Reeve’s celebrity, his experience as an activist and the public sympathy his injury inspires combine to make him a potential juggernaut on behalf of disabled Americans – particularly the 200,000 or so with spinal-cord injuries. It’s a role Reeve has embraced. After all, as he said after his meeting on the Hill, ““either you vegetate and look out the window, or activate and try to effect change.''
Reeve probably hasn’t seen much of his yard lately. He’s argued tirelessly, before legislators and in the press, that an additional $40 million a year spent over the next decade would help him and others leave their wheelchairs forever – and save billions on long-term care. In March, Reeve wrote each member of the Senate and taped a radio spot supporting legislation that would raise caps on health- insurance benefits to a minimum of $10 million. (Reeve’s own primary insurance policy is capped at $1.2 million, and, at his current spending rate, will max out in two years.)
Reeve’s crusade has created ““enormous awareness,’’ says Susan Howley, director of research for the American Paralysis Association, which recently elected Reeve chairman of its board of directors. Besides getting the $10 million pledge from Clinton, Reeve inspired philanthropist Joan Irvine Smith’s donation of $1 million to establish a research center for spinal-cord injuries at the University of California, Irvine. And about 25,000 Good Housekeeping readers have written to Specter’s office urging him to boost funding since Reeve’s appeal appeared in the magazine’s June issue. Many enclosed checks of their own.
By campaigning for a cure, however, Reeve has wheeled himself straight into the middle of a debate among the disabled: should we spend big money seeking cures that may be years or decades off? Or would the disabled be better served if we concentrated our resources on the immediate improvement of their day-to-day lives? ““I’m in favor of research, too,’’ says Cyndi Jones, publisher of Mainstream, a magazine focusing on the rights of the disabled. ““But I’m in favor of research that makes a difference in the lives of people with disabilities as they live them. Things like bowel and bladder function – there’s all kinds of stuff that they could put a little bit of money into.’’ There are also important issues of access, housing and civil rights that many activists for the disabled would prefer Reeve use his stature to address. And then there are those who scoff at the need to be ““cured’’ at all. ““When you say you want to cure me, you’re saying there’s something wrong with me,’’ says Joe Ehman, a disability-rights activist from Rochester, N.Y., who uses a wheelchair because of muscular dystrophy. ““I’m fine. I just get from point A to point B differently than most people.''
Not that a little controversy bothers Reeve. ““We should always remember that when Kennedy promised a man on the moon by the end of the ’60s, many thought that was not only impossible but irresponsible,’’ he told NEWSWEEK. ““Some feel the same way about diseases of the brain and central nervous system, but the information I constantly receiveconvinces me that the push for a cure is reasonable, appropriate and absolutely necessary.’’ As for those who deny anything’s wrong, ““I would hope that with good therapy they would come to realize that they are entitled to much more out of life,’’ he says.
Wheelchair or no, Reeve continues to squeeze the most out of his own days. All of his activism, it’s worth noting, comes on top of an already crowded schedule: he’s done the voice for a character in an animated Warner Brothers film; he’s gearing up to direct an HBO drama; he’ll host the Paralympic Games in Atlanta in August, and he’s writing a book for Random House. We should all be so disabled.
