Supporting Independence for People With Disabilities

0:00 Speaker 1 Sunday Morning. Calling in right now is Heraldo Rivera, a good friend, a great television host, the radio host, and he worked for Fox News for twenty two years and now he’s working with Quest Cuomo at News Nation and we have a charity that we both do along with Bill O’Reilly. Well, Heraldo was good to see you last

0:25 Sunday to help with the charity and tell us about the charity that you’ve been involved in for such a long time.

0:33 Speaker 2 Will do John, I just want to first signals to the audience that you have been enormously generous.

0:39 Speaker 3 And we appreciate it.

0:41 Speaker 2 At Life’s Work over the years, you and Margot have just gone above and beyond and with that kind of support the charity Life’s Work and do.

0:50 Speaker 3 This important, this important job.

0:53 Speaker 2 I’m delighted that I’m teamed up with Bill O’Reilly again.

0:57 Speaker 3 We were together at Fox News, were very lay everybody knows opinion aided, but surprisingly even though our opinions differ a great deal, we get along great and this week we’ll talk about it later, John Bill Ridder, a long time Eyewitness Snooze host, was given an awards over the com Alite Nuns. Bill Ridder given the award for his

1:21 courage coming forward and telling his audience that he has an early stage Alzheimer’s I believe, And you know he’s stepping down from his job as anchorman to buy Witness snooze. So it was an honor to be with him and his wife Kathleen and say hello, but to see you you guys the charity. What we do is we help

1:46 those who might be institutionalized to live as independent living as they can with their families. We work hard to provide services and resources for these families. We have young young, not young anymore. We have people who’ve been with us for decades, for generations, since we busted up will have Brooke that awful place on Staten Island.

2:15 Speaker 1 John Well, I remember the big investigation you did. It seems like such a long time ago, and you exposed some of the ugly things that were going on in Willowbrook, and you were able to put together this charity along with Vicky and now if I remember right when you and Bill O’Reilly were speaking about it, that you’re up

2:45 to almost was it twenty seven buildings or twenty seven centers that are helping people now?

2:52 Speaker 3 More than that?

2:53 Speaker 2 I thought Dicky Schnetz, our delightful, dynamic creator.

2:58 Speaker 3 I thought she said forty four, but it shows that it’s.

3:03 Speaker 2 In the double digit and we’re very proud of it. Every facility, some of them now being as we spoke in the in the event, some being renovated.

3:12 Speaker 3 To make it easy for people with disabilities to get around. You know, it’s funny, John, I’ve been around the scene so long, going back now more than half a century to the Wildbrook days. I still see people on the street, you know, maybe parents with a down syndrome kid, and they look at me. I look at them. We know

3:33 who’s who and the relationships, and it goes back that deep. The roots of this charity are that deep that now we you know, the people are aging out. Some of the old timers we took from Wildburg. They’ve had lives that they would not have had, whole lives and so easy.

3:53 You know, you see a crazy homeless person on the subway, you want to say.

3:57 Speaker 2 Hey, my god.

3:57 Speaker 3 Right the Christians try in an institution, you know, maybe they should be in some kind of facility. But when you see someone who has an obvious disability, like a down center of a person, you know that they they need, they need the resources so they can live independently, that they could live on their own or live at least

4:20 with their parents, but supported by by this wonderful compassionate charity that the emphasizes that they eat. These these folks with disabilities deserve a full life. And then you know there’s a there’s a memo circulating the Justice Department, John, that I hope that you get involved in as you go on. A memo says that the federal government should

4:46 not have any responsibility to support the disabled in their own homes or in their own facilities. That the federal government’s jobs to prevent a discrimination. But that doesn’t equal discrimination. It has for fifty years equals discrimination. But now they were troubled a bid that the federal government might be trying to pull back from support that these parents need

5:11 so desperately to give a full life. City.

5:14 Speaker 1 Well, Araldo, I’m only going to mention one more thing. Somebody in the state government or the city government. And we live in New York right now, is at one time we had twenty eight thousand people in New York in mental institutions and now there’s only about five six seven thousand and That doesn’t mean we’ve cured the other

5:40 twenty thousand, but they’re on the streets in New York or in the subways in New York. And I want to have that discussion with you in the near future because it’s a problem we’re creating for people.

5:54 Speaker 3 I agree with you, it’s a problem that should not exist. But they are also very separate population, and someone who is criminally insane is very different from someone with a disability like downs, and it should be obvious to people if they know. It’s too easy to bunch everybody with a disability in the same basket. But I am acutely

6:15 aware of what you speak of, John, I think it’s a very very important aspect of this whole thing. We cannot allow, you know, people to act out. My own daughter was just on the subway and someone was demanding a lady, old lady demanding money. Uh you know, so my daughter handled it with grace. She pretended that she

6:40 was looking at her at her phone or tablet, and the lady finally went away. But I mean, the scene is su unsebbling, and no one.

6:48 Speaker 1 Likes they Both both sets of people need help. Absolutely. Thank you so much for coming on this Sunday morning. I look forward to seeing you again real Sir John.

6:59 Speaker 3 I look forward to it and thanks Agein for your generosity. Thank you,