7:48pm January 21, 2014

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

youneedacat:

wackyshenanigans:

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.

The latest hateful meme I’ve been hearing in the USA is that disability benefits are the ‘new welfare,’ as unemployment payments run out or are cut off. …As if people are becoming disabled by choice (I guess the idea is that it’s easy to successfully fake it). So, the next program to be vilified and put on the chopping block seems clear.

I think I was lucky to graduate from college before my functionality finally fell apart (I’d been having cognitive & physical problems for years). It was a somewhat fru-fru school and I majored in something that people find overly impressive. If I’d flunked out it would’ve been hard to shake the “lazy, just doesn’t want to work” assumption. Since I didn’t, it was “someone this smart and ambitious is probably not faking it.,” when the only real difference was six months.

It *is* twisted what people are put through because most of the worry is that some tiny fraction might be cheating the system. I read the UK’s system found a rate of fraud of 0.5%, but with how people talk you’d think it was 75%.

Honestly if disability benefits were really “the new welfare”, the problem would be that people couldn’t get welfare easily, not that people were faking disability (and yes, it’s not that easy, for most people). I remember seeing an interview with someone who was actually faking disability benefits because otherwise she’d have to work in a horribly dangerous work environment that could result in death or actual disability, and I couldn’t bring myself to be pissed off at her, only at a system that forced people to make such choices. Because if you need the tiny amount of money that disability actually pays you, then disability is not the problem. And I have a feeling that one reason people don’t like the idea of people being guaranteed a livable income, is that otherwise people would have to be paid the amount of money their job was worth, in order to be enticed into such horrible dangerous work as many low-wage no-benefits jobs are.

Pointing our fingers at even the actual frauds that rarely exist, is just a way of saying “Yes, it’s okay that people go hungry, work dangerous jobs, end up homeless, can’t feed their children, etc. It’d be better if that situation continued, than people get benefits they ‘don’t deserve’. People don’t, after all, deserve a basic standard of living.”

And that goes back to the whole idea of the deserving poor and the undeserving poor.

For more on the history of this issue and 'debate’, I strongly recommend reading disability historian Paul Longmore’s book, Why I Burned My Book and Other Essays on Disability. It’s $15.37 on Kindle but right now there’s a used paperback for $3.38 on Amazon, so it’s semi-affordable for a lot of people. It traces these 'debates’ back to the Poor Laws.