This is quite a hard post to write. I’m used to being loud and outspoken and angry and sarcastic, or sad, or positive and encouraging.
I’m not really used to writing out how scared I am, in blog format.
I’m terrified.
People around the world are dying in large numbers from this virus. It’s a full pandemic. And the callous attitude of many is really getting to me.
“It’s fine,” they say, relieved, “because only old people, only disabled people, only immunocompromised people are going to die. Everyone else will be fine!”
Thus they blithely wave a large section of the population into irrelevance. They don’t care. They don’t think we really exist. They don’t think we deserve to be alive. They don’t mind that we will die in huge numbers, because we’re ONLY disabled people. They’ll be fine, with their healthy bodies, their youth untouched by years or chronic illness, their immune systems neither unresponsive nor overactive – they’ll shake it off like a bad cold and survive while we die a horrible, painful death of suffocation and pneumonia.
The selfishness of such people is immense. They have descended upon the shops like a Mosaic plague of locusts, snatching necessary supplies out of our hands and hoarding them in ridiculous quantities they will never need or use. My friends desperately need disinfecting wipes to properly clean their mobility aids, yet all remaining stock of such items has been decimated by the viciously selfish and gullibly panicked. Medical supplies actually needed by doctors and chronically ill people have been stolen away by those with more money than compassion. I am sickened, horrified, infuriated to the point of tears by the sheer stubborn refusal of people to accommodate the needs of others even a little bit.
I always knew, somewhere in my mind, that the majority of abled people do not care about us, but this situation has made it so painfully obvious that I feel as though I’ve been kicked in the chest. My friends could very well suffer and die because these people can see only their own fear and have no thought for anyone else.
It’s a truly terrifying time to be a chronically ill/disabled person. I don’t want to die. I don’t want my friends to die.
We have to learn to look after each other, to stop putting human beings in a hierarchy of “who deserves to exist more”. We all deserve to exist! We deserve to thrive! We deserve to lead happy, fulfilling lives in whatever way is available to us. We are a communal species – it’s time we started goddamn acting like it.
Livin' on a Prayer 