Two things that make me angry
One personal one not, seem to have converged under “Background check consequences.”
I have a good friend whose medical status caused her to have to resign her last position ( due to a painful, ongoing disability) without notice. She has another job, but it’s part time no benefits. I firmly believe that when she applied for more than 100 jobs over the spring and summer, the reason she did not get a single one of them has to do with her credit score and her last employers admission that she is not eligible for rehire. (to protect themselves, of course they do not go into *why* ) Was she an extremely competent, well liked and award winning employee at her last job? Yes she was. But all that goes out the window because she committed the unpardonable sin of leaving without notice.
She’s living in one room in a rooming house. Has been for two years, and she cannot even use the kitchen there because it is one floor above her (thank God she’s on the same floor as the shower and laundry) She needs health insurance and at present cannot get it, and may not even be able to get anything affordable on the exchanges because there will be no Medicaid expansion in this state. Her car has died because she hadn’t the funds to repair it. She has type two diabetes, and uses busses and walks with crutches. She has lost the padding on the bottom of her feet for some reason and is literally skin and bone with every step. She also has severe diabetic neuropathy with no way to afford the Lyrica that would ameliorate that portion of her chronic pain.
Her disability claim was denied (!) so she keeps working, with the chronic pain that is constant and also keeps her dealing with insomnia, not to mention that fall and winter are coming and they will make bus travel extremely dangerous for her. Essentially, the consequences of a correctly run background check for her mean no chance to get a real apartment, a full time job, or healthcare at this time. All for the crime of leaving a job without notice because she was dealing with painful ongoing impairment.
Then there’s Aaron Alexis, the shooter in DC.
The consequences of the background check run on him for his contracting firm by another contracting firm, (Source: The Rachel Maddow Show), is that no one found or acted upon his history of mental health problems…so not only did he get to keep a job he never should have had access to without managing his mental health…the end result has been the deaths in DC.
Screw up with [your personal] money and leave a job too quickly and you never get a decent job again, apparently.
Have a visible ongoing record of mental health issues that made you a danger to yourself and others?
Work on, dude. Work on.
That’s fucking wrong. I don’t know how it can be fixed but it’s fucking wrong.
“It’s not me, it really is you.”
Now that was never really said to me…it’s just a ridiculous attempt by me to shorthand this excellent article
which is a scholarly treatment of why persons with disabilities are oppressed when it comes to intimate relationships. I’ll go further and say excluded from experience of intimacy, partnering etc.
I saw the subject and said “Oh no, wait a minute, that’s not true…” but then I read the whole article.
Yes, my experience is quite different from the take of the article but I guess there are aspects to my experiences that make mine the exception that tests, and in some ways, validates what the author of the article is saying.
I had a very visible disability from birth (cerebral palsy)…
My late husband was not able bodied, we met at a camp for kids with disabilities. So, for those that knew him well, they never gave him the pitying stare about having to “take care” of me because he struggled with impairments of his own…But.
His physical disability did impose specific limitations on him (don’t do contact sports, don’t live more than two hours away from a hemophillia treatment center), but when it was just hemophilia, except for a slight limp, he could “pass” as nondisabled, and did so often. So strangers did treat him as able, and if they overtly spoke to him about “It’s noble to take care of her,” or some diminishment of me like that, I never heard about it and he never mentioned it…with the exception of one relative’s comment to him that “You can’t marry this girl!,” to which he answered “Watch me!”
I was not conventionally good looking in high school. Then got less and less “acceptable” as time went on.
While I did experience a great deal of the aversion of able boys while trying to date in high school, and to a lesser extent college, I met my future husband in high school, we dated a bit then, I had another boyfriend, he had a couple other girlfriends, and then I re-met him in my early twenties and by the time I was twenty five I was married, matching the earliest members of my high school class, all able but me, and beginning the rush to the altar that same year…. So by the time I hit my mid twenties both myself and my husband were on the same romance/sex/marriage timeline as our able bodied counterparts.
When I lost my husband in 1993, I also matched a behavior of a lot of able bodied widows…I had a bit of a wild streak that lasted about three years. I was beginning to make unwise and sometimes even dangerous choices after a bit, so I pulled out of that stall, and stayed alone by choice for a few years. I had another boyfriend. That ended badly for reasons having next to nothing to do with my disability or his. Haven’t the able often had that relationship where they look back and say “My God, what was I thinking?” Again, a similarity, not a difference.
But my life since about 2002 has mirrored that in the article pretty well, Age and body shape have factored in more and more….
So are the disabled as a group oppressed in matters of intimacy? I think so, based on the experiences of myself in later years and many friends with disabilities throughout their lives….and the reasons and structures that contribute to that are exactly the setups the author explains in the above article.
What I can’t figure out is why I missed out on that particular oppression. Over the long haul, it didn’t touch me much before the age of 40. (Though it’s darn well locked in now.) The article is very well done. I encourage folks to read it.
“People don’t really say that to you, do they?
Yes, they do. Check out the hashtag #heardwhilstdisabled on Twitter.
The able like able privilege
Even if they don’t admit to it….which is why they ask freakshow quesitons about our personal lives every now and again.
I’m pretty proud to freak out a subset of the able by saying that for a good long while I walked in your world and did *exactly* what you did including stuff that’s less than admirable….from working and drinking, and marrying, and after, marriage, sleeping with the wrong (and occasionally right) people, and spending too much money.
I’ve also done a bit more than many, been an advocate, published an article, acted…
If I never do a thing of note for the rest of the way, at least I will have done that.
Comments are disabled to avoid creepster responses. Any creepster FB responses will be deleted.
The NYT calls persons with disabilities complainers
for asking that PWD play PWD on tv…..
and also assumes that there is a universal reaction of able bodied people when confronted with a disability.
He and the writers know what you know about Mr. Fox and how you are naturally inclined to feel about it — that condescending mix of sympathy and pity and discomfort that any disability brings out in those not directly affected by it.
What a complete load of crap. Certainly there are able who feel those things, but not every able reaction is either that annoyingly passive agressive or that on the far side of benign. Reactions range from open acceptance to revulsion, and targeting for violence and everything in between. Lazy writing
Would have been a good article, but for that sentence. I feel sympathy pity and discomfort for the writer.
Midlife And Treachery 
