Some hard truths about disablity activism.

 

 This is going to be a difficult post, to write as it is about the core of why I started the blog and it was about having something to work towards but I have discovered something, that I didn’t want to confront.  This is because disability despite international advancements still has a lot of stigma around it and stigma against people with disabilities.   

I realize that there are programs to be able to help people with disabilities but in the short term, we have seen that people seem to get jealous when we level the playing field. I see that we do have things like the Americans with disabilities act, and we also have the anti-discrimination act in Australia but then when tempered with things such as “reasonable risk,” and “ the inherent ability to the job” we see that this could be considered code for people with disabilities to be not able to do the job when there are many people with disabilities that are able to work with a little bit of an adjustment.

I  now see that disability isn’t a topic that is able to be talked about and people don’t want to be able to accept that disability is normal and that we need to be able to have a rational discussion about disability in the modern context.   I come from a conservative viewpoint but have the view of live and let live.

 However, I see that people are scared of disability and us being open about disability and the ability to understand that our struggles are real and that they aren’t perceived as real, and that really harms people and I am not talking about microaggressions, that is something that we can brush off but I am talking about real abuse that isn’t taken seriously. Such as being coerced into paying for things that a caregiver should be able to be reasonably able to provide for themselves, such as lunch, and dinners, or should be given by the company as part of a compensation package.

I see that online there are many disability “activists” but I also see that some don’t seem to have the same level of the lived experience of disability and don’t understand it or are faking it for views and we now know that social media and being  “terminally online” can be a massive issue to the point that it can cause brain damage.  I find that people are also less tolerant of “diverse wording” and I have coped with flack online for using terms that in my part of the world are not considered offensive and  I feel that I don’t need to adjust my words for an international audience, and I feel that my values would be compromised if I did. 

This harm is underrecognized at an international level due to people not wanting to report it to authorities due to the fact that in some cases they might be harmed by the law enforcement that is supposed to protect them.   Or in some cases the people who are meant to be able to care for them.  This is what I now see as the difficult things that we need to discuss as disability is not a cute topic to talk about it’s difficult and there is a lot of “ in fighting” and people who have made it their job to be an activist.

  I don’t consider myself to be an “activist”  but more an educator as I have seen far too many people who are “activists” get radicalized and can’t see others’ points of view, and being able to meet in the middle to find good solutions to complex problems.

It is here where the “ true activists” are separated from those who have been radicalized because they need to belong to something, to me I have some hallmarks of those who give disability activists a bad name, however,

 these are what give most activists  a bad name and this is something that we need to talk about that there is bad representation of disability through a higher socioeconomic class that is unrelatable to  people who are the majority of people with disability and through being an activist they have made it into a job so they need to create problems to solve instead of working with grassroots organisations they  

·       They believe that disability is an excuse for everything and they don’t accept self-accountability for their actions to the ability they are able to understand them

 

·       They believe that they speak for all people with disability because they have a child or a sibling with a disability, while these do have their place the people with disabilities that speak out against this cop flack for the simple reason that these people are so used to advocating for one person with a disability they believe they have a right to advocate for everyone with a disability without realizing how tone deaf this is.

 

 

·       They don’t accept that some people just don’t want to accept that disabilities do exist and that it’s something that could happen to them, they believe that an institutional approach is the best approach, while in some cases this is true but in others, this can cause profound harm due to being isolated from the outside world.

 

·       Or as mentioned earlier they are faking it for views and this is what has made me make the blog a success so much harder as I don’t “present” as disabled, and in technical terms, I am high functioning meaning that I need less care than other people, but I still need a very low level of help, to live a normal life and this means living where I have access to support. 

 

·       Or they believe that disability needs to be cured and while there is medical advancements over time this is telling us that we need to be “fixed” to be valuable to our society while minimizing the fact that many people with disabilities work and that many people with disabilities fill roles that if they where paid the charities they work for might not be able to afford what they are able to do for free or a subsidized wage.

The problem that I see with those who are activists are they are very extreme in their views and call out simple ignorance as ablism many people have so much going on in their lives they don’t need to be worried about offending people and to be effective as an educator you need to be willing to offend some people.  This means that you need to take a stance and my stance is that disability activists need to have a lived experience of disability and be considerate of those who care for people with disabilities both paid and unpaid as they are underrepresented in activism or over-represented as well as listening to the voices of siblings of people with disabilities.     

 

I know that this post will cause division but we need to talk about how disability activism is something that is needed but when it becomes a commodity we lose sight that it’s about people’s lives and how they can be improved and this means listening to people whom you might not agree with and working to find common ground and this common ground might be what defines disability as there are very different views on disability as well to the rest of the world and it's not a moral problem but one that it’s a reflection on the society we all live in as how it treats its most vulnerable.