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1:43pm November 29, 2011

Disability oppression is life and death

This is part two of my responses to Thrown Out of the Citizen Ship by Dave Hingsburger. This one’s even more important to me than my first response. Because this is what I live every day, this is what I’m aware of every single day, and most people, even many disabled people, push this reality away because it’s too scary and they can’t handle it. But it’s very real. Especially if you’re in the combination of circumstances I’m in. Or even worse circumstances, of which there are plenty. Anyway here’s what I wrote – like the other part, it wasn’t planned, it just came out when I read the article:

And I don’t think I will ever in my lifetime know the safety that comes from knowing that anyone – anyone at all no matter their relationship to me – who kills me will ever be thought wrong to do it. It’s always right to someone – whether supposedly out of “mercy” to me, to my family, to caregivers (who for me aren’t family and likely can’t ever be), to society as a whole, or whoever. There will always be a justification for me to be dead and I have to go every fricking day knowing this and knowing that most people either don’t know, refuse to know, don’t care, or some combination. And so every time I land in the ER I have to hope they see treating me as worth it (have the lung damage to prove they haven’t in the past), and every time i get a new caregiver I have to hope they’re not one of those ones that would deliberately kill (has been attempted already, can’t say it won’t again). Or through negligence (I’ve lost count of the close calls). And given the way my particular body works I’m in a number of groups of disabled people at higher risk for this crap. I can’t move to another country at present because of having no money for it, and immigration laws that restrict people based on disability and employability. And leaving the country won’t do me any good because in all my research I’ve never found a safe country for people like me. (And if there were they probably wouldn’t accept people seeking asylum because of disability prejudice – that’s pretty much unheard of.)

The scariest part? I know all this – and know exactly how hated people like me are on so many levels (whether the hatred is disguised or not) – and I’m used to it. I’m used to accepting a potentially greatly reduced lifespan not because of my body (which may be a factor) but because where I live people like me die every day from either lack of medical care or lack of any income at all (which are just as bad as more overt hate crimes). And because with economic and environmental catastrophe I expect this to become more the norm not less. Mind you I don’t accept that it is okay. Ever. Will fight it with everything in me. But accept that it may happen? Yes, I’ve made what peace I can with that, and not even on purpose, it just seemed more and more likely. There are just too many subgroupings within disabled people that I fit, and too much prejudice in the world interacting with those subgroupings and other aspects of my life, that I’ll be amazed if I survive. This isn’t giving up, not even close, it’s just awareness of the odds and how narrowly I’ve already beat the odds how many times already, often just by a hair, one tiny variable changed and I wouldn’t be here. And the older I get the closer together these near misses happen. I’m only 31.