12d • General discussion
44. part Collision with the Polish Hell…
(My Life – from my subjective point of view)
The Signum Association – Integrating the Disabled with the Able-Bodied – operated together with the Apple Club. I promoted my concept of minority instead of disability, also in terms of logic and set theory. With horror I observed that the majority simply could not grasp that logic and the idea of sets containing one another.
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But never mind – I was patient and organized numerous events, gatherings, and trainings. For me this was in no way a money-making activity. More and more people with kinetic disabilities became interested in IT and working with computers. I myself worked mainly on an IBM AT computer. I gave my legendary Apple, along with the disk drives and printer, to one of the disabled people.
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I remember a woman with a disabled son contacting us. She lived on the 9th floor at Aspekt Street in Warsaw and said she had no family, that she was completely on her own, and that for 19 years she had not been able to take her son for a walk because she could not carry him up and down by herself, and the building had no elevator on every floor – so he would have to be carried half a floor. She said that neighbors had once helped, but for 19 years she had been unable to persuade anyone to help.
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It was a very specific neighborhood. Former prisoners had once been settled there, and municipal apartments were assigned to people being displaced from the Praga district. In a word – not the most interesting area. We sent someone to verify what the woman had told us. Everything checked out. The guy I sent even tried talking to the woman’s neighbors. From one he heard that he didn’t give a damn about some disabled brat, from another that for money why not, he could carry the boy up and down, from yet another that he should stop wasting his time with such nonsense. Well – that was also part of the world we lived in.
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I remember we moved heaven and earth to swap that apartment for another one, at least on the ground floor. After many efforts we succeeded, and they really did move to Przasnyska Street in Warsaw, in the Żoliborz district, into a ground-floor apartment, even with a small garden.
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I went around to many companies with proposals for them to support us or at least donate some older computers to our disabled members. Unfortunately these efforts were in vain. No one was interested in the fate of the association or the disabled – with two exceptions over more than five years. First, the then-president of PZU gave me 5,000 zlotys for an integration trip, and second, Ryszard Kajkowski, who ran the company CSK – Computer Studio Kajkowski, donated three Lidia computers, which were Apple clones.
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Years later it turned out that this aroused envy and jealousy among some members of the Association. We were not able to provide computers or apartments for everyone. I was becoming increasingly tired of my activities.
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First: because of the absolute media silence. I could not understand why no journalist had ever written a single good word (except for some one local neighborhood paper) about the Association’s activities, not to mention my earlier work for the deaf. And it was not about popularity – I already had that and used it in my programs to promote my ideas. It was about sharing and spreading activities for the benefit of the disabled and the new trends I was proposing.
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Not a single journalist in Poland, not a single psychologist, not a single educator showed any interest in the topics mentioned. I felt completely alone in all of this. Only later would I fully learn and make use of the mechanisms governing the media in Poland.
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Second: tensions were growing inside the Association – why did X get a computer and not Y, how much is Tymochowicz making off us and what is he doing with all that supposedly huge money? This also accumulated with the attitude not so much of many of the disabled themselves, but more of their parents. I did not expect any great gratitude or recognition, but at least some minimal help with organizational matters. Instead I ran into an unbelievable sense of entitlement on the part of the parents of disabled children.
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I remember the complaints of several of them at one of the gatherings – why was everything taking so long and why hadn’t we arranged meals for their children. I politely explained that we were in the center of Warsaw and that there was no shortage of bars and restaurants nearby. In response I heard that it was my damn – yes, they said – damn duty to organize free meals for them, because after all I was certainly making a fortune off all of them.
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That became the proverbial last straw. Not only was I spending my own private money organizing many things, not only was I donating my time and energy charitably, but on top of that came a litany of accusations similar to those that Marek Kotański had been subjected to.
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At the next gathering I recounted all those conversations, told them straight what I thought about the whole thing, and therefore – I said – there was nothing for me to do here anymore, I was resigning from further cooperation, and I was leaving them all the right to use the Signum name and the Apple Club.
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Many disabled people and activists said goodbye to me with tears in their eyes. As I had suspected, no one continued either the club or the association, even though director Jasiuk was still ready to provide the halls of the Museum of Technology free of charge.
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We remained in regular contact, by the way. Sometimes he invited me to various elite artistic events where I met Professor Bardini and many of the actors and writers of that time.
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That was the end of my adventure with charitable activity – although later, when I was running my own company, I repeatedly helped various people free of charge. Soon I would witness the shocking story of the founding of the Prokom company, I would also meet Solorz-Żak before his period of greatness, and many other people who later became well-known.
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44. part Collision with the Polish Hell…
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