When We Make People Invisible, We Lose our Humanity

What disability integration taught me in 6th grade — and how Rock Island keeps her spirit

In sixth grade at Eugene Field Elementary School, I had the job of grinding a classmate’s food so he could eat lunch with the rest of us. Born with a severe form of cerebral palsy, he needed help eating, and our school invited his peers—children—to step into that role. I can still feel the small hand-crank grinder in my palms, see the food softening as I worked, and remember lifting the spoon toward his mouth, a moving target because of his involuntary spasms.

The first day I helped, I felt queasy—at the smells of blended food, the saliva that spilled from his mouth, the collective gaze of the cafeteria settling on us. But by the second day, the discomfort evaporated. What remained was connection. What had initially triggered my animal instinct toward aversion transformed into something deeper: recognition, tenderness, and the understanding that care is something we learn through practice.

What I didn’t know then was that this small daily ritual was only possible because a revolution had taken place just a decade earlier—a revolution that invited me to a table set by public policy.

A World Before Inclusion

Before 1975, most children with disabilities were barred from public schools—kept at home, kept out of sight, kept out of the community. Until 1974, cities across America enforced “Ugly Laws,” making it illegal for “any person who is diseased, maimed, mutilated or deformed in any way… to expose himself or herself to public view.”

Disability wasn’t just marginalized. It was criminalized.

This practice mirrored “sundown towns,” where local ordinances—persisting even after the Civil Rights Movement—made it illegal to be Black or brown in public after sunset.

I was born in 1980 and entered school in a different world—one shaped by parents, advocates, and disabled people who refused invisibility. Eugene Field became the district’s model for integration, where students with disabilities learned alongside their peers instead of being separated from them. That experience shaped me profoundly, though I didn’t understand how deeply until adulthood.

An Invitation to Love

Children don’t arrive in the world knowing how to respond to human frailty or difference. I watched my own daughter stare at someone in a wheelchair and hesitate to touch her great-grandmother’s skin, which resembled living tissue paper over bones and blue veins.

These reactions are developmentally normal—they are signals of curiosity and overwhelm, not cruelty. And it is our job, as adults and as a society, to help children understand those feelings, to invite them to move toward compassion rather than away from it.

Rock Island has given my children that invitation.

My daughter has long since grown out of her early avoidance and now participates in The Penguin Project, a beautiful collaboration between Augustana College and the Center for the Living Arts. Soon, they will be featured in the PBS documentary I AM disABLEd, produced by Fresh Films here in Rock Island. Penguin Project pairs children living with disabilities (Artists) with peer Mentors, and together they put on a full musical production. The performances feel like a glimpse of heaven—joy, community, and belonging radiating from the stage.

She has been paired with the same Artist for two years now. Last year, they attended “Night to Shine,” a prom for young people with disabilities hosted at Heritage Church. It is impossible to witness these events and not feel that this is the world we should all want to live in and contribute toward.

And all this magic happens in Rock Island. Because of course it does.

A Disturbing Trend: Disappearing People by Disappearing Words

In Rock Island, Skip-a-Long Daycare is partnering with Friendship Manor Nursing Home to provide an innovative, intergenerational child-development program. The partnership—unique in the United States—aims to strengthen social and emotional bonds across age, culture, and socioeconomic status.

Loving our neighbors at the local level is becoming harder because of federal policy preferences. As part of an ongoing lawsuit, Head Start shared a list of roughly 200 words that the federal government demanded they remove from their grant applications in order to receive funding. Words such as:

• disability

• Black

• women

• tribal

• LGBT

• inclusion

• accessible

• empathy

• equity

• trauma

• vulnerable

Read the NPR Story Here

Erasing the words does not erase the people—it erases our responsibility to them.

Pair this with the dismantling of the Department of Education—responsible for enforcing disability rights—and the rapid expansion of school-choice programs that prioritize private schools, exempt from disability accommodations, and the pattern becomes clear.

In America, exclusion is trending. We are teaching preschoolers that their empathy is toxic rather than divine.

Policies that normalize discrimination and dehumanization are gaining traction. And once a society decides it no longer needs to protect children with disabilities, all bets are off.

The Gift of Being Seen

The classmates I grew up with are adults now. Many still live in Rock Island, even if their needs have changed. Last weekend, the Martin Luther King Jr. Community Center hosted an emergency winter shelter with Project NOW. Nearly half of the guests—49%—had a physical or mental disability.

I think of St. John’s Lutheran Church in Rock Island. Every Sunday, residents from the ARC of the Quad Cities join worship. Their voices rise with the congregation; their joyful interruptions feel like part of the liturgy. When I attend church elsewhere, I miss those sounds—the man who reads aloud half a beat behind everyone else. That, to me, is what “a place for all people” sounds like.

A church is a place where people with disabilities are seen and held with care. A street, a doorway, a bus stop—those same people may suddenly become invisible or disposable, especially when labeled “homeless” or “poor.” The label dissolves the concern that would otherwise be instinctive.

Disability and homelessness are inextricably linked. When a city sends a message that homelessness is unwanted, it sends a message that disability is unwanted.

Rock Island is home to The Third Place QC, Christian Care, Project NOW, and The Nest Café. In Rock Island, we create spaces where visibility is not only allowed but welcomed—because we know that staying stuck in the spiritual maturation of a four-year-old is no way to build a community.

What Some Rock Island Politicians Are Forgetting

What some of our politicians forget is that so many Rock Islanders choose this city because of its compassion—because here, we get to live in community with the whole world, not tucked away in sanitized pockets protected from anyone struggling or different. That is our strength, not our weakness.

Alderman Dylan Parker recently said, “The demand that Rock Island warehouse the Quad Cities’ poor is apparent.” He imagines he is setting a firm boundary with surrounding cities, protecting downtown from a “concentration of poverty.” But instead, he bends toward the worst instinct in modern politics: identify an “other,” blame them for the system’s failures, and then begin the work of relocating the vulnerable—modeling that disgust, not compassion, is the proper civic response.

When I first met Christie Adamson from The Third Place QC, I still carried that reflexive question: Why Rock Island? Why us?  Why should we be the place providing emergency overflow shelter?

She told me that her life is made better every day by being with unhoused people. In other words, her life is made better every day by being with adults with disabilities and other people experiencing homelessness. I didn’t understand that until I spent more time at The Third Place and allowed proximity to change me again, just as it did in childhood. The unfamiliar became familiar. The instinct to look away dissolved. What remained was humanity.

Sometimes I wonder whether parents at Eugene Field resisted the inclusion program. It required more resources, more attention, more patience for students who were not going to compete academically in conventional ways. Did parents ask why their children should share classrooms with classmates who needed more than they could give?

I like to believe parents and leaders sat around a table and decided that it is right and good and worthy to care for people who rely on others to survive—in ways that are humane, safe, just, and rooted in dignity.

When I was invited to the table to “help” my peer in sixth grade, I received far more than I gave. When my daughter rehearses with her Artist for Penguin Project, she comes home a happier, healthier kid. And every volunteer who showed up at last weekend’s shelter left with more peace, perspective, and purpose.

As Rock Islanders, we value living in a city where mutual aid exists alongside economic development and clean streets and quality roads. It is not a choice between compassion and economic development. It is a both/and. Social entrepreneurship is part of Rock Island’s brand.

The demand for compassion is not coming from outside. It is coming from within our city.

Leadership Sets the Tone for Who Belongs

The conversation around homelessness has expanded into housing, and some city officials are now maneuvering to reduce housing options and essential services as a way to push poor and disabled people out of Rock Island.

How uninspired.

How unimaginative.

How depressingly familiar.

The 1950s called—they’d like their redlining back.

I reject the argument that economic development requires “deconcentrating the poor.” In this country, “removing the poor” has always meant removing disabled neighbors, elderly neighbors, Black and brown neighbors, mentally ill neighbors, and people whose lives don’t fit neatly into a developer’s spreadsheet.

And yet, Rock Island has something the rest of the Quad Cities does not: an emerging economy of love. Visionary local leaders are already modeling what social entrepreneurship looks like—work rooted in dignity, care, and the belief that belonging is a form of infrastructure.

As AI and automation transform the workforce, more and more people will be deemed “economically obsolete.” We must decide now whether human value is tied to productivity—or rooted in something sacred and shared.

Leadership and public policy will determine whether our moral circle shrinks or expands. Every one of us should be asking:

When my industry disappears, when my job evaporates, when my health declines, or when my child is born with a disability—what kind of world will I wish we had built?

It was policy that integrated classrooms. Policy that opened doors. Policy that allowed me, a sixth grader, to sit at a lunch table and feed a boy whose presence changed the architecture of my heart.

And now, in contrast to who we are, it is public policy in Rock Island—the social service licensing ordinance—that makes it harder to act on our instinct to care for our most vulnerable. That ordinance contributed to a moment when I was forced to drop a blind man and a developmentally disabled woman at an emergency room because no shelter in our region had room to receive them. Some have insisted, "well, why doesn't Moline take them," to which I respond, I don't live in Moline - I live in Rock Island.

A policy that restricts compassion is not neutral; it produces harm.

We need leadership willing to insist that the people easiest to overlook are, in fact, the people who strengthen our city. Because expanding access and rights for marginalized neighbors isn’t an act of charity. It is a profound investment in our collective humanity.

We stand at a crossroads. We will either expand the circle of belonging—creating safety, opportunity, and dignity as we enter the next era—or we will build a society of identification, detention, and disappearance. A world where those with resources barricade themselves behind gates while entire industries arise to manage and contain those left outside.

A community that disappears its vulnerable members loses its soul.But a community that embraces visibility—messy, imperfect, deeply human visibility—grows stronger, braver, and more whole.

I’ve been told, “If you build it, they will come,” as though providing services to unhoused neighbors will summon an unmanageable influx. I believe the opposite. Rock Island can build a table that, like the one set for me in sixth grade, offers people a chance to experience a community they didn’t know they needed until they sat down at it.

That is how you build identity. That is how you build loyalty. And that is how you draw the kind of developers who aren’t here for a quick extraction through tax incentives—those same incentives born from the poverty they now point to with blame—but those who want to join a city choosing to carve a compassionate path through an increasingly cruel world.

I invite you to a Rock Island revolution. This table is big enough for everyone.