Hello disabled comrades! Sorry the mega is late again. I hope we’re all weathering the COVID surge as best as we can.
As always, we ask that in order to participate in the weekly megathread, one self-identifies as some form of disabled, which is broadly defined in the community sidebar:
“Disability” is an umbrella term which encompasses physical disabilities, emotional/psychiatric disabilities, neurodivergence, intellectual/developmental disabilities, sensory disabilities, invisible disabilities, and more. You do not have to have an official diagnosis to consider yourself disabled.
Mask up, love one another, and stay alive for one more week.
All these tech companies dropping DEI initiatives has me a bit concerned.
My contract agency just submitted the paperwork today, so fingers fucking crossed I guess. What’s done is done.
I don’t bother disclosing anything to jobs or coworkers anymore unless absolutely necessary. About a year before COVID I worked at a place which had a fully remote guy who was “allowed” to do it because he was a “rockstar” — not my words. I asked if I could also work remotely full-time because it would accommodate my medication and glucose monitoring needs better and was given a big fat emphatic hell no. Then not too long later it turns out we really were just capable of being fully remote completely, after all. Funny, that.
The suits and their toadies (see: everyone) immediately jumped on the “I’m more productive at the office” bandwagon, so I do not assume they give much of a shit about the welfare of anyone who actually needs help. Until it’s them, of course. Personally I’m living for that day to come, and in this era of unmitigated & continually intensifying plague such that can be dubbed “quad-demic”, it certainly will.
Get them while you still can, I suppose…
incoherent ranting about Elon Musk and fascists
This is what makes it so INFURIATING when the media defends his fascist actions as “oh, he’s autistic, he doesn’t know better”. I am autistic, it probably affects me more than it does him (though he can just throw money at any problem), I have a lot of difficulty with daily life and got no social skills at all, that doesn’t mean that I would go and do a nazi salute on the big stage. Most of us won’t. Didn’t the nazis kill autistic people? At least those that they didn’t see fit for “useful work”? Why the hell would I uphold the ideology of those who would lock me up in a mental institution and then starve me to death or perform horrible experiments on me?!
I guess that’s what being
does to your thinking. Even if he wasn’t rich. They think they’re is untouchable. To the average USA person, the nazis are an abstract idea, something that happened far away while they were comfortably sitting on their continent. Their country didn’t get invaded and destroyed by the fascists. The fascists didn’t massacre their people. They didn’t need fight a war against them for years with incredible sacrifice to expel, and then somehow recover and rebuild the country after that despite the death of millions. They think pretending to be a nazi is “edgy” and hilarious because they are so detached from the reality of what fascism is (otherwise they would see that their own country is inflicting it onto the world right now).
And of course, this guy Elon has his class interests. He isn’t ignorant, he understands perfectly well what he is doing. Fascism is good for his class interests.
Of course, the same media ghouls who spent the last years screaming about how anyone who has even the slightest opposition to
is anti-semitic, will do everything to defend this. Common class interests. Same empire. Death to them all.
Having the same concern. The news about NASA or some place like that did say “Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Accessibility initiatives”. Are they going to change the policies to no longer provide any disability accomodations, and I will be 100% unemployable because I need these?
I read this and I feel so angry for you.
I hear you.
Fingers crossed on your paperwork. I hope it works out for you.
I’m presently pursuing diagnosis for ADHD (which is a huge frustrating journey), and I’m hopeful that treatment and accommodations will help me find academic success, but the state of our local university is grim, and the options for neurodivergent people (even if it’s “just” ADHD) looks grimmer.
I worked in disability care for eight years, and spent the latter half of that trying to organize, unionize and lobby my state legislature for a higher rate of care. I mostly worked in group homes for adults with intellectual and developmental disabilities. The standard of care was abysmal.
A narcissistic part of me feels like I, alone, stood up to the abuse and negligence in my workplace, and that I, alone, made an effort to rally my coworkers to do something. That narcissistic part of me looks back at the times I tabled for the DSA, the IWW, the times I lobbied with the SEIU, the times I tried to put a stop to ableism in the group homes where I worked, and that part sees all the people who failed to act. That part of me lays the blame for all this at the feet of citizens who that part of me views as careless, cowardly and unempathetic.
I know that part of me comes from a wounded place. I know that people have fought harder than I have. That the fight continues and we’re not alone.
But damn is it hard to resist the urges of that wounded, resentful, bitter part of myself.