Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha
Excerpt:
Something I keep thinking this year is, where do we go from here? There’s been a real “what the fuck?” and “what do we do now” vibe out there in criplandia and DJlandia. Things are beyond intense: fascism is rapidly stepping up the pace of its attacks, with hundreds of anti-trans bills that increasingly single out neurodivergent trans people for extra levels of exclusion, anti critical race theory laws, the stripping away of our access to abortion, and ever-present killing violence against Black people, including the May Day vigilante killing of beloved neurodivergent Black artist Jordan Neely on the New York City subway.
At the same time, disabled life often feels like living in the Twilight Zone, if you don’t give in to the overwhelming pressure to “forget” the pandemic. As of this writing, we are a week post the World Health Organization and the White House declaring the global and US pandemic emergencies “over”–even though a thousand people continue to die in the US every week from COVID and the head of WHO admits that one person dies every three minutes from COVID globally (that we know of). Many people refer to “back when COVID was happening,” erasing the millions of people who have died and the millions of people with Long COVID who are, in the words of activist group ME Action, “still sick, still fighting.”
To continue to live, be awake and resist as disabled people in these conditions is difficult, to put it mildly. Most of us are also holding a shit ton of unprocessed grief which makes everyone’s energy pretty flatlined. Skyrocketing prices make it hard to just get by, not to mention the recent decrease in SNAP benefits since the federal public health emergency orders are “over.”
