3:26pm December 18, 2011

Across The Divide part eight

[This is Part Eight of Across The Divide, a long article I’m breaking up into sections so it’s more manageable.  Please read the parts in order so it will make sense. Here are the links to the other parts:   Part One, Part Two, Part Three, Part Four, Part Five, Part Six, Part Seven, Part Eight (you are here).]

So when people say my pain would be the same if ableism were removed, I doubt them.  I already deal better with things like physical pain, communication problems, and living my life from bed, than people who see themselves as entitled to a nondisabled body and all that comes with it.  If I had been prepared for these possibilities and how to deal with them from birth?  If the difficult side of these things was treated by everyone around me as just as much part of the difficulties in a regular life as relationship problems?  If people truly recognized today-nondisabled people’s impairments as impairments, and as non-universal ones at that?  If people truly recognized the good side of the conditions now seen as purely impairment?  If people understood that for many things, strengths and weaknesses are unbreakably bound together?  All these things, and so much more, tied together as part of how societies in the world in general dealt with disability (despite obvious differences in how different societies would weight different things and carry them out)?

Can anyone really tell me they are sure that if all that happened, then their experiences of physical and emotional pain would be the same?  Because I can already see that relatively small changes in these things create large results.  Even larger changes would make our current experiences of disability unrecognizable.

Removing ableism isn’t about changing lots and lots of words around. It’s not about creating the ultimate ideology and shoving it down people’s throats until your “anti-ableist” crap starts twisting around to result in damage or death to actual disabled people.  It’s not about creating new “models” of disability, even if those are sometimes helpful on a really simplistic level.

It’s about really and truly and fully valuing us as equals within the human race, and going from there.  And believe me truly getting what that entails is a lifelong process.  Because if people saw us as equals already then most of what we believe and do, not just about disabled people but about all people, would be changed on levels that few of us can even begin to imagine.  

And it can’t just be segmented off into doing this for one group of people, because how societies treat disabled people are tangled up in knots with how we treat all other people, oppressed or not, and because disabled people also face oppression in other areas.  Most people seem to veer off from this part into memorizing a bunch of “social justice” ideologies and jargon for each oppressed group.  Please don’t.  Ideologies will never solve oppression, they just twist it into new forms.  

You have to start from the roots, not tangle webs of ropes in the branches and yank them until they fall off and call that progress.  So in the end we all have to dig deep into ourselves and the world around us and try to act on the values that we find there.  And try not to fall into the trap of assuming that the changes we seek will be simple to plan, simple to implement, and simple to imagine the scope of the consequences.

Somehow, I’m not staring across the divide any more.  My cat and I are curled up against the memory of the roots of the Mother Tree, and my human friend and all her cats are here with us.  The divide still exists, but whether I can say or understand a single word or concept or not, there are people here with me, on the same side. And I don’t have to see, to look at them.

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