21: Nineties / Beginning of Now

Buchanan grew up in a giant family in northwest Washington, D. C., one of nine kids. He and three brothers, born in successive years, formed a posse of brawlers and street fighters, "the scourge of Washington's Catholic community,"

But those early trips with my mom made obvious for me something I’d always known implicitly: that both skateboarding and navigating daily life with a disability involve surprisingly similar ways of engaging with the built environment.

Spaces that are inaccessible are indicative of failures in design rather than the human body, and those failures require creative solutions. It is an idea that is expressed daily by people like my parents.

In an interview in Psychology Today, Ms. Hendren explained that her goal was to create “a weird Venn diagram” between the skateboarding and wheelchair use “because people never think of those two things together.” The skaters, she explained, were seen as executing “this rebellious, athletically virtuosic thing,” while wheelchair users were seen as engaging in “a kind of sad version of not walking.”

You could look at a staircase and say, ‘I can do this one,’ ” she said, “in the same way that I can look at something and tell you exactly whether I’m going to have trouble with it.” In time, navigating the world with my parents helped me grow as a thinker and problem-solver: I learned that sometimes the best solution is an imperfect one, and that few things matter more than the ability to think in the moment, to improvise.

The first curb cuts — friends to users of all wheels — were created in Kalamazoo, Mich., in response to an influx of disabled veterans returning from World War II.

The list goes on: In myriad ways in the past 50 years, disabled citizens and activists have “hacked” the built environment — and the political system — to effect change, including the 1990 passage of the A.D.A., a law that The Times’s Michael Kimmelman wrote “<a class="css-yywogo" href="https://www.curbed.com/2015/7/23/9937976/how-the-americans-with-disabilities-act-transformed-architecture" title="" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">has reshaped American architecture</a> and the way designers and the public have come to think about civil rights and the built world.” That’s radical.

“Bill Clinton and Al Gore represent the most pro-lesbian and pro-gay ticket in history.” And so they do.

The agenda that Clinton &amp; Clinton would impose on America – abortion on demand, a litmus test for the Supreme Court, homosexual rights, discrimination against religious schools, women in combat units – that’s change, all right. But it is not the kind of change America needs. It is not the kind of change America wants. And it is not the kind of change we can abide in a nation that we still call God’s country.

we stand with him against the amoral idea that gay and lesbian couples should have the same standing in law as married men and women.

We stand with President Bush for right-to-life, and for voluntary prayer in the public schools, and we stand against putting our wives and daughter and sisters into combat units of the United States Army. And we stand with President Bush in favor of the right of small towns and communities to control the raw sewage of pornography that so terribly pollutes our popular culture.

There is a religious war going on in this country. It is a cultural war, as critical to the kind of nation we shall be as was the Cold War itself, for this war is for the soul of America.