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silveradept[This Year's December Days Theme is Community, and all the forms that it takes. If you have some suggestions about what communities I'm part of (or that you think I'm part of) that would be worth a look, let me know in the comments.]
Community: The Temporarily Able-Bodied
azurelunatic suggested this, and so naturally the randomizer decided it was time to do it.
"Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness" are part of the "inalienable rights" provided by the Creator in the Declaration of Independence of the United States. Of course, at that time, and in most times since, the society of the United States tends to think of all of those things, and so many other things that constitute social participation, as having an asterisk next to them, which leads to a footnote that says, "if you are of able body and able mind." Even with the passage of various disability legislation and their additional requirements to make spaces, both physical and virtual, accessible to persons with disabilities, there's still a lot of work to be done to make things accessible, much less inclusive of people with disabilities.
The community that I am currently part of is the one of the Temporarily Able-Bodied. Even though I have variable attention stimulus trait, and therefore at least some part of my life can be viewed through a disability lens (even if the manifestation of trying to live with that disability is an entire load of systems and external reminders that are meant to make up for the deficiencies of my brain's ability to store and recall information well, to recall information in a timely manner, and/or to task-switch from one thing to another.) My physical health has been much less requiring of assistive devices and systems, and I am often the most able-bodied person in the household when it comes to doing physical tasks. I may not be the most knowledgeable person, or possibly even the correct person, but I am usually the one with the most ability and energy to spend on physical tasks.
Needing to be the person with the physical ability has expanded my repertoire of useful skills, in addition to using the ones that I unwillingly learned at the hands of my father and mother. For example, I am a competent sous chef for the people who have recipe ideas or who then can take over the cooking once the prep work and the basic parts have been started. (That was demonstrated ably this last Harvest Celebration, where, under the direction of the more confident people, I did most of the primary cooking for the feast.) In situations where being a tool-using mammal has been needed, I have been able to use the tools appropriately, for lifting and carrying, loading and unloading, but also for cutting, rewiring, hammering, screwing and unscrewing, and other such things. It's usually physically exhausting to do all of that work, but I'm usually the one that can do it or needs to provide the primary assist for such things. Grunt work is not usually glamorous, but it is usually helpful, and I have regular brainweasels that usually land to the statement of "If I can't be [pretty, witty, charming, attractive, smart, or some other positive quality that will garner a positive opinion of me from others], I can at least be helpful."
The community is specifically related to being Temporarily Able-Bodied, because the state of being able-bodied is a temporary one for everyone. Not just because of the final bit where the body and the brain stops and are no longer alive, but because there are mass-disabling events that happen every day. And events that disable others every day, either suddenly, temporarily, or permanently. And the presence of wasting and degenerative diseases that slowly take away the ability of the body. And, even underneath all of those, the aging of the body and the reduced function that often comes with having an aged body. That I am a person of temporary able body to this point in life comes from a fair amount of luck in genetics, in where I was reared, in the relative lack of dangers in my life, and my phenomenal luck so far that I have not been in a situation that will disable me, whether through bad luck, chaos, infection, tactical nuclear war, domestic or international terrorism, natural disaster, the consequences of my own actions, or the actions of other people. And I have had a few opportunities to disable myself in my life, whether through hard knocks, rebounding blades, injuries, surgeries, near-misses, panic attacks running unchecked through my body and brain, apneatic sleep, and other such dangers that are part of living and working in the society.
Everyone else who is similarly currently able-bodied has been lucky in similar ways, and the designation of being temporarily able-bodied is supposed to function in similar ways to the blessing uttered to practicing Catholics (at least, while I was practicing) on Ash Wednesday: "Remember that you are dust, and to dust you will return." Disability is in its own way a memento mori to the rest of the society, which often does not like contemplating the idea of their own death or disability, even though such things may be right around the corner for them. The frailty and mortality of the body is a regular recurrence in media, which often delights in causing injury, disability, or death as part of the plot, or which often demonstrates the technological superiority of a fictional society by having erased disability or found ways that permit full participation in society by the disabled. Usually the first, rather than the second, excepting in non-visual media, because the visual language of our media prefers pretty and abled bodies as heroes and relegates disability or disfigurement as the signifiers of villainy. (And even then, sometimes still has able-bodied people playing those with disabilities, rather than finding the people who have the relevant disability, limb difference, or condition, and having them do the acting on the screen.)
Disability is far more prevalent in society than popular conception of it, but that is often because many disabilities are easily corrected for with our current level of technology. Corrective lenses are a ubiquitous technology whose purpose is to allow a person who has a disability to participate in society. We even make corrective lenses that are functionally invisible so that someone with that disability can appear fully able-bodied, if that's what their self-image demands, or if that is what the image they have to project as part of work or society demands. Brain malfunctions, variable attention, hormonal imbalances, and/or several infectious diseases and disabling conditions have either been vaccinated against, so they can no longer take hold in a body, or have a suite of possible drugs and treatments that can suppress the condition and its symptoms, re-regulate a dysfunctional process, re-balance the complex chemistry of the body, or provide necessary compounds to a body that it does not produce in sufficient quantities by itself. Menstruation can be regulated, suppressed, or have the bodily symptoms toned down or removed, and pregnancy can be prevented, induced, regulated, or stopped, in accordance with what is desired and what is best for the health of the beings involved. (It's easier to conceive of menstruation as a disability if you've ever been around or are someone who has irregular or excessive bleeding and/or strong, painful symptoms, or exist in a society that considers menstruation something shameful or that makes you unclean, and is therefore something you should not be doing in public or around other people. Not that capitalism believes that someone should get time off to deal with their bleeding and such. To think about pregnancy as a disability, you just need to be around enough pregnant people and see what the process does to those who are pregnant, both in healthy pregnancies and in difficult ones.)
What most people think of as disability, though, is a physical disability that either requires visible technology to mitigate, such as crutches, canes, chairs, adjustable furniture, curb cuts, or gentle grade ramps, or that requires accommodation or specialized methods to successfully interact with, like sign language, service animals, screen readers, braille, text-to-speech, and communication boards. Regrettably, despite the temporary nature of the able-bodied, able-bodied is seen as an unmarked default, and therefore, accommodations and structural changes to allow for the disabled to participate more fully in society are seen as special things outside of the norm, burdens that have to be shouldered, and low-priority elements for spending that could be "better" spent on militarized forces and tax cuts for people already wealthy enough that anything more is merely numbers rather than improvements in existence. Even though there is a known and studied phenomenon where making improvements to ensure a greater amount of participation by the disabled produces improvements for everyone taking advantage of those structural improvements, there are still not nearly enough resources being poured into making the world more accessible, and trying to sort through situations where there are conflicting access needs to find something that will either work or can be customized to work for the need of the person in front of them when it's needed. It is just now, this year, that there have been curb cuts poured such that I could get from my house to the local park or the nearest bus stop, were I to need to do so in a chair. I'm not entirely sure that all of the buses are equipped to handle a chair user, and so I might have to wait for another cycle or two before finding a bus that I could actually use.
Having disabled people as friends, who post about their interactions with the world, makes it easier to conceive of different views of the world, and some of the considerations that have to go into figuring out whether or not an activity is worth undertaking, based on what the results will be, and the costs that will come with that. Because disability is widespread and prevalent, but a specific disability may not be, services to make it easier (or possible) for someone to use a service successfully (like taking a trip on public transport) are often targeted for savings or budget harmonization. Such "wasteful" costs are only used by a fraction of people, and even if it is the only reason they can use those services, it's clearly not enough to justify the continued spending in a society that insists that even its public services be profitable. (Or at least must manage to provide such services with whatever amount of charity can be extended from the public coffers without complaint about how stingy it is.) As someone who works in public sector work, and has to deal with the realities of budgets and the continued lack of funding that could be rectified if people with more than enough money for generations were to contribute appropriately to the public goods, rather than buy legislators and demand those legislators further starve the public funds, it's close enough to infuriating to have a solution that could work, were it not for the power concentrating in the hands of the people who want to see number go up.
Outside of the matters of funding and public services, even in interactions between people, or between people and business entities, how a disabled person will be treated run a full range of possibilities, from acceptance and assistance to eugenic sentiments. And because there's no way of knowing what reaction a disabled person is going to get when they have to interact with other people, often times what gets seen by observers is not the thing that precipitates a reaction, but the reaction itself, and that can produce further negative sentiment toward someone with a disability if it looks like they're being "unreasonable" in asking for what they need to successfully do a task or interact with a person. Especially when the place they are looking for accommodation from doesn't actually have what they need, even if that thing is required by law.
There's a tendency to blame the person who is making the request for making the request, rather than the person who should be able to accommodate the request failing to do so. Perhaps because of a disabled person's status as a memento mori, a living embodiment of inscriptions on gravestones and other markers meant to remind everyone who encounters them of a specific concept: "I was what you are, you will be what I am." As mentioned above, despite U.S. media having much to do with death, disability, violence, and other such things as inflicted on others, it tends not to want to grapple with the reality of disability, or the long-term consequences of it, or how much it really can suck to be disabled and not have access to anything that makes living life with a disability easier and more pleasant. Instead, narratives about overcoming disability to live an abled life or narratives where people who are disabled in one way have some kind of compensatory overabundance in another (both of those categories properly derided as "cripspiration,") flourish and are seen as laudatory. The overarching societal feeling tends to be either one of fear, of both the possibility and the inevitability of having a body that will fail, or of contempt, that a body that cannot have every inch, every moment, of its existence used to make profit for someone is useless and should be discarded. Often regardless of what the inhabitant of that body has to say on the matter. Both of those impulses combine to push disabled bodies to the margins, to pretend they don't exist (unless it's unavoidable,) and to set goals that are less about integrating who's here and working toward making fixes available for those that want them and more about trying to make sure that no such person will ever exist again and will not be able to continue their family line. It's supposed to be a constant of the universe that if what you are thinking is actual Nazi shit, or something that would not have been out of place for Nazis, then don't do what you're thinking. And yet, there are a lot of people out there talking about impurities in the genetic pool, or the need to decrease the surplus population, or wistfully looking forward to a future where there are no disabled people or all the disabled people have to live with each other, separated from society. Or are dead.
I thoroughly expect, since I have had a life of temporary able-bodied-ness, to grouse, complain, bitch, and otherwise bemoan the inevitable where I stop being so able-bodied, because I will remember the times where I used to be able to do things. What I also hope for myself is that I will accept the new limitations as they arrive and that there will be accommodations available for me so that I can still function with those limitations. And perhaps remember to yell a lot about those places that don't have them so that they get them, so that other people can also participate in places they were previously excluded from.
Community: The Temporarily Able-Bodied
azurelunatic suggested this, and so naturally the randomizer decided it was time to do it."Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness" are part of the "inalienable rights" provided by the Creator in the Declaration of Independence of the United States. Of course, at that time, and in most times since, the society of the United States tends to think of all of those things, and so many other things that constitute social participation, as having an asterisk next to them, which leads to a footnote that says, "if you are of able body and able mind." Even with the passage of various disability legislation and their additional requirements to make spaces, both physical and virtual, accessible to persons with disabilities, there's still a lot of work to be done to make things accessible, much less inclusive of people with disabilities.
The community that I am currently part of is the one of the Temporarily Able-Bodied. Even though I have variable attention stimulus trait, and therefore at least some part of my life can be viewed through a disability lens (even if the manifestation of trying to live with that disability is an entire load of systems and external reminders that are meant to make up for the deficiencies of my brain's ability to store and recall information well, to recall information in a timely manner, and/or to task-switch from one thing to another.) My physical health has been much less requiring of assistive devices and systems, and I am often the most able-bodied person in the household when it comes to doing physical tasks. I may not be the most knowledgeable person, or possibly even the correct person, but I am usually the one with the most ability and energy to spend on physical tasks.
Needing to be the person with the physical ability has expanded my repertoire of useful skills, in addition to using the ones that I unwillingly learned at the hands of my father and mother. For example, I am a competent sous chef for the people who have recipe ideas or who then can take over the cooking once the prep work and the basic parts have been started. (That was demonstrated ably this last Harvest Celebration, where, under the direction of the more confident people, I did most of the primary cooking for the feast.) In situations where being a tool-using mammal has been needed, I have been able to use the tools appropriately, for lifting and carrying, loading and unloading, but also for cutting, rewiring, hammering, screwing and unscrewing, and other such things. It's usually physically exhausting to do all of that work, but I'm usually the one that can do it or needs to provide the primary assist for such things. Grunt work is not usually glamorous, but it is usually helpful, and I have regular brainweasels that usually land to the statement of "If I can't be [pretty, witty, charming, attractive, smart, or some other positive quality that will garner a positive opinion of me from others], I can at least be helpful."
The community is specifically related to being Temporarily Able-Bodied, because the state of being able-bodied is a temporary one for everyone. Not just because of the final bit where the body and the brain stops and are no longer alive, but because there are mass-disabling events that happen every day. And events that disable others every day, either suddenly, temporarily, or permanently. And the presence of wasting and degenerative diseases that slowly take away the ability of the body. And, even underneath all of those, the aging of the body and the reduced function that often comes with having an aged body. That I am a person of temporary able body to this point in life comes from a fair amount of luck in genetics, in where I was reared, in the relative lack of dangers in my life, and my phenomenal luck so far that I have not been in a situation that will disable me, whether through bad luck, chaos, infection, tactical nuclear war, domestic or international terrorism, natural disaster, the consequences of my own actions, or the actions of other people. And I have had a few opportunities to disable myself in my life, whether through hard knocks, rebounding blades, injuries, surgeries, near-misses, panic attacks running unchecked through my body and brain, apneatic sleep, and other such dangers that are part of living and working in the society.
Everyone else who is similarly currently able-bodied has been lucky in similar ways, and the designation of being temporarily able-bodied is supposed to function in similar ways to the blessing uttered to practicing Catholics (at least, while I was practicing) on Ash Wednesday: "Remember that you are dust, and to dust you will return." Disability is in its own way a memento mori to the rest of the society, which often does not like contemplating the idea of their own death or disability, even though such things may be right around the corner for them. The frailty and mortality of the body is a regular recurrence in media, which often delights in causing injury, disability, or death as part of the plot, or which often demonstrates the technological superiority of a fictional society by having erased disability or found ways that permit full participation in society by the disabled. Usually the first, rather than the second, excepting in non-visual media, because the visual language of our media prefers pretty and abled bodies as heroes and relegates disability or disfigurement as the signifiers of villainy. (And even then, sometimes still has able-bodied people playing those with disabilities, rather than finding the people who have the relevant disability, limb difference, or condition, and having them do the acting on the screen.)
Disability is far more prevalent in society than popular conception of it, but that is often because many disabilities are easily corrected for with our current level of technology. Corrective lenses are a ubiquitous technology whose purpose is to allow a person who has a disability to participate in society. We even make corrective lenses that are functionally invisible so that someone with that disability can appear fully able-bodied, if that's what their self-image demands, or if that is what the image they have to project as part of work or society demands. Brain malfunctions, variable attention, hormonal imbalances, and/or several infectious diseases and disabling conditions have either been vaccinated against, so they can no longer take hold in a body, or have a suite of possible drugs and treatments that can suppress the condition and its symptoms, re-regulate a dysfunctional process, re-balance the complex chemistry of the body, or provide necessary compounds to a body that it does not produce in sufficient quantities by itself. Menstruation can be regulated, suppressed, or have the bodily symptoms toned down or removed, and pregnancy can be prevented, induced, regulated, or stopped, in accordance with what is desired and what is best for the health of the beings involved. (It's easier to conceive of menstruation as a disability if you've ever been around or are someone who has irregular or excessive bleeding and/or strong, painful symptoms, or exist in a society that considers menstruation something shameful or that makes you unclean, and is therefore something you should not be doing in public or around other people. Not that capitalism believes that someone should get time off to deal with their bleeding and such. To think about pregnancy as a disability, you just need to be around enough pregnant people and see what the process does to those who are pregnant, both in healthy pregnancies and in difficult ones.)
What most people think of as disability, though, is a physical disability that either requires visible technology to mitigate, such as crutches, canes, chairs, adjustable furniture, curb cuts, or gentle grade ramps, or that requires accommodation or specialized methods to successfully interact with, like sign language, service animals, screen readers, braille, text-to-speech, and communication boards. Regrettably, despite the temporary nature of the able-bodied, able-bodied is seen as an unmarked default, and therefore, accommodations and structural changes to allow for the disabled to participate more fully in society are seen as special things outside of the norm, burdens that have to be shouldered, and low-priority elements for spending that could be "better" spent on militarized forces and tax cuts for people already wealthy enough that anything more is merely numbers rather than improvements in existence. Even though there is a known and studied phenomenon where making improvements to ensure a greater amount of participation by the disabled produces improvements for everyone taking advantage of those structural improvements, there are still not nearly enough resources being poured into making the world more accessible, and trying to sort through situations where there are conflicting access needs to find something that will either work or can be customized to work for the need of the person in front of them when it's needed. It is just now, this year, that there have been curb cuts poured such that I could get from my house to the local park or the nearest bus stop, were I to need to do so in a chair. I'm not entirely sure that all of the buses are equipped to handle a chair user, and so I might have to wait for another cycle or two before finding a bus that I could actually use.
Having disabled people as friends, who post about their interactions with the world, makes it easier to conceive of different views of the world, and some of the considerations that have to go into figuring out whether or not an activity is worth undertaking, based on what the results will be, and the costs that will come with that. Because disability is widespread and prevalent, but a specific disability may not be, services to make it easier (or possible) for someone to use a service successfully (like taking a trip on public transport) are often targeted for savings or budget harmonization. Such "wasteful" costs are only used by a fraction of people, and even if it is the only reason they can use those services, it's clearly not enough to justify the continued spending in a society that insists that even its public services be profitable. (Or at least must manage to provide such services with whatever amount of charity can be extended from the public coffers without complaint about how stingy it is.) As someone who works in public sector work, and has to deal with the realities of budgets and the continued lack of funding that could be rectified if people with more than enough money for generations were to contribute appropriately to the public goods, rather than buy legislators and demand those legislators further starve the public funds, it's close enough to infuriating to have a solution that could work, were it not for the power concentrating in the hands of the people who want to see number go up.
Outside of the matters of funding and public services, even in interactions between people, or between people and business entities, how a disabled person will be treated run a full range of possibilities, from acceptance and assistance to eugenic sentiments. And because there's no way of knowing what reaction a disabled person is going to get when they have to interact with other people, often times what gets seen by observers is not the thing that precipitates a reaction, but the reaction itself, and that can produce further negative sentiment toward someone with a disability if it looks like they're being "unreasonable" in asking for what they need to successfully do a task or interact with a person. Especially when the place they are looking for accommodation from doesn't actually have what they need, even if that thing is required by law.
There's a tendency to blame the person who is making the request for making the request, rather than the person who should be able to accommodate the request failing to do so. Perhaps because of a disabled person's status as a memento mori, a living embodiment of inscriptions on gravestones and other markers meant to remind everyone who encounters them of a specific concept: "I was what you are, you will be what I am." As mentioned above, despite U.S. media having much to do with death, disability, violence, and other such things as inflicted on others, it tends not to want to grapple with the reality of disability, or the long-term consequences of it, or how much it really can suck to be disabled and not have access to anything that makes living life with a disability easier and more pleasant. Instead, narratives about overcoming disability to live an abled life or narratives where people who are disabled in one way have some kind of compensatory overabundance in another (both of those categories properly derided as "cripspiration,") flourish and are seen as laudatory. The overarching societal feeling tends to be either one of fear, of both the possibility and the inevitability of having a body that will fail, or of contempt, that a body that cannot have every inch, every moment, of its existence used to make profit for someone is useless and should be discarded. Often regardless of what the inhabitant of that body has to say on the matter. Both of those impulses combine to push disabled bodies to the margins, to pretend they don't exist (unless it's unavoidable,) and to set goals that are less about integrating who's here and working toward making fixes available for those that want them and more about trying to make sure that no such person will ever exist again and will not be able to continue their family line. It's supposed to be a constant of the universe that if what you are thinking is actual Nazi shit, or something that would not have been out of place for Nazis, then don't do what you're thinking. And yet, there are a lot of people out there talking about impurities in the genetic pool, or the need to decrease the surplus population, or wistfully looking forward to a future where there are no disabled people or all the disabled people have to live with each other, separated from society. Or are dead.
I thoroughly expect, since I have had a life of temporary able-bodied-ness, to grouse, complain, bitch, and otherwise bemoan the inevitable where I stop being so able-bodied, because I will remember the times where I used to be able to do things. What I also hope for myself is that I will accept the new limitations as they arrive and that there will be accommodations available for me so that I can still function with those limitations. And perhaps remember to yell a lot about those places that don't have them so that they get them, so that other people can also participate in places they were previously excluded from.
