Please allow me to comment briefly on another aspect of this unfortunate encounter: the reliability of eye-witness testimony and the nature of oral history.
1. Each person sees activities within their own perceptual and conceptual framework; the technical words for this phenomenon are "perceptual set" and "conceptual set". Basically this means is what each person senses and conceives when they witness something is influenced by what they know from past experiences, acquired knowledge, and by various emotive aspects of what they sense , i.e. personal prejudices.
Some of those who took a philosophy class from me will remember the telling experiment: A group of drama students would burst unannounced into the classroom and perform some disruptive activity of short duration and then leave. Students were asked to immediately write down what they witnessed. Sometimes the incident was videotaped.
The results were astounding to most students as the accounts varied in fundamental ways very greatly. Those that much later [see below] viewed the video tape were even more astounded. Perhaps very disturbing was that during the course of teaching classes and using this technique several law enforcement officers were among the students. In general, their powers of observation [and memory] were not any better than most other students.
2. The original immediate memory of what was witnessed is modified through time greatly by various kinds of post-processing; this post-processing is again determined by prior personal experiences, knowledge, prejudices, and memory decay.
With respect to the experiment above, sometimes the whole class or selected students were asked again to describe the incident several weeks later. The later accounts were compared to the earlier ones. Astonishment (and a great deal of denial from some students) occurred, especially when the accounts were compared to the videotape of the incident. [Several students accused me of altering the video tape just to make their perceptions/memories look wrong; each of these insisted, however, the videotape was altered in a different way from that which each of the other protestors insisted it was altered.]
There has been lots of work done on the problem of eye-witness testimony. Those interested can Google '"eyewitness testimony" reliability' to access much further material.
Perhaps it is important to keep the above in mind in evaluating the accounts of the incident at Archie's and the various discussions which have ensued. Unless the incident was videotaped, it will be very difficult to determine what really happened, although a skilled, careful investigator might be able to isolate the parts of the differing accounts that agree and disagree, and also isolate some of the factors that may help explain the different viewpoints.
For my part I am continually thankful when I see disabled persons, especially those that need continual care just to perform the ordinary processes of everyday life, that there are people who will patiently care for them, who are tolerant of their disabilities, and also very thankful that I am not so afflicted.
There is a man now in Moscow who is not only wheelchair bound, but whose mental abilities seem to have become greatly diminished. I am very, very sad when I see him. When we first moved to Moscow over 17 years ago, this man was a very bright, intelligent, charming, active, athletic, and lively person. There for circumstances of life might be any of us, now or in the future.
When dealing with persons with disabilities perhaps it is important to try to see the world as they might, to try to understand the problems they face that we don't, and to try to treat them with at least a little understanding and compassion.
Wayne A. Fox
1009 Karen Lane
PO Box 9421
Moscow, ID 83843
(208) 882-7975
waf at moscow.com
----- Original Message -----
From: Robbie
To: vision2020 at moscow.com
Sent: Monday, March 26, 2007 11:17 AM
Subject: [Vision2020] Archies on the Square
Good morning all, I got the following email this morning and thought that I would share it with you all.
<><><><><><><><><><>
I'm sending this to friends I believe have a bit of activist in them, in hopes you might want to join us next Sunday around 9:00 a.m.
Here's the situation as written to me by Amanda, Tom's wife. " Tom and Dan went to Archie's on the Square for breakfast last Sunday March 18, 2007, when they were being escorted to their table, there was a gentleman who appeared to be the cook, talking to a couple . Dan stopped and tapped him on the shoulder, and began signing to him he was
there to eat with Tom and was excited about being there. The gentleman turned to Tom and said "can you take care of this now" Tom went over and escorted Dan over to the table. When the gentleman ended his conversation with the coulpe he then proceeded to tell Tom "this is bad for my business my friend." Tom and Dan left and went and had breakfast
at The Breakfast Club.
After Dan and Tom finished breakfast Tom decided to call Archie's to give the person the benefit of the doubt that maybe he was just having a bad day. A woman answered and said Archie was too busy and Tom explained why he was calling, explained to her about the
incident earlier and he was thinking about writing a letter to the editor. She asked him to hold, went and got the owner, and it turned out that the same person involved above was in fact the owner [the cook who had them leave]. Tom went over the incident with this gentleman expressing how rudely Dan was treated this morning. The gentleman said
"your friend was the one who was rude, for all I know he was drunk!" Tom said he was not drunk, he has a disability, the owner said "then he should wear a damn sign around his neck to identify himself." Tom then told him he had no choice but to write a letter to the editor about the way he treats people with disabilities and he told Tom "I DON'T
GIVE A SHIT, WRITE TWO!" then hung up on Tom.
Tom let me know late this last Friday that he and Dan were going back to Archie's on the Square Sunday morning, taking a couple of signs and protesting the treatment of this young man, hoping he would come out and apologize for his behavior. I joined him, along with a few other friends. Archie stood inside his restaurant and flipped us the bird, came out and told us we need to come back every Sunday, as we'd really increased his business. So we'll go back next Sunday, but I'm sure this time we'll be better organized, and we'll see if we can get a bigger show of support from our community, see if we can get KLEW to come up, and see if Evan will come from the radio station to cover it to get some exposure. We'll also get a letter to the editor going, and I know Frank McGovern is working on something for the Argonaut.
We talked with one of his waitstaff, who was very upset saying "it this how you integrate people who have disabilites?" Later she came back out to talk, calmed down, and realized this is an issue of discrimination and human rights. She said in Archie's "defense" that he's 'old and cranky, and from California where they don't have people who have disabilities.'
What??
Anyway, I hope you can come, and that you'll spread the word.
You know how we love those windmills.
Written by Tom Hopper, Amanda Hopper and Valerie Cutshall
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