If that photo doesnāt terrify you then you donāt understand whatās going on
This photo is more threatening than the ones where they were being pulled out of their chairs and zip tied
[Tweet from ADAPT reads, āhe had them sent to jail without their wheelchairs clearly senator portman doesnāt care!ā
Image is a police officer pulling an empty motorized wheelchair (mobility scooter?) down the street. Another officer and empty chair are in the background.]
Imagine if theyād kept an able-bodied prisoner in a jail cell but kept their legs (and possibly their hands) bound, so they couldnāt stand up, move around in the jail cell, get out of bed or off the floor.
That would be considered inhumane, and torture, right? If that news got out, humanitarian organizations like Amnesty International would be up in arms. You know they would.
Thatās what it means when you take away a personās wheelchair. Thatās why itās terrifying. But because itās happening to disabled people, no one except the victims is noticing.
Also note: Power mobility aids like those in the photo can cost as much as a brand-new automobile. And if they get damaged because the authorities donāt know what the hell theyāre doing (or they do know, and are motivated by spite or malice), then the person will be just as helpless after they get out of jail.
And Medicare will not replace a damaged or broken wheelchair unless itās at least five years old.
Now imagine being helpless in a jail cell, unable to move, and havingĀ that worry in the back of your mind.
just because the die-in yesterday at mitch mcconellās office was the first one to get larger media attention in a while, doesnāt mean that this hasnāt been happening and doesnāt justify posts likeĀ āwhen the disabled are protesting your heath care bill you know itās badā or stuff about howĀ āwhen you have the disabled forcibly removed youre despicableā like itās not despicable to have any protestors removed and erasing the decades of work that disabled activists have done in this country. also donāt sayĀ āthe disabledā like what the fuck thatās literally sensitivity 101
the first large scale protest for disability rights in the us was a sit-in in the 70s that lasted 25 days, thereās a long and proud history of disability activism in the united states and when youāre implying a. that disabled people only protest when itās super bad, when disabled people have been fighting for healthcare since the 70s, and implying that these people are not professional organizers, youāre erasing their agency.Ā
one of the women in a wheelchair that was arrested is a defense lawyer, these are people that are prepared for this, most of them have been arrested before, so shut the fuck up with your infantilizing bullshit like youāre so surprised that disabled people have the capability to care about politics and to act in defense of their rights and educate yourself about the work of organizations like adapt, that are the reason why we even have the ADA.Ā
like where the fuck were you when protesters from adapt chained their wheelchairs together in the capital rotunda a couple months ago and were dragged out of their wheelchairs by police, where were you when disabled people (especially disabled people of color) were and are being beaten, arrested and murdered by police, surprise this isnāt some new fad to the trump administration, or some sign of the times that disabled people are protesting,Ā
we have been fighting oppression for decades and you havenāt been listening. and people who are surprised when politicians make comments insulting disabled people like itās the worst thing you can do (looking at you m*ryl streep) like politicians havenāt been actively pursuing policies to eradicate disabled people (especially poor disabled people and disabled POC) for hundreds of years. newsflash theyāve been trying to kill us, and institutionalize us, and prevent us from every right they can from voting, from public spaces, from jobs, from education, from healthcare, from life.
it doesnāt surprise me one bit that they would publicly insult us and if you were surprised by that then you need to fucking educate yourself. iām so fucking tired of performative allyship where you pretend to support disabled people or only support the groups of disabled people that you belong to and distance yourself from thoseĀ ābadā disabled people. if youāre not with all of us, youāre not with any of us.Ā
no wait iām not done
police vans in dc are wheelchair accessible because of protestors in wheelchairs, many of them from adapt, like think about the slim minority of places that are wheelchair accessible but the police vans sure are, because of how many times these trained activists have been arrested.
also if youāre reblogging an inaccessible version of a post without image description (eg just a tweet or image without the text below for screen readers), congrats for making your āsupportā for disabled people inaccessible to disabled people, like wow, if you need a more tangible representation of how much the performative allies actually care about disabled people and accessibility, itās a. not enough to do the bare minimum to make their shitty posts about disabled people accessible to other disabled people, and b. not enough to do the bare amount of research to not make shitty posts.
If you endorse policies that would eventually lead to the deaths of huge swathes of disabled and chronically ill people, your own motives for doing so might be perfectly reasonable, but some of the results of those policies are functionally indistinguishable from large-scale forcible eugenics, and your support makes you at least partially complicit. Itās mass murder of disabled and chronically ill people via legalized medical neglect, and it doesnāt belong in any society that claims to protect its own citizens.
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