Suicidal Ideation: a struggle with “disability” and identity

SpeEdChange.at.Medium

A little more than 10 years ago, for Blogging Against Disablism Day 2009, I wrote a piece about my battle with societal disinterest in the facts of disability. Blogging Against Disablism Day is an important event on MayDay that gives voice to the widest possible range of disability stories.(though it could not be organized in 2018–2019 we hope it will return, and as always I wish all the best to @goldfish who began it all)

When this old post was brought to my attention recently, I wondered about its continued relevance, but then I saw what was important. We live in a time when political leaders in the United States and the United Kingdom are busy dividing their nations into “citizens who matter and have rights” and “citizens who don’t matter, and have no real rights.”

“…the Republican Party of the Obama years didn’t just recycle its Gingrich-era excesses; it also pursued a policy of total opposition, not just blocking Obama but also casting him as fundamentally illegitimate and un-American. He may have been elected by a majority of the voting public, but that majority didn’t count. It didn’t represent the “real” America.

“And President Trump, of course, has repeatedly and falsely denounced Clinton’s popular-vote victory as illegitimate, the…