So can we talk about how Finding Nemo had not one, but three major characters with disabilities? And how all of those characters (Nemo, Dory, and Gill) were fully fledged characters? And how a core message of the movie was that disability=/=incompetence or worthlessness? And that the movie accomplished this without ever turning into “inspiration porn” or even making it a big deal?
Can we talk about that?
Because it’s kind of awesome.
“Disability is often treated as though it were a deviation from the rule. In fact, it is not an anomaly. One out of five persons in the U.S. has an impairment, yet disability is perceived as an "oddity" rather than as a natural occurrence. ”
—Marta Russell, Beyond Ramps:Disability at the End of the Social Contract
7 Reasons Why You Should Stop Bitching About People On Benefits.
sorrelish.blogspot.co.uk‘1. One day, it could be you.
The welfare state is a safety net. It is there to catch anyone who falls on hard times, including you. Say you got hit by a car and were tragically paralyzed from the waist down; the welfare state would pay you a Mobility Allowance so that you could still leave the house. It would pay for any special equipment you needed and a personal assistant to help you go to the loo, bathe and perform household chores. If you lost your job and were unable to find a new one, the state would support you until you were able to find another one. Sounds pretty fair now, doesn’t it?
2. What do you think the other options are?
Let’s be totally selfish here; the other option is that anyone without a significant safety net is made homeless. Two summers ago I worked out that if I took my family out of the picture, I was one month away from homelessness. Two if my landlord felt like being lenient with the rent. Would you seriously prefer that millions of people had to live on the streets (your streets) if it meant that you would have to pay a couple of pence less tax?
As attractive as it is to bluster on about how we should kick everyone off benefits and into paid employment, the jobs situation now is rather like the time my local library gave me an extension on my library books because if I were to bring them all back at once, they would not have room on the shelves. There simply are not enough jobs and due to ‘austerity measures’, more and more jobs are being lost. The more impoverished the area, the worse the situation.
Job hunting is a soul destroying process. I have been unemployed twice and both times I was spending around four hours a day, five or six days a week job hunting. I had an excellent CV, a whole bunch of qualifications and lots of voluntary work but the fact was that every entry level job on the system was attracting around 150 applications; jobs at places like MacDonalds and Tesco were attracting over 500. It really isn’t that simple.
3. Seriously, the amount of tax you pay into the welfare state is a pittance.
Every time I ‘talk’ to people having a winge about their tax going to ‘scroungers’, they seem to have run away with the idea that they, personally are paying for that flatscreen TV they have heard so much about. Your tax goes to pay for many, many things including schools, hospitals, bin collections, roads, the legal system, the royal family, streetlights, the military and right now, for massive corporations like Tesco to get free labor when they should be actually employing people who need jobs. If you earn £20,000 a year, you pay 0.00003066 pence a year to each individual person on unemployment benefit. I don’t imagine you have paid for even 1% of someone’s flatscreen.
4. If your objection is based around a perception that people on benefits are living a life of luxury, then I’m afraid I have news for you.
Being unemployed is not a crime. I know that must come as a shock to you, but I’m afraid it’s true. Every citizen has the right to the same freedoms, rights and basic standard of living, regardless of their personal situation. Your perception probably came from sensationalist newspaper headlines urging you to grab torch and pitchfork because the Daily Mail found one family who, if you add up and tweak all of the benefits they receive, seem to be receiving a pretty average wage! And the bastards spent it on some really normal things! Kill them!
Words to look out for are ‘flatscreen’ (seriously, when was the last time you saw a TV that WASN’T flatscreen outside of a school science classroom?) ‘laptop’ (how many families do you know who don’t have a computer?) and any references to irrelevant lifestyle choices such as cigarettes, obesity or alcohol. And that large number emblazoned across the top of the page? Before jumping to conclusions, ask yourself some questions:
· How many people is that split between? Often journalists will find a large family and add up every benefit they claim to make the number a lot bigger.
· Where are they living? The amount of housing benefit paid to each family depends hugely on what part of the country they are living in and the size of house.
· Is the article comparing like with like? I have seen many, many articles that compare an ‘average working wage’ for one week with a jobseekers payment which is paid fortnightly or the total yearly benefit payment for a whole family with the average monthly wage for a single earner. This is because the papers know that if they tell you that a jobseeker is typically expected to get by on around £50 a week, even in London, they don’t have a story.
Just as the NHS has no right to refuse to treat your brain tumor because you enjoy a drink on the weekends, you have no right to dictate how benefit claimants spend their money. Benefit claimants are not being punished and if you think they should be, go away and have a good long think about why.
5. But I work for my money and I can barely make ends meet! Why should I pay for them to sit on their arses?’
This is one area where you may have a serious point-not about benefit claimants, I’m afraid you are probably still being a bit of a cock-but you are right about one thing. You absolutely should be earning the same if not more a year than someone claiming benefits. Why aren’t you? Because in most parts of the country, minimum wage does not equal living wage. Particularly in the current economic climate, the cost of living is rising much faster than the minimum wage. The independently calculated living wage would put most people at around £2000 a year better off; unfortunately, very few businesses pay it.
THAT is something to get angry about. A popular rhetoric employed by Irritable Duncan Syndrome, one of my favouritest Tories in the whole wide world is that people are not taking or looking for certain jobs because they feel they are above them. He’s in the right ballpark, but he came in from the wrong dugout.
The reason people feel that many minimum wage jobs are beneath them is that they are hard work, dull, demoralising and generally unpleasant and then on top of that, you still have to go home and choose between putting the heating on and having three meals a day. If I could earn enough to comfortably pay my rent, utilities and food bills and put a little bit aside for emergencies I would happily clean toilets for eight hours a day.
6. Benefit claimants are not criminals.
I know I already said this, but it bears repeating. There are two prejudices here; firstly that the act of claiming benefits is in itself inherently criminal and secondly that people on benefits are inherently criminal. The first one is so ridiculous I’m not even going to bother; if you seriously believe this, you are so far gone as to be beyond saving.
The second one is a bit more interesting. I read a story in The Express yesterday about a woman who had carried out a reign of terror against one of her neighbors; she was a thug and a bully and made this poor woman’s life hell. A sad story you’ll agree, but hardly something for the front page of a national newspaper. But there was one key fact that made this story particularly newsworthy and that was the fact that this woman was ON BENEFITS and the woman she was harassing was A VETERANS WIDOW.
This was such a grossly transparent manipulation that it genuinely stopped me in my tracks. It very clearly highlighted the shorthand of prejudice; the headline may as well have read ‘SLYTHERIN WAS MEAN TO GRYFFINDOOR!’, the caricatures are so firmly entrenched in the political and journalistic canon.
Politicians need you to think that these people are feckless and undeserving so they can get away with slashing the welfare state; Journalists need you to believe this so they can continue printing lazy, knee-jerk puff-pieces. Screw the lot of them over by remembering that all people are just people and a percentage of all people are dicks; I’d be more worried about what the rich and powerful dicks are doing.
7. Supporting the most vulnerable in society benefits everybody
Poverty isn’t good for anyone. (Apart from the economic elite, who need
people willing to polish the parquet for a pittance). Impoverished people are less likely to invest culturally, socially or creatively in their community. Poverty affects the health, education and prospects of the people caught in its trap. It breeds resentment and apathy.
It is crunch time; do you want a society where everybody is empowered to contribute, where people value their communities and incentives to commit crime and behave antisocially are greatly reduced? Or do you want to punish the poor, the disabled and the downright unlucky because, eewww poor people are so last century?’
Sorrel Kinton at 16:39
“That image of the man using a wheelchair beside the elevator telling him to walk is a particularly vivid one, but here’s the other thing -- not all disabled people use wheelchairs. A great many disabilities are invisible to the outside world, meaning you might look at a disabled person and never have any idea that they had a disability, even one that has an extreme impact on their lives and mobility. If we’re encouraged to think of the stairs as the morally superior choice for those not using wheelchairs, where does that leave the folks who don’t use wheelchairs but for whom climbing stairs is just as impossible? ”
—ELEVATOR SHAMING and Ableism: Why Pro-Stairs Health Campaigns Kind Of Suck
I wish this post existed last year when ableist assholes were complaining on Facebook about coworkers that were “so lazy” they used the elevator to go up one floor.
The Apollo Report: Wisconsin State Assemblyman Dan LeMathieu calls special needs children "a burden on our schools"
apolloreport.blogspot.comAt a gathering of school board members and public school administrators in Madison, Wisconsin, Republican Wisconsin State Assemblyman Dan LeMathieu said that special needs children are “a burden on our schools.”
This comes as members of the Republican-controlled Wisconsin State Legislature are set to vote on a state budget, which was proposed by Republican Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker, that includes a proposed special needs school voucher program.
Dan LeMathieu admitted the real reason why he and his fellow Republicans in Wisconsin want to implement a special needs school voucher program: because they believe that allowing special needs children to attend public schools is “a burden” on public schools, and, therefore, they want to make it difficult, if not impossible, for public schools to be able to accommodate special needs children, forcing many parents of special needs children to send their children to private schools, where there is no guarantee that their educational needs will be properly accommodated.
As someone who was a special needs student in a small-town public school district in Central Illinois, I know that special needs students are NOT a “burden” on public schools. My teachers knew how to deal with me and treated me with respect, and they didn’t consider it a “burden” to teach me.
I find it to be absolutely appalling that an elected official would make offensive, disparaging remarks about special needs children.
I was once a special needs student in school, and it ticks me off!
To say that a special needs student is a “burden” is flat out insulting to the nth degree!
h/t: The Apollo Report
Respect adaptive technology
Technology is amazing.
It means that we don’t all have to be subsistence farmers. And that we can live in places with deadly cold climates. And that we have safe water. And that we can go places quickly that used to take days of walking. And that we can communicate with people on the other side of the world.
These are all good things. And they’re all things that we can take for granted, because depending on technology makes it possible.
And yet - when a person with a disability uses technology which most people don’t use, people say many versions of this:
- Well, I used to use PECS with him, but he can say a few words if he really tries, and I didn’t want him to become dependent
- She can walk. I’ve seen her. Why is she using a wheelchair?
No matter what you use, as a disabled person, someone is likely to say that you shouldn’t be using it and should be trying harder not to depend on technology.
It isn’t reasonable. And bearing that in mind makes life easier.
“As I get older, as time goes by, I care less and less and less about whether someone can talk pretty. I care about action. At the end of the day, I don’t care how well you can articulate your perfectly punctuated anti-oppressive political points, I don’t care how many buzzwords fall from your mouth, I don’t care if you name-drop a thousand acronyms or theorists – I care if you will show up. I care if you will fucking show up. And I know that showing up is complicated when you struggle with whether or not you can get outta bed. Sometimes showing up means biking to a friend’s house with coconut water & ginger ale & Saltines when she has stomach flu. Sometimes it means sharing your leftover pain meds from your emergency root canal when a friend has a pain spike. Sometimes it means making soup in a friend’s kitchen, stocking his fridge & freezer, blowing him a kiss across his bedroom & miming tucking him up under his sheets, because you can’t actually tuck him in or kiss him good-bye, because your own immune system is fragile enough as it is. And sometimes it means texting a little emoticon heart from your own sick bed, where you are laid up with a shoulder that aches so bad when the weather gets damp (which is a lot in San Francisco), or stomach that can’t digest a fucking thing, or clogged-up sinuses, or a throat on fire, or a wet raspy cough. Sometimes it just means saying Honey, I love you. Honey, my sick heart reaches out to your sick heart. Honey, I wish I could be there, and I can’t, but I can do this. You mean the world to me. Sister. Brother. Love. ”
—Vote for Shad Sexton - Jasonville, IN in the 2013 National Mobility Awareness Month Local Hero contest!
mobilityawarenessmonth.comHey a family friend of mine could really use tumblr’s help.
In July last year, Shad was in an accident that resulted in him becoming a quadriplegic. As if that wasn’t bad enough, he lives in a very rural town in Indiana and has to travel to Chicago for treatment and therapy. However, because of his size and the added weight of his wheelchair, he doesn’t fit into standard transport vehicles so he has no transportation in his area. Right now his mom is renting a van from 100 miles away, driving home, loading it, then driving to Chicago and back. It’s very costly and very time consuming.
By voting for Shad, he can win a vehicle that can meet his needs. To quote him, “My being a quad isn’t what’s disabling me. What’s disabling me is not having the tools I need to function to the best of my ability.” He wants to continue living his life and mentoring others who need help, but he needs that van to do it.
So please, just take 5 seconds to vote for him. It would really help him and his family out.
The Curiously Oppressive Power of Positive Thinking
The Curiously Oppressive Power of Positive Thinking
by Rachel Cohen-Rottenberg, Content Intern
Occasionally, I read articles and see memes that suggest that loving ourselves and our bodies involves believing in the power of “positive thinking” – a belief that dictates that if we just believe in ourselves enough and put out positive energy into the universe, good things will happen. Following is an example of this type of meme:
Source: Facebook
[The graphic shows a watercolor-style picture of a woman with her eyes closed and her hair swept up. The text reads: “Believe in what you want so much that it has no choice but to materialize.”]
I have to admit a certain attraction to these kinds of graphics. After all, the way in which we carry ourselves in the world sometimes can have an impact on how people respond to us. For example, most people in our culture will respond more positively to a person exuding confidence than a person who is mired in self-hatred. So there is something to be said for increasing the possibility of positive responses by putting confident, self-loving energy into the world.
But for me, these memes go too far, for a number of reasons.
First, there is a vast difference between increasing the possibility of good things happening and actually guaranteeing a positive outcome. Loving yourself enough to exude confidence is one thing; believing that you can make your dreams come true through an act of attitudinal will is something else entirely. The former is an attempt at playing the odds; the latter is an example of a belief in being able to control what is essentially beyond us. A belief in one’s dreams is an essential ingredient of being able to realize them. However, no dream is guaranteed to materialize, no matter how badly one wants it to.
Moreover, for disabled people – as for any group of marginalized people – these kinds of messages can become oppressive, because they feed into the idea that if only we tried hard enough, or had a good enough attitude, we could single-handedly make our lives better. For disabled people, this way of thinking can take the pernicious form of being blamed for the state of our own bodies, as though we somehow caused our disabilities with poor psychological habits and could somehow cure them with the proper way of thinking. It leads away from self-love into self-blame.
Disability studies scholar Susan Wendell calls this kind of thinking evidence of “the myth of control” – the belief that one has the power to completely control the life of the body (Wendell 1996, 94). Likewise, writer Susan Sontag notes that the mid-20th century saw the flourishing of the belief that a person’s emotional and psychological states were responsible for illness; people had cancer, the story went, because they were “inhibited” and “repressed” (Sontag 2001, 39), and prone to “emotional withdrawal… lack of self-confidence and confidence in the future”(Sontag 2001, 55). The result is that people encounter blame for becoming ill, on the premise that they have the wrong state of mind, rather than receiving support and love while going through a difficult time. This type of blame is just below the surface of the following “positive thinking” graphic:
Source: Facebook
[The graphic shows a beach at sunset, with colorful stones in the foreground and blue water going out toward a yellow sun and an orange and blue sky on the horizon. The text reads: “The Universe is not punishing you or blessing you. The Universe is responding to the vibrational attitude that you are emitting. – abraham hicks.”]
Despite the disclaimer that one is not being punished or blessed, the graphic makes each person entirely responsible for his or her fate. Put out positive energy, and the universe will respond in one way; put out negative energy, and the universe will respond in another. So if something bad happens, it’s your own doing. This graphic in particular, and the whole notion of “creating your own reality” in general, ignores the many levels of structural oppression that keep people from realizing their dreams, no matter how much good energy they stream in to the world, and ends up blaming people for their own victimization.
People with disabilities routinely run into barriers that make realizing the life they want impossible. These barriers are not of our making and cannot be overcome by means of a positive attitude. A person in a wheelchair who is homebound because he lives on the fifth floor of a building without an elevator cannot, though the power of positive thinking, get to the first floor and onto the subway to a job. A young woman routinely denied employment because of a facial disfigurement cannot, through a powerful rush of spiritual energy, stop people from limiting her opportunities. The 85% of people with autism who are unemployed cannot, by adjusting their attitudes and hoping for better, make remunerative employment appear.
I know that some will answer these assertions by pointing out that individual disabled people have, in fact, overcome structural barriers. The implication is that if one disabled person can do it, then all disabled people should be able to do it. But that sort of thinking ignores the fact that exceptions to the rule are, in fact, exceptions because larger structural inequities make overcoming these barriers uncommon. The notion that, by force of will, we can always overcome structural barriers reinforces the pervasive American notion that individuals bear all of the responsibility for the outcome of their lives, and that society as a whole bears no responsibility at all. But disabled people, for all of their effort, still live with dizzying levels of unemployment, poverty, hate crime, and discrimination. No amount of positive thinking will keep someone from refusing you a job or committing a hate crime against you if they’re bound and determined to do it.
Ultimately, the driving force behind the “power of positive thinking” meme is the word “power.” If you’re powerful enough, you can make anything happen. But what about those whose bodies are not powerful? What about those who are vulnerable? What about those who are tired, isolated, and struggling? What about those who are ill? What about those who lack proper support? How do they make their dreams manifest?
My answer is this: Given that all bodies are vulnerable and go through fluctuating states of ability, disability, energy, fatigue, wellness, and illness, we cannot rely simply on our own individual power. Rather, we must collectively help make one another’s dreams manifest. We must remove the barriers and the inequities that keep people from realizing their dreams.
It’s not enough for each of us to do it for ourselves. It’s up to all of us to do it for one another.
References
Sontag, Susan. Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors. New York, NY: Picador, 2001.
Wendell, Susan. The Rejected Body: Feminist Philosophical Reflections on Disability. New York, NY: Routledge, 1996.
