Hello, Alamo.
I’m a pretty humble person overall, at least in the ways I know I come up short.
One of those ways stems from my ADHD. I do not retain information unless it’s one of those things that I’ve spent my lifetime obsessing over. I am very bad about the specific details like dates, locations, but for example, I know much and keep relearning updated facts about the Civil Rights Movement.
It’s wild to even entertain the idea that I “know a lot about history.” Point-blank, I don’t. However it seems that my brain retains the parts that actually matter, re: those who don’t learn history are doomed to repeat it. I feel like we’ve been repeating it for decades. Different fonts, same bigotries with the same end goals. To be fair, some of those are “different” like Arial and Arial Bold are different.
Everyone loves to focus on the receptacle in office as the beginning and end of all our country’s woes. I’ll even admit that until Bernie Sanders the year prior, I still had a little bit of faith in politics. It was kind of a nightmare learning how astoundingly naive this country is to elect a nepo-baby, racist, loser, failed businessman, reality tv star, now-felon.
All that aside, we always make do with the poisoned crap we’re dealt.
I remember hearing over and over how trump had no intention of harming disabled people. We were safe. Women lost their autonomy (and I still had a womb capable of birth at the time too?), but they wouldn’t come for me or my community! Sure, he eventually had that one speech where he literally made the “r*tarded sign” when mocking a disabled reporter, but he explained that away and we all moved on. I’m worrying for nothing.
No one listens *to* disabled people anyway. They talk over us, all the time, implying they know better than us, even the supposedly well-meaning ones. Being gaslit for years, just for the DOJ to publicly release an opinion on Olmstead, just to learn July 20th that they doubled down in saying Olmstead isn’t legally enforceable… It’s fucking infuriating.
Where are all the Autism Moms who claim to be fierce warriors for their children? Why did my friend Wednesday have to come to me, devastated, asking me to please write about the Olmstead opinion because the only places she’d seen it talked about was by a few smaller creators on Tiktok?
Some days I have a lot of hope. Today isn’t one of those days.
I know it’ll pass and I’ll pick myself back up like I always do, this time with a little help from my mostly also disabled and otherwise multiply-marginalized community who have proven to be very reliable. Right now, I just have to be pissed off and sad.
Salud.
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