2:08pm January 21, 2014

➸ The Virtual Gherkin: Sickness and Disability is not a Lifestyle Choice.

People on disability benefits talk about the work they did before acquiring disabilities and chronic illness. These are not people who are refusing to work out of laziness. Although I want to point out that human value is not dependent on paid work and disabled people who have never been able to do paid work deserve respect too.

I never had a full-time job in my life, but everyone who knew me knew I was a hard worker. A lot of my identity was tied up in that. I volunteered in the office of my grade school/middle school, doing tedious stuff that nobody else liked to do, and I loved it. The secretaries told each other I was no trouble and I was a hard worker, and I took pride in it. Later on, I was part of a job program at a residential facility, where I took care of the horses (which includes shoveling their shit and pushing it around in a wheelbarrow), painted the fences and barn, hosed down the driveways, and took care of all the animals on a daily basis, and got paid minimum wage for it. I took a lot of pride in that. Despite my intellectual capabilities in some areas, intellectual work has always been hard to me due to what I’d describe as cognitive stamina issues, but I’ve always managed to do other work as well as I could… until my body started crapping out too.

I get very, very angry when people suggest that I’m out of work because I’m lazy. That I need care around my house because I’m lazy. Because I’ve always been the sort of person who wants to do things on my own, who doesn’t want to owe anyone anything… but that’s not the way my life turned out and I had to learn that everyone is interdependent, even people who consider themselves independent are not. I had to learn that my attitude about being independent as much as possible was not healthy for me or for the people who had to deal with the aftermath of my crashing after I worked too hard. And… yeah, people who call us lazy freeloaders are assholes and dangerous assholes, because they make it hard for us to get the assistance we need.

Bottom line: Everyone needs to survive. And even if some people really were lazy, it would be better to give lazy people (or even outright frauds) benefits, than to assume everyone is lazy and to deny benefits to those who need them.

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