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According to the U.S Bureau of Labor Statistics, the employment ratio for people with a disability was 17.9 percent in 2020, a decrease from 19.3 percent in 2019.
I’ve attempted to write this article a few times now; “Student Life with Disabilities.” I’ve written about my experiences, journey, self-advocacy, frustrations, criticisms and insights. Normally, I tend to follow the Amy Lee school of thought that “If we can’t talk about it, we’ll just keep drowning in it.”
But that was before.
Before half the country voted to sail directly into an iceberg rather than reconcile our differences.
Before the crew threw all the passengers overboard without so much as a floatie, let alone a lifeboat.
Before our president ordered his sycophants to hold our heads under the water until we stop fighting to surface.
Talking about disabilities has always been discouraged, especially in professional circles, wherein they are treated as burdens, liabilities and the very enemies of productivity.
For the past decade, we’ve managed to make some progress in destigmatizing being disabled through social media, but recently the political pendulum has swung farther right than ever anticipated and suddenly talking about the disabled student experience feels eerily dangerous in light of our current administration. The President of the United States declared disabilities are “a dire threat to the American people.” Medicaid Services are making us “prove that you matter” enough to deserve healthcare and Elon Musk is calling those relying on public benefits “the parasite class.”
If you’re a history buff, you’ll note the Aktion T4-esque overtones of this rhetoric are gaining traction among the supremacist zeitgeist that’s re-infected our country. These policies, once enacted in full, would prove catastrophic to students in career rehabilitative programs and higher education by robbing us of the healthcare and treatments we need in order to attend, let alone succeed in school, so we can graduate into embodying that age-old, yet toxic, paragon of unfettered capitalism we call “productive members of society.”
If our very right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness in the form of healthcare is only granted on the contingency of how productive we are perceived to be by wage-thieving billionaires, then life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness was never actually a constitutionally guaranteed right, but a mere gentlemen’s agreement–one wherein all the gentlemen have walked the plank laden with heavy chains while the rest of us fight to swim against the violent undertow of the tides of tyranny.