Thursday, May 05, 2011

I'm only halfway through, but wanted to get something up

Well, despite all my good intentions, I completely missed blogging on BADD this year. I had a post all written, but was too sick to get on here to hit publish, or send my link to the lovely Goldfish. Now that I'm improving again, I'm making my way through all the links, and wanted to share some of my favorites.

And, by favorite, I find that (more often than not) I mean the ones that talk about the most despicable or moving or memorable abuses that people with disabilities face on a daily basis. A lot of these are also unfortunately, all to familiar to me, and to others with disabilities.

Under despicable, please file the unbelievable (or all-to-believable) but true story of Kimba, that Julia shares with us

You don’t even get a trial when your crime is drooling or not talking, when your sin is PTSD or autism, when the thing you did wrong was being born and then not quite meeting expectations. You just get put away.


(I can't post over there because I don't have Wordpress, but I just can't even express how Kimba's story has impacted me. It is heartbreaking and nauseating, and just... so horrid.)

Also see the things AngliKitten is doing wrong; Hannah's post about the accomodations her office refused to provide for her until it was too late to do her any good; or what Sue has to say about people who look away.

It's easy to get discouraged, reading all of this. It's easy to come away from BADD with a feeling of "why even bother?" I know, for me, it's especially hard to keep fighting when I haven't got the energy to do everyday things like brush my teeth or make it to yet another doctors appointment. Sometimes, I just have to step away for a little while, to take a breather. But I keep coming back because, whether I want to fight it or not, people are going to keep treating me and other people with disabilities differently, unequally, abusively. So I don't have the option of walking away permanently. Even if I did, though, even if I magically was all of the sudden no longer being discriminated against because of my disabilities, now that I know that other people are, knowing about it makes it my problem too. The reason there's a BADD, the reason I keep reading, and all of these lovely people keep writing, is because there's something to blog against. If there wasn't? Then we could all go on our merry ways, (off to fight another fight, most likely), and gather on May 1st to say "Look at that, it's all fixed!" But until then, it might help to think of it the way that Neurodivergent K put it:
They will fight for each other, but no one fights for us. I am tired of fighting, but I keep doing it because it's fight or die, and I am not dead yet.


Because we're none of us, dead yet. So we'll keep showing up, whenever we've got the spoons. (At least I will.)

For some slightly more positive BADD posts, there's Martha's post about thank yous; Fausterella's post on Being Vincible (and an ally); Where's Lulu's list of current TV actors with disabilities (to show that we are out there, sometimes).

Haven't made it all the way through yet, though, so I'll keep you posted as I come across more favorites. In the meantime, you can still read all of the Blogging Against Disabilism Day Here

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