I’m just curious about this. As someone with a chronic illness, I pretty much never hear anyone talk about things related to the sorts of difficulties and discrimination I and others might face within society. I’m not aware of companies or governments doing anything special to bring awareness on the same scale of say, pride month for instance. In fact certain aspects of accessibility were only normalized during the pandemic when healthy people needed them and now they’re being gradually rescinded now that they don’t. It’s annoying for those who’ve come to prefer those accommodations. It’s cruel for those who rely on them.
And just to be clear, I’m not suggesting this is an either or sort of thing. I’m just wondering why it’s not a that and this sort of thing. It’s possible I’m not considering the whole picture here, and I don’t mean for this to be controversial.
Excuse my ignorance because my only (known) disability is needing corrective lenses.
LGBTQ rights and issues are relatively straightforward (where the goal is to love whoever you love and act like the person you want to be). Disability (to me) is much more of a vague and broad concept so I don’t know what the aim of a movement would be.
The causes of disability range from a voluntary or involuntary event, whether it’s a workplace incident, sports, car crash, or sometimes people have it from birth. People inflicted with conditions such as blindness, deafness, speech impediment, schizophrenia, or being bound to a mobility or other device like a wheelchair, pacemaker, hearing aid. There’s such variety and people need assistance in different ways.
I try to help where I can, but I have trouble offering help sometimes. How do I support someone without calling attention to their disability?
I’m disabled and really we just need people to know and talk about how many of us live in poverty in wealthy countries. Look up how much a disabled person must live on for your part of the world. In my area, I have a bottom of the market, illegal rental suite in middle-of-nowhere farmland and rent takes up 2/3 of my monthly income, this is after we just got a boost to our shelter allowance. I live in Canada, some countries are worse, some are better. We just passed a new law federally that is supposed help a lot, but it will take about a year to get rolling and we’ve heard these kinds of promises before. We shall see.
A well supported disabled person can still contribute to society in other ways than a full time job, but right now we makeup the bulk of homelessness, a growing problem, globally. This problem is systemic, change must be legislative and that will only happen if these issues are in people’s minds and conversations. So just do a bit of googling, find out how much a single person on disability gets, and talk about it with your friends. Get them to talk about it with theirs. If you really want to do your disabled neighbours a solid, write to your elected representative about these issues.