Monday Monday: The plight of disabled America

The greatest obstacle to the advancement of disabled Americans isn’t ableism or physical infirmity but rather the disabled community itself. The lower median income and higher rates of poverty found among disabled Americans does not result, as they may argue, from high medical costs and the inherent difficulties of working with a physical or mental impairment. Instead it is the obvious result of liberal economic policy and cultural issues within the disabled community. These economic and cultural problems are so incredibly important that I must address them together and also ignore any distracting liberal explanations to do with structural violence.

Though well intentioned, welfare aimed at helping the disabled community is actually exponentially increasing problems within it. Think about it for a moment: By paying subsidies to disabled people, the government is encouraging disabled people to stay disabled. Not only this, but they are incentivizing it. I do not believe it will be long before able-bodied people, realizing the life of ease and pleasure that awaits them once handicapped, begin irreparably injuring themselves en-masse in order to become disabled. This is, of course, the rational choice to make; an individual can either work, only to be brutally robbed of it all through taxation, or they can jump in front of a train and live a comfortable life on the bountiful riches of welfare forever. Who in this situation wouldn’t want to be unemployed with physical and/or mental disabilities?

Other conservatives might respond to this crisis of welfare-dependence by advocating for decreasing both welfare and taxes as a means of increasing the job-creating capacity of the wealthy and thereby creating more jobs for the disabled community. I believe that this is a shortsighted plan. Instead, I argue that while taxes and welfare should be cut, the wealthy should then keep the money they preserve instead of using it to create more jobs for disabled workers. Certainly, this may at first mean that a few disabled people live in intense poverty – but in the long run it will very much benefit them. If the rich can further enrich themselves, we will ultimately see the poorest disabled becoming richer too, as an inevitable result of the trickle-down effect. QED.

I would like also to address the self-defeating tendency of most disability rights activists to argue for the expansion of ramp, elevator and braille installation nationwide. These do-gooder schemes only serve to further the culture of dependency in certain sectors of the disabled community. With enough work, anyone can get into any stepped-entrance building, no matter how severe their physical incapacitation. That is the beauty of America. If you always rely on ramps other people build for you, you’re never going to make your own way into these buildings and so never achieve The American Dream. Needing help is, after all, deeply un-American and fundamentally just a sign of laziness.

Of course, the brutalizing economic policies of the government cannot be seen as the sole cause of the problems faced by the disabled community. They are also caused by disabled people themselves. Just look at the glorification of disability we see in films like ‘The Theory of Everything’ and ‘A Beautiful Mind’. These films and the individuals depicted therein make it seem as though disability is cool, encouraging thousands of disabled youths to never work for anything and to get famous just for being disabled, like notable disabled individuals Stephen Hawking or Helen Keller.

Clearly, the existence of difficulties faced by disabled individuals is the product of a culture that glorifies and incentivizes being handicapped. Yet the most significant factor in perpetuating these difficulties is the crippling sense of victimhood within the disabled community. Disabled individuals consistently blame ableism and the impairment of their physical or mental health as the reasons for poverty and distress in their community, when in reality it is clearly the result of a poor work-ethic and welfare grubbing. I would never say that these people are lazy: just that they do not want to work or do anything strenuous in spite of the obvious benefits doing so would present to them. The difference should be obvious.

Ultimately, the truth about the difficulties facing the disabled community is this: they’re just not trying hard enough. The disabled community needs to take a long hard look at itself, see that it doesn’t really face any real problems except its own whininess, and then it needs to get to work. Only then can America truly achieve Martin Luther King’s dream of a body-blind, identity-less, bland society.