12:03pm December 15, 2011

What hate can look like

You know it’s bad when something you read on Tumblr gives you nightmares and you wake up furious, with tears all over your cheeks from crying in your sleep.

In this dream I’d been running for public office in a world not that different from this one. I was running because of the inequalities that, just as in the real world, ensured that disabled people were impoverished and dying at higher rates with the whole world saying that nobody hates disabled people, it’s just the natural order of things and disabled people who object are a bunch of whiners who want something for nothing.

There’s a lot of cultural customs in the dream world that weren’t the same as the real life USA so I’m not going to focus on those except when they highlight some real point.

I’d been going to go to some kind of event for candidates but I found my way being blocked at every turn.

They put me through what had been going to be a lengthy physical exam, but stopped at the first part. The measurements taken of my legs showed some incredibly subtle physical sign of the reason I almost needed a leg brace and did need physical therapy in infancy (in real life too). They said this was an immediate disqualification from even running for office.

I tried to tell them it wasn’t ethical on any level to put an arbitrary physical standard on who could run for office. I was outraged that they’d patronized me by letting me think I could ever run, when they knew the physical criteria were such that a full time powerchair user could never hope to run even if they hadn’t found the much subtler leg deformity.

They told me that the criteria weren’t unfair in any way, certainly not oppressive. Nobody hated disabled people after all. They were just acknowledging certain truths about the world. We would never be able to do what nondisabled people could do. That meant if we held office we put everyone at risk. And that wasn’t fair to everyone else. Those of us who objected only wanted special rights, we were already equal after all.

At one point one of them somehow towed my powerchair away when I was outside of it. Forcing me to use a crappy manual one that hurt even to sit down in, and get pushed by someone. I was trying to get to an event for candidates I’d been told I shouldn’t even try to go to because of steps at the door. I went in my manual chair anyway. The “steps” were really a single step so tiny practically all chair users could get over it.

With friends I stormed into the building and began a loud protest of everything that happened. I was ostensibly welcomed. They acted like the protest was cute, something a child might think up. They told me how inspiring I was even after I’d said “fuck inspiration, we demand equality”.

One woman saw an exaggerated (compared to real life) bit of evidence of how sloppy and uncouth I was: A shirt I once wore plastered with oatmeal. In real life what happens is smaller but similar. The woman led the group in explaining to me why this shirt proved I was childish and incapable of ever functioning in adulthood let alone in office. I was humiliated and crying but everyone acted as if it was all totally within their rights to do this. Every objection I had was instantly shot down as irrational and childlike. Because rational mature people always excluded us, and this was inherent in the very definition of work.

The dream only got weirder and more fucked up from there. At every level possible in this dream, I was being oppressed at every turn by people who swore they couldn’t be oppressing me because they didn’t hate me.

Here’s the thing:

Hate isn’t a special extra strong kind of anger.

Hate is – among other things – the desire that someone else not exist. It’s not any less hateful when it comes with a smile, a pat on the head, a sugary voice. Hate isn’t an emotion, it’s an action and a state of being.

When people say lives like mine are not worth living, that’s hate.

When people create arbitrary standards to shut people like me out, that’s hate.

When a society bends over backwards to meet the needs of some people, while calling the needs of other people special, unnecessary to meet… the kind of thing that’s just optional, something to if anything be dealt with on a personal level, never a societal one (because that would take effort and change), that’s hate.

When most people get acres to play around in and disabled people get one square foot each. And where nondisabled people get to step into our square foot when they want. But our every millimeter out of line is met by all hell breaking loose because we are just too damn demanding – that’s hate.

When I go to the emergency room and they don’t want to treat me because they have real people they want to treat. People who have some chance of quality of life, you know. People who don’t look like they (in the words of an actual guy at the ER, about me) “have the cognitive functioning of an infant”. That’s hate.

When actual murderers of people like me get all the sympathy because they were already sentenced to live with us? That’s hate.

And so much, much more.

It doesn’t matter if hate looks like anger or like pity or like apathy or like sweetness and light. It’s still hate. It still says, forcefully enough that we die all the time, “don’t exist, you’re not worth what we are”.

And I don’t have the time to waste on people who refuse to acknowledge that any of this is real. I have a life to protect – to protect at all times because very few other people are willing to protect what they see as a costly and fruitless life. But damn it I’m still here and I’m going to stay here as long as I can no matter how many people can’t see the forces trying to erase me. And I’m not talking metaphoric erasing here. I’m talking forces that don’t want me or anyone remotely like me to exist. If you can’t perceive them and insist they’re not there – you’re working for them.

Notes: