Wibbly-Wobbly Ramblings

PLEASE

This would mean I could get married and might have a chance at getting to a slightly higher and less shitty tier of poorness.

This would literally save lives.

reading a paper on quality of life among 45-to-70-year-olds with Down syndrome:

“Individuals expressed a desire to be allowed to go to bed when they wanted to.”

:(

Imagine.

I lived in a room and board that failed the burrito test. (”If you’re not allowed to get up in the middle of the night to microwave a burrito, you live in an institution.”) No one stopped me from going to bed, but they did tell me I had to have my lights out by 10, and that I had to be out of the house by 10 the next morning. When I complained to my outpatient program that I needed more help than I was getting, they threatened me with board and care, where my cell phone would be taken away and I would lose contact with the outside world. My case manager sounded so damn smug, like he had caught me out, when he said, “if you’re really as helpless as you say, then you need to be in a board and care.” Like my only options were struggling to do things I couldn’t do, or surrendering my life to an institution.

When I tried to talk about these things with other people, they always rationalized it away. (I told my dad once that my caseworker was reading my e-mails as I wrote them, demonstrating extreme disrespect for my privacy, and he said, “Well, she’s probably making sure you don’t use the internet to goof off.” I was 22 years old.)

 People tend to mock the idea that telling an adult when to go to bed, when to eat, etc., is a human rights violation, even though they would find it outrageous and absurd if anyone came into their lives to do the same thing to them.

And this is what people seem to think when they tell disabled activists we’re just not disabled enough to understand that some people really do need to be locked up and deprived of all autonomy.

Here’s the paper:

https://library.down-syndrome.org/en-us/research-practice/06/3/quality-life-ageing-down-syndrome/

They don’t want *any* activists for mentally/developmentally disabled people. If you’re able to advocate for your rights, you’re not “disabled enough” - and if you were disabled enough you wouldn’t be able to advocate for your rights.

I need you guys to listen so bad, but I’m at least glad people on Twitter are starting to talk about this. The government of Canada is expanding Medically Assisted Death to cull the poor and disabled, and now suicidal and mentally ill (these are usually interchangeable of course here). It is EUGENICS and every single disabled rights organization is against it.

Disability payments are $1,200 a month. The average one bedroom apartment rent in the Greater Toronto Area (greatest pop. area by far here) is $2,000 a month. People with mental illnesses are on months long waitlists to get even a single publicly funded session. Weeks to get privately funded care which costs at least $200 a session. There is no housing here for disabled people. We are in one of the worst housing crises in the world right now.

Doctors are now offering MAiD unprompted to young suicidal people. This woman is 21, a health practitioner literally suggested she kill herself.

This is one of the worst Disability Rights Violations we’ve ever seen in Canada. The government is killing us because it is cheaper than funding healthcare, cheaper than giving people housing and food and basic human rights.

Canadian MAID policy is just eugenics with extra steps when there aren't other social nets to help living people.

On this day in 2020, we lost Stacey Park Milbern, a fierce advocate and activist who taught us about disability justice, love, organizing, and so much more. Spend a moment today with some of her most important works here: https://disabilityvisibilityproject.com/2020/05/23/staceytaughtus-syllabus-work-by-stacey-milbern-park/

unfriendly, in fact, clinically socially deficient reminder that "neurodivergent" is meant as a way to express the common ground between different mental/neurological disabilities, and as a rallying cry for our rights and our solidarity, NOT:

In what backwards universe do neurotypicals equate autistic people saying “hey, don’t post videos / blogs showing your autistic kids in crisis situations they would find humiliating” means we’re trying to ignore any autistic person with extensive care needs?

DEAR NEUROTYPICALS, here it is in the plainest English I got:

We say “hey, don’t post those video” because the person in the video is a human being who deserves their privacy. 

A disabled human is not a circus side show to be gawked at. 

We never saw videos of Stephen Hawking with his wheelchair stuck on a ramp. We don’t know how he went to the bathroom or the routine for getting him dressed and groomed in the morning. We never saw him with food on his face or if a muscle spasm caused him to tip in a weird position in his wheelchair. His carers did everything to keep his private life private. Sometimes rumors and bits got out, but for the most part the public wasn’t privy to what went on in his house until years later.

Gee, how hard is that, to let a disabled person have their privacy? NOT THAT HARD.

Showing videos to the public that depict the autistic person in undignified / humiliating / crisis situations is not educational at all. It’s voyeuristic, exploitative and a destruction of their privacy.

I don’t even like it when parents post embarrassing videos of their able bodied / neurotypical children, but at least NTAB kids can say “mom, turn the camera off! Mom, take that video down!”

Someone who can’t speak or advocate for themselves that way can’t defend themselves against how they’re being portrayed to the public.

Autistic people don’t say “no videos like that” to people because we want the ugly side of autism to go away.

We want you to stop exploiting people who can’t defend themselves against that exploitation. 

Here, let me break it down so even a child can understand.

Did the person in the video say you can share it on the internet?

If yes, go ahead and post it.

If no, only share it with a doctor if the behavior is a symptom of something and then delete it or keep it out of the public eye.

If it isn’t possible to get a yes or no from the person, DO NOT POST IT ONLINE!!!

“So the problem is not that we have moved too far away from traditional institutions, and need to move backwards to make things better.  The problem is that we have not moved far enough away from the practices of traditional institutions.  The solution is to be less like a traditional institution, not to bring back traditional institutions.”

“If Alyssa couldn’t make decisions for herself… who had been making decisions for her while she was in the hospital? When police asked that question of Mayo staffers… they replied that Alyssa had been making her own medical decisions.”

“If Alyssa couldn’t make decisions for herself… who had been making decisions for her while she was in the hospital? When police asked that question of Mayo staffers… they replied that Alyssa had been making her own medical decisions.”

Kavanaugh is endorsing ideas rooted in eugenics. Find a script here for telling your Senators to oppose his nomination. You can also use Resistbot to send a message.

“Judge Kavanaugh vacated the District Court’s injunction, arguing that “accepting the wishes of patients who lack, and have always lacked the mental capacity to make medical decisions does not make logical sense.” 

That stands in contrast to even the most conservative interpretations of the laws… [and] the lifetime pass Kavanaugh seems to be arguing for, which would allow doctors to perform any procedures they wanted on a person who was once ruled unfit, does not exist.”

Y’all please reblog because this is fucking terrifying. It’s yet another attempt to sabotage any attempt at the poor receiving any kind of health care. God forbid you ever get fired and can’t declare yourself permanently disabled. 

Make no mistake: people WILL DIE from this. 

Contact your reps however you can. Use Resistbot and more importantly, just spread this shit around because I KNOW there’s a bunch of you on here that are directly affected by this.

Please share far and wide.

It’s murder. Murder by apathy. Murder by politics. Murder by making sick people choose between bankrupting their families or dying to save them from that fate.

There’s a reason why they’re doing this. Why they’re trying to bury the ADA. The ACA. Food stamps. Every social program.

They want to hoard even more money for the rich, for the military industrial complex, for themselves. And they’ll literally kill sick and poor people for that goal. Because we’re nothing to them. We’re not worth a damn thing. If we die? If we go bankrupt? Homeless? Starve? They don’t care. It’s a benefit for their desires to be richer if we’re dead.

This isn’t just politics. This isn’t policy differences. Calling it that santizes and disguises the truth: we, as a people, let other human beings die, starve, go bankrupt and homeless every single day. Those in power are just trying to expand that to more of us now.

If any of y’all think “this is murder” is an exaggeration… Let me paint you a picture. 

My clients are all disabled, in some way or another. They all have a serious physical disability, chronic illness, or psychiatric diagnosis that prevents them from working. They are also all homeless. And every single one is on Medicaid. 

And, I bet many of you didn’t know, but dictating who gets access to certain kinds of housing (specifically housing for people with serious mental illness- permanent housing) is in part determined by how high your Medicaid usage is. 

So, where does this shit leave us? Well, first off, it leaves my clients without any kind of insurance. All of them need medication, all of them go to the doctor and/or hospital frequently. All of them rely on Medicaid. So add a work requirement to Medicaid, and where does that leave people who are physically and mentally incapable of working? Yeah. In the fucking dust. 

Now, take away their Medicaid, and their chances of getting into permanent housing drop, too. So not only do they not have the means to get their medications and see their doctors and go to the hospital when they fucking NEED TO, now they no longer qualify for most of the housing that I am trying to get them into. So, they end up back on the street or in dangerous, overcrowded shelters with NO medication, NO doctors, NO hospitals, and almost no fucking chance of getting into housing because they have no Medicaid because they apparently need to work to have Medicaid and they CANNOT. FUCKING. WORK. 

SO this is murder. This is murder of people like my clients, who rely on Medicaid and related services. This will be the death of hundreds if not thousands of Americans. 

I don’t really have the energy for it, but I looked into things a little.

Kentucky, South Dakota, Alabama, Louisiana, South Carolina, Mississippi, Kansas, Indiana, and Arkansas are the 9 states I could find named as seeking the work requirement. [x]

Kentucky passed their requirement the day after the article link at the top of this post, on Jan 12th. [x] Indiana passed their’s on Feb 2nd. [x] Kansas seems to have possibly enacted this sometime late Jan, but could still be in the proposal stage. [x] Virginia is the most recent, in the past few days of late Feb. [x]

This IS happening. It’s not a posturing thing, or a goal they have. They are acting on it NOW.

Unless I get approved for disability this year, I won’t have health insurance next year. Like, I just won’t. Because Indiana doesn’t care about people who can’t work.

Lucretia Felder is getting a shot at freedom:

“As the judge signed a document ordering Felder’s release, he offered her a chance to speak for herself — a courtesy he didn’t afford her 12 years ago before sending her a psychiatric facility and banishing her from Milledgeville.

Felder stood before the judge in a patterned green dress and green cardigan, one of the few outfits she occasionally gets to wear instead of hospital scrubs.

“I want to live my life on the outside,” she said. “I want to work. I want to do good and hold my head up and do the right thing.””

“There is more than one way to do disability activism. This should be obvious, but needs repeating.”