treating disabled people with respect and dignity shouldn't be a fucking choice.
The crazy thing is, if you live long enough, you will become disabled.
All of you beautiful, healthy abled people out there? You WILL become disabled.
You will need a stool in the shower, you will need a cane or a zimmer frame or wheelchair, you will need oxygen tanks or to eat through a tube in your stomach or to wear hearing aids or get cataract surgeries and develop blindness.
You will need an organ transplant, you will need medication to control mental health issues or trauma support. You will need devices that help you put on your shoes and get a frame fitted for your toilet so you can get access to it.
You will develop a condition that makes it difficult to feed yourself or function in every day life. You will get a condition like COVID and have life-long lasting effects that destroy your life because of a roll of a dice. You're going to wake up in a hospital without an idea of how you got there.
Every person, if you live long enough, you will need support and you will need assistance because your body and mind will eventually start breaking down. This is just a fact of being human. You will become disabled.
You will get in a car accident or develop a genetic condition you never knew you had a family history of, you will have a stroke or a heart attack, and need to apply for government assistance because you can no longer work. You will need to ask the government for assistance to clean your home and feed yourself.
And at that time, you will NEED assistance and care and support. And you will beg the doctors and the government for support, and they will say what they say to me now-- there's just not enough FUNDING to get you the support that you need! So I'm sorry, you have to go on a waiting list, and you have to wait, and MAYBE-- just maybe-- you'll be able to apply for grants to get someone to come help you.
Until then? You just figure out how to feed and bathe yourself when you can barely move. Good luck! Empty your life-savings to get someone who can come spoon food into your mouths.
And you might just remember how all your life, you repeatedly complained about how high the taxes were And what a waste of space disabled people were. How you voted to cut support for disabled people and support systems to keep us alive. And you'll think about all those times you either never saw disabled people, or you saw them and scoffed and thought they were just lazy and and what a burden on society all those fucking disabled people were. The dregs of society STEALING your tax money and living off of it whilst you work so hard! The invisible, useless scum who probably aren't even that disabled anyway all stealing your tax.
And then one day, you're going to notice that your hand has a tremor.
That sounds aren't as clear as they were. You're going to get a cough.
A little pain in that knee, in that hip.
You're going to have a doctor inform you that the blood tests came back with concerns.
And you can't keep this job because you just cannot physically or emotionally manage it an more. Because you are just too disabled.
And you will be sat in your wheelchair, unable to access the pavement or a store because there is no ramp, and you're going to remember all those times you walked past someone in a wheelchair and didn't even clock how much they were struggling.
And you're going to realise that disabled people were not scum stealing your tax and taking up space. We were people all along who genuinely just needed a little help. The kind of help you will absolutely need at some point in your life.
If you live long enough, you WILL become disabled. You will struggle. And you will need the love and support from others that you should be giving to all disabled people right now. Human bodies do not last long. This is a fact.
You’re abled now. But understand that one day, that might change-- and all those support systems that you will need access to will be shut down because you voted to shut them down. You voted to stop that funding. Because after all, who cares if it kills disabled people, right?
Well, most people do NOT care. Until they become disabled. And then they demand access to all the social services and care they need-- but guess what? It's not there.
So, my beautiful abled people who never really even see how much disabled people struggle? Who either can't see us at all, or just see us as a waste of space?
Enjoy and appreciate your health and well-being right now. Because human bodies are exceptionally fragile. And you'd be shocked at how little it takes to disable one.
Treating disabled people with the most basic respect doesn't seem like it should really be such a hard thing to do. Voting to keep support systems in place to protect us is really not such a hard thing to do.
And you really should be voting to protect those services because we are people who need help and deserve assistance. You should be treating us like humans anyway.
But a shocking number of people do not.
And you will regret that. Because one day-- and that day may come so much sooner than you think-- you might be begging people to treat you with that most basic respect despite your own disabilities. And you will need those support systems. You will need us to give you the help as you attempt to navigate the systems and access that support that is so fucking hard to access.
Peace and love, folks. Be excellent to each other. Treat each other well. Enjoy whatever health you have right now, appreciate if you have a working body and mind right now. And understand that it will not always be so.
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