Journal Entry from 4-20-10

Disability as a Social Construct
A person's needs aren't special, they are ordinary.

Under the materialist/capitalist system, people are classified by their production value or their utility to "society". Our society's zeitgeist is that of unconscious and unmitigated consumption. People are judged and valued according to how much they contribute to this. Being that we know now that the production/consumption paradigm is unsustainable and detrimental to the planet, we can rethink what we see as a valuable contribution to society.
Personally, I have never believed that a "productive" member of society as defined by the mainstream is valuable or virtuous. Being a cog in someone else's machine is not "normal", it is to be a mental slave to the dictates of the market. The light that shines from people who are being themselves, doing their own thing, are always inspiring. They are sometimes threatening to those people who will fight to the death to remain in mental bondage. What we know about human behavior is always changing. All one needs to do is look to the recent past to see the error in our beliefs and understandings in regards to disability or exceptionality. Examples of this can be seen with racial theory, eugenics, words like "handicapped" and "imbecile". If we were in error only a few short years ago, how do we know we are not in error now?

"We live in a society where it is normal to be sick, and sick to be abnormal." -Edward Abbey