Sagamihara, Disability Erasure and the Affective Reverberations
CW: Human Brutality Lately, whenever my brain has a chance to wander, like as I am brushing my teeth or I am sitting on public transport, I think about Sagamihara. In those moments of in-between-time, I imagine feeling safe, warm and comfortable in my bed, in my home, and then hearing horror and fear from the next room, and not knowing what is happening, and feeling the sheer terror as I wait, unable entirely to move or defend myself... I have been trying to process and talk about the mass stabbing that took place in mid-July at a Japanese care facility for disabled people, but I have been unable to convey my overwhelming grief and anger. On Monday, I went to hear an amazingly courageous woman talk about the Yazidi genocide currently being enacted by ISIS (Watch Compass on ABC on Sunday). Through her grief and heartache, Nadia Murad spoke so eloquently and generously about the trauma and brutality she lost her family to, and the abuse, sexual and otherwise, that she endured. She iterated the urgent global need to collectively organise and stop ISIS, and their insidious ideologies and atrocities that are violently and callously dehumanising minorities. I left, and promptly burst into tears, feeling helpless and apologising to the sky, the universe, for always being so ignorant, and so human. Even though, I know absolutely that more sadness and pain is not what is needed. I canât help but actually be in this world. I feel so appreciative that I am fortunate and safe enough that my daily struggles are with getting out of bed, with keeping social arrangements, and cultivating enough energy to do my uni work. But simultaneously, I feel that those struggles and my own distress has to be connected, in some way, to other peopleâs, not particularly in a causational way, but in a collective-ownership way. This may be why I take so long to comprehend and face the horrors of the world, particularly when they, like what happened in Japan, have the capacity to imprint and affect my sense of personal value and way of coping. I donât think I read an entire article about the incident, which has been rightly referred to as a âmassacreâ. But yesterday, as I was scrolling through Tumblr, a post reminded me that the 26-year-old murderer, worked at the residential home and cared for the people, whoâs throats he later would cut. He killed 19 people this way, and seriously injured 20, and hurt 5 others. Maybe I forgot this vital fact, maybe I just skipped it in my selective reading of the event previously. Yet, it made my heart freeze, how could a person be so ruthless? Unlike most disabled people, I donât take a hard and fast line with regards to euthanasia, particularly when a person has little quality of life and is in pain. But this man, sadly like the majority of societies, equated human ability and productivity with the intrinsic worth of human life. In a clear and rational way, he wrote a letter to the government, calling for the genocide of people who couldnât do âhousehold and social activitiesâ and discussed his intent to kill in February, and no drastic measures were taken to ensure the safety of residents he worked with. This is disability erasure, it is the widespread ableism, which saturates everything so entirely, that it is invisible to anyone who doesnât have to think about it. This flippant disregard for disabled lives is fucking everywhere. The fact that this horrific tragedy barely got any attention is just a symptom of what generated such violence. Disabled people are valued when they can âovercomeâ their disabilities and be âinspiringâ for able bodies. And they are pitied, negated, systemically abused, and hidden from view, when they are too much to handle, when theyâre too messy and chaotic to fit into a cute image for a motivational poster. Look at the domestic violence and sexual abuse statistics for disabled people. Look at the education and employment rates⊠Completely horrific, and to be perfectly honest, makes me doubt my resilience and ability to live in a social climate, where a planned annihilation of a minority based on a eugenic and extremist ideology, barely appeared on social media. What is inferred, is that disabled lives are valued less, our pleasure, pain and ultimately our deaths affect other people less. Hate can manifest in countless of ways, think of the social outcry if it was a school, or targeting another marginalised, vulnerable group. It makes me so sad that most disabled people werenât even shocked, because we feel this kind of negation, disregard and erasure on a micro scale multiple times a day.