal transit for example to UBC or to SFU or to Commercial Drive. That time, with chores as the destination, effectively made a trip that might be for a car driver a brief expedition an expedition that was, for me, at least a half-day round-trip. While travel across the system was possible in theory, travel time became a prohibitive in trips outside of the core city, for example to the Tsawassen (southern terminal, figure 1) or Horseshoe Bay (northwestern figure 1) ferry terminals. More importantly, the result presented a time-space that was not smooth and constant but wrinkled and irregular. The local coffee shop I had patronized, one a few minutes from my house, became a more distant destination, for example. At issue was not raw accessibility I could get there by a bus using two transfers but the distance in time was far more complex, and variable (less constant), than a Euclidian space measured in kilometers would have predicted. Neighborhood Scale The effect on daily living patterns was especially notable in the neighborhood I had, prior to surgery, unthinkingly inhabited. During much of the study period my walking time was a third that of average citizens and limited to a range of four to a maximum of five city blocks. Any distance farther than four blocks required a several-minute rest period to permit the pain to decrease. Within Greater Vancouver that made some destinations, while theoretically accessible, practically unavailable. Included in the list of inaccessible sites would be those homes or shops on slopes greater than perhaps 8 degrees. While relatively few, they were still noticeable for example the home of a friend at Third and Yew a block north of the Fourth Avenue coffee shop. Included as well were a large part of Pacific Spirit Park and homes on Eighth to Six Streets between Granville and Cambie, principal homes and commercial areas of the city. More importantly, perhaps, because of limits in walking distance or cycling, neighborhood shopping that had required little time now required a 28-32 minute bus trip. Because no bus runs along Arbutus to Fourth Avenue, for example, it was necessary to travel west to Broadway and Alma to transfer to an eastbound bus or to Granville and Fifth for a westbound bus. Thus to travel to the stores previously patronized required two buses, with their attendant waiting times, and one transfer. As a result, my daily purchase patterns shifted from Fourth Avenue to Broadway Avenue stores near Arbutus, from small specialty stores to a single supermarket for food. Travel to Commercial Drive, Granville Market, and the North Shore became full day trips rather than afternoon excursions. In effect, my travel range for daily necessities was altered, restricted by the time a bus-transfer trip would require for food, shopping, afternoon coffee, etc. At night, when transit is less frequent, the situation worsened. The shifting range of transport disability is graphically described in Figure 4 where shops on Fourth Avenue and the Granville Market are shown outside a darker, home-centered rectangle that was the post-operative travel range. Discussion All of this may seem obvious, confirming what is known, and certainly commonsensical. Inability to drive is in this study certainly a disadvantage it takes longer to get there from here exacerbated by ambulatory limits. Travel took longer and not all equidistant points were equally accessible: some places came off my daily map because of distance from a transit stop, or became excursions rather than simple trips. For those who are wheelchair users in my neighborhood, the lack of accessible stops would be, at least for those who do not drive, not disadvantageous but disastrous. There is no wheelchair access to the transit system within 1.5 kilometers of the Arbutus and Thirteenth Avenue epicenter of this study. In a wheelchair, or again with limited mobility on crutches, one is literally off the map. Equally disadvantaged are those whose poverty inhibits both transit use and automobile ownership although for some the bicycle may serve as a local-and mid-distance substitute. Whether the result is "disabling" depends as much on one's understanding of the adjective "disability" as it does on the limits of either the transit system or the potential transit rider him or her self. In a similar vein, this experience affirmed the observation by Golledge (1993) quoted earlier, and more recently rephrased by others, that differing abilities require people to move differently through the environment which is transformed by individual capabilities (Church and Marston 2003, 9096). Automobile drivers, irrespective of other impairments, access the city in a way that I and others without cars could not. Persons with mobility limits who have a limited range have different access levels than those whose ambulation is more or less mundane. Not obvious either in the maps or the literature is what all this means. If

"transit disability" is

embedded in the system then how can it be defined and expressed across the system? The experiences detailed in this paper, and by others with mobility limits, suggests a difference space in which the regular metrics of time-distance transit planning are modified or suspended in the reality of daily use. In the design of urban systems we assume distance is a constant that expands in a regular and consistent, linear fashion. If it is five minutes to "x" location at this speed; a distance twice as far requires twice as much time. And while that may be generally true for some, the reality experienced here was different. Space is in effect wrinkled, an irregular surface in which hills of time create barriers for some that for others are simple planes of distance. In addition, mobility limits may impose absolute barriers for some for example a 6-block walk for me that for others are not impediments at all. Like all very personal studies the results are limited to the nature of the
individual experience. Even if one accepts the commonality of my experience, what is the reality of those who require wheelchair access to the transit system? Not all paraplegics can drive. Nor can all those who require scooters and other motorized ambulatory aides. Within Greater Vancouver transit access for those who use wheelchairs is restricted not only by temporal wrinkling but by the system itself. They are limited

absolutely to a small number of routes that permit access at specific times of the day. The question of wheelchair users is not simply one of a distinct range but of accessibility itself. Clearly, simple mapping of eccentric daily activity routes do not serve to express the
general reality experienced here. More fundamentally, the traditional assumptions of transportation and urban analysis reflected in this paper's map, assumptions of distance measured in time as a regular constant, require a different analytic. How does one argue a "wrinkled" space that is generally nonconstant and in parts practically inaccessible even if system maps make the systems that traverse them appear accessible to all? Future Works First, there would need to be a map depicting the lines and stops of the system. Those would become the raw data from which travel time surfaces based on different travel modalities would be developed. Centered on a single location, what was required was a surfacing of the space-time of the city for different travel modalities if a very plastic and variable travel space based on modality were to be created. In future studies automobile use would be the necessary travel mode against which other travel spaces were measured. This would require either a number of drivers logging travel points from the central location to all other locations, or a travel-time algorithm that would generate those points. In comparison, a time accessibility analysis based on transit system lines would need to be generated in a manner that reflected real travel time, including time walking from the origin point to transit access nodes, time waiting at access nodes and transfer points, and time walking to destinations. Finally, a parallel study based on transit accessibility and time for wheelchair accessible transit routes would need to be created for the region. Surface analysis uses data points to generate a continuous space in which a single variable travel time, cost, etc. can be created across an area in which origin and destination points can be identified. This inverts traditional transit mapping in which such points are the focus within a space that is assumed to be constant and linear. Developing the data to map a complex surface on the basis of cost, time, or some other variable is not a trivial problem. It requires first a well-developed dataset and secondly a method of testing the accuracy of the resulting surface. As a first step, I applied for and received from Coast Mountain Bus Company (CMBC) map files that described all routes within the Greater Vancouver Regional District and all bus, trolley, and light rapid transit system within the region. CMBC officials also provided the location of individual transit stops on each route. Online schedules for the period of December 2006 to April 2007 permitted travel time and transfer time to be added to all routes. To analyze this data, and develop an approach that would serve for the various modalities, I applied for assistance to several colleagues. They include, to date: adjunct professor of geography Ray Torchinsky, Simon Fraser University (Vancouver, BC); University of British Columbia transport and urban geographer Ken Denike, and Simon Fraser University transportation and urban geographer Warren Gill. Together we created the Vancouver Transit Access Study Consortium, to develop a system of accurately assessing the relative accessibility of the city by varying modalities for persons with different physical limits. Aware that all travel is dependent on traffic levels, we decided to begin by limiting our work to nonpeak travel hours during the weekday. To date a tentative system of mapping has been developed that permits surface maps analyzing travel time for automobile, transit, and wheelchair transit use. A second task, not yet complete, is to add to these transit maps multi-modal capabilities, including for example the time it takes to walk or wheel to and from a transit stop. Also to be added will be surface contours permitting streets with specific gradients to be taken off the map of mobility limited users Generation of the maps is only part of the exercise. The maps are the workbenches on which we hope to generate more precise mathematic descriptors of relative accessibility of these interrelated but distinct travel systems. We believe the methodologies evolving from this work will permit an accurate portrait of mobility constrained, locational accessibility measures for critical urban locations city hall, hospitals, shopping malls, universities, etc. as well as a general portrait of modal inaccessibility. In other words, we will be able not only to map generalities but specifics, to ask whether Vancouver City Hall is accessible to all or is its accessibility limited, and if so to what degree, to certain classes of citizens who can drive, afford a bus, or find wheelchair routes from home to the City Hall. This degree of specificity will require an analytic sufficiently flexible to focus on a wide variety of central points and to refashion the mapped perspective from a range of origins and destinations.

The research is academic to the extent that it seeks to find a consistent methodology encouraging the investigation of urban accessibility both in terms of characteristics of different modes of travel and of constraints on the mobility of individuals. It is academic in its critique of an existing assumption of space. The goal, however, is practical, activist, and local. The hope is to develop a methodology by which debates over urban accessibility can be pursued in a climate not simply of political dissent (See, for example, Imrie and Edwards 2007; Valentine 2003; Gleeson 2000) but instead grounded in clear expressions of concrete differences. The hope is that development of this approach will serve both local communities of
difference and transit officials who are making a strong, good faith effort to expand their service to assure the greatest possible ridership. At this writing the first surface models of the variable systems are being generated. Attempts to expand them to include more variables including the effect of slope on walking, of absolute walking limits, speed variation and non-linearity of walking times, etc. are soon to be begun. So, too, we hope to develop general algorithms that may modify those currently employed on the assumption of special regularity. That, however, is for the future. The program has to date received no outside funding. Nor has any been applied for. We believed it important to first investigate the potential of our approach before seeking support for further research.

This report therefore presents a first statement of the pre-test and early modeling rather than of the results of our efforts. We hope within six months to a year to be able to begin a series of more detailed reports expanding the eccentric and personal critique presented here into a more general, system-wide exploration whose methodology encompasses the traditional planner's focus on locations of origin and destination in a general surface analytic we believe will best serve to express the effect of physical limits on urban access using different transportation modalities. We believe with that the need to equal the playing field to assure equal

access to all will be not simply a political ideal but a social goal in transit planning.

PLAN
The United States federal government should increase investment in transportation infrastructure to make it more accessible. Here are examples of transportation infrastructure investments that the plan includes Carpenter 2006 (Matt, Senior Planner with the Sacramento Area Council of Governments, Senior and Disabled
Mobility Study, Sacramento Area Council of Governments, October 23)

Implement local Pedestrian Master Plans and pedestrian access improvements in the planning, design, construction, maintenance and rehabilitation of local transportation infrastructure, including: -Improve design at key destinations for seniors and persons with disabilities by requiring buildings to front the street, or providing safe pedestrian access ways through large parking lots. -Increase pedestrian safety in crosswalks by increasing crossing times or installing extra-time pedestrian request buttons at major intersections, insuring accessible curb cuts, adding pedestrian refuge islands in wide streets, audible/countdown signals and/or in-pavement lighting . -Adopt narrower street designs and traffic calming strategies to slow traffic. -Add pedestrian resting areas with amenities such as benches in downtown and suburban settings. -Improve pedestrian access and comfort by providing ample sidewalks, sidewalk connectivity, reducing sidewalk obstacles (poles, garbage cans, etc.), adding lighting for safety and shade for comfort, and using noise-reducing materials and acoustic processes to reduce street and freeway noise. -Insure good bus stop design and access.

Contention 2: The Holy

The holy community is founded on narratives of hospitality, which affirms dignity. Transportation infrastructure in the status quo is rooted in the sacred order, which is founded on exclusive narratives and approaches otherness with hostility and violence. Fasching and deChant 2001 (Darrell J., Professor of Religious Studies at the University of South Florida, Dell, Director of
Religious Studies in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of South Florida, Comparative Religious Ethics: A Narrative Approach, Pp. 10) Human religiousness is defined by two opposing types of experience that tend to shape the way stories are told and interpreted. Moreover, our understanding of good and evil is defined by the kind of story we think we are in and the role see ourselves playing in that story. The terms the sacred and the holy, which have typically been used interchangeably, are

we

proposed here as names for these opposing types of experience . The sacred defines those who share a common identity as human and sees all others as profane and less (or less than) human. The sacred generates a morality expressed in narratives of mistrust and hostility toward the stranger. The holy, by contrast, generates an ethic which calls into question every sacred morality in order to transform it in the name of justice and compassion, especially toward the stranger. The task of an ethic of the holy is not to replace the morality of a society, but to transform it by breaking down the divisions between the sacred and profane, through narratives of hospitality to the stranger, which affirm the human dignity of precisely those who do not share my identity and my stories.

Holy Communities project openness to the transformative impact of the experiences of others. The sacred order is a methodology of domination. Its foreclosure of the possibility of truth in difference condemns us to an apocalyptic stalemate moving ever closer to human self-destruction. Fasching 1993 (Darrell J. Fasching is a Professor of Religious Studies at the University of South Florida, The Ethical Challenge of
Aushwitz and Hiroshima, Pp. 5-8) The best way to describe the "style" of the theology of culture proposed in these books is to suggest that it is a "decentered" or "alienated

theology is the opposite of apologetic theology. Apologetic theology typically seeks to defend the "truth" and "superiority" of one's own tradition against the "false," "inferior," and "alien" views of other traditions. Alienated theology, by contrast, is theology done "as if" one were a stranger to one's own narrative traditions, seeing and critiquing one's own traditions from the vantage point of the other's narrative traditions. It is my
theology". Alienated

conviction that alienated theology is the appropriate mode for theology in an emerging world civilizationa civilization tottering in the balance between apocalypse and utopia. There are two ways to enter

world history, according to the contemporary author John Dunne: you can be dragged in by way of world war or you can walk in by way of mutual understanding. By the first path, global civilization emerges as a totalitarian project of dominance that risks escalating into nuclear apocalypse. By the second path, we prevent the rise of the first, creating global civilization through an expansion of our understanding of what it means to be human.
This occurs when we pass over to another's religion and culture and come back with new insight into our own. Ghandi is an example, passing over to the Sermon on the Mount and coming back to the Hindu Bhagavad Gita to gain new insight into it as a scripture of

nonviolence. Ghandi never seriously considered becoming a Christian but his

Hinduism was radically altered by his encounter with Christianity. One could say the same
(reversing the directions) for Martin Luther King Jr., who was deeply influenced by Ghandi's understanding of nonviolent resistance in the Gita. When

we pass over (whether through travel, friendship, or disciplined study and imagination) we become "strangers in a strange land" as well as stangers to ourselves, seeing ourselves through the eyes of another. Assuming the perspective of a stranger is an occasion for insight and the sharing of insight. Such cross-cultural interactions build bridges of understanding and action between persons and cultures that make cooperation possible and conquest unnecessary.
"Passing over" short circuits apocalyptic confrontation and inaugurates utopian new beginningsnew beginnings for the "postmodern" world of the coming third millennium. Ghandi and King are symbols of a possible style for postmodern alienated theology. To be an alien is to be a stranger. To be alienated is to be a stranger to oneself. We live in a world of ideological conflict in which far too many individuals (whether theists or a-theists)

practice a centered theology in which they are too sure of who they are and what they must do. Such a world has far too many answers and not nearly enough questions and selfquestioning. A world divided by its answers is headed for an inevitable apocalyptic destiny. However, when we are willing to become strangers to ourselves (or when we unwillingly become so), new possibilities
open up where before everything was closed and hopeless. At the heart of my position is the conviction that the kairos of our time calls forth the badly neglected ethic of welcoming the outcast that underlies the Buddhist tradition. This care for the stranger and the outcast, I shall argue, provides the critical norm for identifying authentic transcendence as

self-transcendence. Centered theologies, whether sacred or secular, theist or a-theist, are ethnocentric theologies that can tolerate the alien or other, if at all, only as a potential candidate for conversion to sameness. Centered theologies are exercises in narcissism that inevitably lead down apocalyptic paths like those that led to Auschwitz and Hiroshima. Why? Because such theologies, whether sacred or secular, cannot permit there to be others in the world whose way of being might, by sheer contrast, cause self-doubt and self-questioning. When as a student I read Paul
Tillich, I found it hard to believe him when he said that the questions were more important than the answers. I was so taken with his answers that I was sure he was just trying to be modest. What really mattered were the answers. Since then, I have come to realize that answers always seem more important and more certain to those who have come by them without wrestling with the questions. I know now that Tillich was quite serious and quite rightthe questions are indeed more important. I have come to find a fullness in the doubts and questions of my life, which I once thought could be found only in the answers. After Auschwitz and Hiroshima, I distrust all final answersall final solutions. Mercifully, doubts and questions have come to be so fulfilling that I find myself suspicious of answers, not because they are necessarily false or irrelevant, but because even when relevant and true they are, and can be, only partial .

It is doubt and questioning that always lures me on to broader horizons and deeper insights through an openness to the infinite that leaves me contentedly discontent. Alienated theology understands doubt and the questions
that arise from it as our most fundamental experience of the infinite. For, our unending questions keep us open to the infinite, continually inviting us to transcend our present horizon of understanding. In a like manner,

the presence of the stranger continuously calls us into question and invites us to transcend the present horizon of the egocentric and ethnocentric answers that structure our personal and cultural identities. An alienated theology understands that only a faith which requires one to welcome the alien or stranger is truly a utopian faith capable of transforming us into new beings who are capable of creating a new world of pluralistic human interdependence. To put it in terms closest to home for myself, as a Christian who seeks to come to grips with Aushwitz in the
light the history of Christan anti-Judaism, I cannot be a Christian except as I am prepared to welcome Jews (and analogously Buddhists or secular humanists, etc.) into my life. The very attempt to convert them would be to destroy the authenticity of my own faith by robbing me of the chance to welcome the stranger (the one who is different from me and a permanent witness of the Wholly Other in my life) who is given to me as an invitation to self-transcendence. For the literal meaning of transcendence is "to go beyond"to go beyond ourselves (individually and communally) as we are to

become something more and something new. To be human is to have a utopian capacity to create new worlds. When we deny ourselves that possibility, we set in motion the seeds of our apocalyptic selfdestruction. The tragedy of human existence revealed by Auhswitz and Hiroshima is that we have continued to misread our situation. Given the opportunity for selftranscendence, the opportunity to be carried beyond ourselves into a

new global human community, we have instead insisted on a technological solution" a MAD (mutual assured destruction) solution. This at best, leads to a global stalemate between cultures

and at worst an attempt at global conquest. In either case we place ourselves under the dark and threatening cloud of a nuclear apocalypse that such a path risks.

The separation of personal ethics from public policy is the only way genocide becomes possible Herbert 2008 (Brent, The Genocidal Mentality, Pt. 1: The 'free market' as genocidal
ideology, http://www.awitness.org/journal/free_market_genocide.html)
In a later book, the Genocidal Mentality, Lifton went on to generalize the workings of a classic genocidal system, that of the Nazis, and apply what was revealed to other prevalent systems of genocide which remain at work on the planet today (his particular interest being the parallels between Nazi genocidal ideology, and the Nuclear Ideology at work in American society today, in which weapons whose only purpose is genocidal slaughter are mystified and mythologized using a process remarkably similar to the process of mystification that infused Nazi society). Genocidal requires a master narrative' which excludes alternative views, and which are crucially sustained by certain psychological mechanisms that protect individual people from experiencing the harmful effects...of their own actions upon others. These mechanisms which blunt human feelings, include dissociation" (the separation of one part of the mind from another) . This leads to doubling', or the existence of two contradictory personalities which exist in one person. One is the genocidal self (a Nazi doctor at work on genocidal duty at death camps) and the other is the real self' (the same Doctor volunteering for a children's charity in the evening, after a long day of killing other people's kids). "Psychic numbing" is "characterized by the diminished capacity to feel, and usually includes separation of thought from feeling...When

doubling enables one, with relatively little psychological cost, to engage in sustained actions that cause harm to others, we may speak of brutalization'." A sense of inevitability, fostered by the power of the state, facilitates the process by "divesting the individual of a sense of responsibility, for destructive collective behavior." So, therefore, Nazi doctors could justify performing cruel
numbing or

experiments on the victims of death camps, using the justification that they are going to die in any case' and therefore it would be a wasted death if they were not made the subjects of experimentation. Nazi concentration camp guards could rationalize their activities in the same way, since if they didn't do it, someone else would.' Genocidal

ideology carries with it a sense of impotence before a mystified, irresistible force, embodied in the machinery of the state. Otherwise
good police officers could become Gestapo officers, and could often even justify their participation in genocide using the rationalization that if good people don't do it, then only the evil will do it, and the results would be much more cruel.' Thus genocidal, brutalizing systems can be rationalized using the familiar refrain about the lesser of two evils' and using this type of thinking

even good people' can become part of the genocidal machine, becoming socialized critics, or protestors working within the system, or even active participants in genocidal activities, using rationalizations about how one must be pragmatic', its going to happen in any case', one must work within the system, to
avoid having the system run by the greater evil' and we have to do it.' Mystification concerning the inevitability of destructive systems of genocide are an important component in getting good people' to do atrociously harmful things. Thus the architects and workers of genocide are found to be not the stereotypical monsters of Hollywood fiction or simplistic history retelling, but rather are ordinary people', well regarded doctors or average police officers who through a process of mystification producing a sense of helplessness' before an irresistible force, through arguments concerning pragmatism' which dilute moral imperatives, and a logic of pursuing the lesser of two evils' become the very monsters' responsible for genocide. That this process is kept hidden by being wrapped in mythologies concerning the purely evil Nazi' is not really a surprise when you stop to consider the constant workings of genocidal ideologies in our world today, and in particular when you come to understand that even today, good people' are committing acts of genocide, as well as acts of ecocide, a process which demystification would make much harder (and which therefore makes this demystification all the more a requirement). By maintaining ignorance concerning the true workings of systems of genocide, by cloaking genocide in dualistic mythologies which paint the workers of genocide as inhuman monsters' unlike the rest of us', such systems remain cloaked in mystification and this process contributes to the forward progress and maintenance of genocidal systems, and also ensures the support of good people' who will not only support the system of genocide, but will also become workers of genocide themselves. Genocidal systems can promote the splitting of the personality into two halves, sometimes one professional (the architect of genocide) and one personal (the family personality). This splitting of the human personality is promoted by genocidal ideology since it is

The central core contradiction of all genocidal ideology is the irreconcilable nature of the belief in killing to heal.' This inconsistency can be found in expressed in the belief that one must build weapons of mass destruction to keep the peace.' Similarly one must kill civilians in warfare to save the nation.' One must destroy the environment to end poverty'. The logic of death and destruction brings renewal
mirrored by the systems of destruction themselves, which are found to be riddled by contradictions and inconsistencies which are impossible to resolve.

and life. One must cause great harm in order to promote the greater good, one must hurt and kill in order to heal. In an extreme case, one must kill Jews to save Germany. Because genocidal ideology is the cause of destructive suffering, it promotes both numbing and derealization' (a failure to experience the suffering being caused as real). In addition their is a curious mix of omnipotence' (the sense of power that comes by taking action, by the killing side of the ideology) combined with a strange sense of impotence (resistance is futile, genocidal systems are inevitable.) Genocidal

systems promote a separate reality, where the doing of evil is removed from the ordinary experience of evil or the ordinary concepts of ethical behavior that would govern the normal self' (as opposed to the genocidal
self) a process which is encapsulated in the rationalizations of participation in known genocidal systems (the system is inevitable, you must be pragmatic and not moral or even worse idealistic or utopian, since nothing can be done, its going to happen in any case, and if you don't do it, someone else will, and you are the lesser of two evils - these trade mark rationalizations are the surest signals that someone is participating in a harmful genocidal system, and since genocide is so pervasive in our society, you hear these sorts of things all the time, since they are a vital component of the process of numbing, of separating intellect from feeling, to allow derealization and facilitate doubling).