It's Not Genocide

I made this for class and I wanted to wait until after I presented it to post it. The assignment was to make a manifesto and this one is about disability. I never see anything angry about disability when we should be enraged, so that’s what I tried to point out. It’s all text but is emotionally heavy.

Trigger Warnings for:

There is also passive-aggressive sarcasm and a generally angry tone

Disability isn’t included in the definition of genocide by the United Nations. It’s not included even though disabled people were the first to be exterminated in Nazi Germany long before anyone else, but you don’t learn about irrelevant lives in history class.

It’s for the best, because if it were included, then Iceland would have to own up to bragging about virtually eliminating all cases of down syndrome through abortion. When speaking about a growing fetus who tests positive for down syndrome and the pregnancy is terminated because of such, the rate is 67% in the U.S., 77% in France, and 98% in Denmark (Quinones & Lajka, 2017). The UK would have to acknowledge that from March 2014 to February 2017, over a hundred disabled people died per day when trying to claim for financial support, including around 11,000 who died after being told that they were actually ‘fit for work’ by a government official who didn’t need to have any sort of education about the disability (Berghs, et al., 2020, p. 50). Before they of course stopped sharing the incredibly high fatalities to the public so that way the burdens can be quieter when they die.

The UK only copied from the United States though, the country that could eliminate a quarter of its poverty rate if they just raised the Social Security Income to be above the damn poverty line. Instead, they’d rather disabled people fight for their fucking lives to get a lucrative $841 maximum on SSI a month, never have over $2000 to their name, and never be able to marry unless if they want to lose the healthcare that keeps them alive. Never mind that on average, someone who has a disability that limits the ability to work requires about $17,000 more per year than the average household without someone with a disability (Goodman, et al., 2020).

At least the United States has the Americans with Disabilities Act, which requires you to have healthcare you can’t afford to be protected from discrimination. The employment protections are also a fucking joke in the face of at will employment. The founding fathers told me I can work, and the jobs told me that I’m not competitive enough to work for minimum wage. Capitalism ensures that we will never survive. Disability is a luxury only the rich can afford, and the rest of us must beg for the government to see us worthy of scraps, break ourselves, or die.

But that’s not intentional genocide, I mean, if it could ever be genocide in the first place. Genocide would look more like 34 million adults knowing at least one person who died because they couldn’t afford their medication (Witters, 2019). It would look more like a recorded 2.8 million people dying because they couldn’t afford needed healthcare in 2017. It would look like the CDC telling everyone that only the disabled and poor people will die, so get back to work. It would look like “this elevator shuts down during a fire no matter what” and wheelchair users finding themselves unable to escape from a burning building. It would look like people insisting that disabled people have lives that aren’t worth living, and when we’re murdered, the story let’s everyone know that the murderer found us better off dead, and the public agrees.

I’m told every day by the world that my right to live hinges on whether my mind and body is profitable enough. Every day I am told that my life and the lives of my disabled siblings aren’t worth jack shit. Then I turn around and I’m told that we should explain to abled people that they need to relearn common decency because it goes out the window when they look at a mobility aid. “Noo silly goose, you can’t touch someone’s property and forcibly move them without their permission,” that’s not a teachable moment, that’s the moment you get out a pocketknife.

There is one class that teaches about disability at this University, and it never bothered to mention we’re slaughtered on a mass scale, instead I was given information that was last updated in 2013 that included revolutionary ideas like how autism isn’t a plague coming for your children. I could learn that, but not told how many autistic children were murdered by their parents on the Disability Day of Mourning website. They couldn’t even find the names of some of those kids, and instead of tears for their deaths, there are tears for their killers who must have had it so hard. What is wrong with you people? These were fucking children, they had decades of life ahead of them, life that’s a blessing to the world, and you’re crying for the killer. Why am I expected to be calm, collected, and insightful towards the people who would rather cry for the fact that disabled people are alive more than they would if we’re dead?

If they truly pitied us so much, they would do something besides torture and kill us. I see a system that takes every single marginalized person, traumatizes them, beats them, and throws them into the cripple bin to die. People who are ashamed to become me, to become one of us, because they know how useless we must be to the system that sees our bodies as profit and nothing more.

It’s okay, I’m ashamed of me too, but at least I got to adulthood with the amount of privilege I have. At least we’re still here, you are still here, and you are worth as much as anyone else.

Every day a person who is bedridden and requires assistance to eat and use the bathroom makes it to the next day, is a day of revolution in a world that sees their life as a meaningless burden. Every breath through an iron lung is a breath of defiance. The rambling, hopping, and jumbled flow of my ADHD redefines writing. The slur in my S and my anxious stutter is a miracle to speech. Our bodies, our minds, our lives are priceless.

But that’s all so hard to convince yourself when it’s not even genocide.

References

Berghs, M., Chataika, T., El-Lahib, Y., & Dube, A. K. (2020). The Routledge handbook of disability activism [PDF]. Routledge.

Goodman, N., Morris, M., Morris, Z., & McGarity, S. (2020, October). The extra costs of living with a disability in the U.S. — resetting the policy table. National Disability Institute. Retrieved April 3, 2022, from https://www.nationaldisabilityinstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/extra-costs-living-with-disability-brief.pdf

Quinones, J., & Lajka, A. (2017, August 15). “What kind of society do you want to live in?” Inside the country where down syndrome is disappearing. CBS News. Retrieved April 3, 2022, from https://www.cbsnews.com/news/down-syndrome-iceland/

Witters, D. (2019, November 12). Millions in U.S. lost someone who couldn’t afford treatment. Gallup. Retrieved April 3, 2022, from https://news.gallup.com/poll/268094/millions-lost-someone-couldn-afford-treatment.aspx