<
https://truthout.org/articles/abled-bodied-leftists-cannot-abandon-disabled-solidarity-to-move-on-from-covid/>
"I have this book coming out. It’s about the disabled future, about how most of
the world will be disabled soon, and how disabled people kept each other and
other people alive during COVID. I have tour dates. They’re all online. Because
COVID. Because COVID is still here. Because every week, 90 percent of the
country is in high or substantial uncontrolled community transmission — the
whole country is blood red on the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
(CDC) map. Because 400-500 people a day are still dying of COVID in the U.S.,
and long COVID is the third-most common neurological disorder. For all of these
reasons, having in-person events would feel like inviting my disabled fan base
to a slaughterhouse. I have every booster that exists, and I’m still
immunocompromised and not hopping on 19 planes in a row.
Yet every time I post, people — radical people, “movement” people — say, “Oh
see you in L.A./Atlanta/Chicago!” And I have to say, “All events are virtual.
Remember that? Virtual events? The accessible kind, with CART (real time
captioning, making events accessible to people with a variety of disabilities
and neurodivergence) and American Sign Language (ASL)? How did you forget so
quickly?”
I’ve started calling the time we live in “The Great Forgetting.” Some call it
“The Great Gaslighting.” Both are true.
By these terms, I mean the immense, on-purpose effort by the state to throw
down the memory hole the fact that the last two years of the pandemic happened.
The CDC switching its easiest-to-find map from the accurate community
transmission map to one that shows the whole country in (fake) happy low-risk
green. Biden saying offhandedly that “the pandemic is over” even as thousands
of people die every week and groups like Long COVID Justice and #MEAction
organize — from bed and in die ins in front of the White House — demanding that
the U.S. declare long COVID a public health emergency. The state is acting like
a bad boyfriend, a gaslighting partner telling you that nothing you remember is
real. That’s not new, but the intensity level has reached a new high."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
