9:23pm July 17, 2014

“In personal relationships and business dealings, you must be a person of honor, integrity, and compassion. But in dealings with the system, you must be a heartless mercenary — a lean, mean, cheating machine with a killer instinct.”

— Barbara Knowlen (via madeofpatterns)

I think I understand some of it.

Basically, when dealing with the system – and here I don’t just mean the disability system but the welfare system the poverty systems in general.  They are set up to make you fail.  So the only possible way for a lot of poor people to make the system work for them is to do stuff that would otherwise be seen as dishonest, underhanded, or unethical.  And as a poor and disabled person who has seen what happens to poor and disabled people who refuse to go that route, I think it's plenty fair to wage war against a system that is basically trying to kill you while claiming it’s helping you.  It’s totally fair to break the rules and lie about it.  The rules  in these cases are there to oppress you, not because the rules are fair and necessary to the running of society.  I have a lot of admiration for people who’ve managed to make the system work for them rather than the other way around, and that’s often accomplished through actions that middle-class people would frown upon – because they’ve never been starving and trying to feed a family of five on minimum wage or less.

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