#and newsflash!!! disabilities ARE still treated awfully!

[lucysweatslove]

I told my best friend about some of the school shit and how I’ve felt a little micro-aggressed and discriminated against bc disability.

Her: “I will fucking slap a bitch.”

Me: “At least I have two friends who actually care and value me for me and don’t suck and aren’t performative and just like, value being a good human.”

Her: “I mean, I try. It’s hard when others suck and you want to punch their face.”

☠️☠️☠️

[hollow-keys]

I keep seeing recurring discourse about how kids these days are doing awfully in school, they're badly behaved, they're not engaged, they don't know basic things, and while I'm not in school so I can't speak to what's actually happening there, I don't like the way the discourse is playing out because every time two camps show up:

Camp 1: It's phones and school closures from lockdown that have fried the kids' brains.

Camp 2: It's covid. They have brain damage from the virus and it's destroyed their ability to think.

And both these camps make me uncomfortable because camp 1 is honestly just fearmongering about tech in ways that aren't constructive. Like, I'm gen z but I remember life before phones and after and I know internet has had positive and negative affects on people. It's not just "these things are rotting people's brains," you're acting like a boomer. And this camp is clearly out of touch with the realities of what being housebound does to someone because, newsflash, a lot of disabled people have been out of school for years at a time because of their conditions, this has been the case since school was a thing, and will always be the case, and do in fact successfully reintegrate with society. Stop talking about people like they're feral, unhousetrained cats.

And while camp 2 makes more valid points about how covid is detrimental to people's health and that obviously has an effect on their broader lives, I don't like how they talk about brain damage. It feels like they think of people with brain injuries as less than, like zombies rather than people. People with brain injuries can in fact think and reason, they just have a condition that affects their function (in different ways because brains are complicated and different types of injuries affect different functions) and need support. They're still thinking, sentient people. Being impaired, including cognitively impaired, doesn't negate that.

There seems to be a lot of fatalism in both camps, and a lot of blaming children (especially in camp 1). And I think the way educators are talking about it validates the kids because if you talk about them like broken machinery or zombies, if you treat them like that when you work with them, why should they just get along with you? Especially if they've been struggling because of covid and lockdown, maybe they just aren't conditioned to respect your authority for no reason because they haven't been under it for as long as they can remember, maybe the fact that you aren't sympathetic to their struggles makes them lash out at you, maybe it's easier to bury their head in their phone than engage with adults blaming them for struggling? Just a thought. A lot of these kids have become disabled, and I remember being a disabled kid. It wasn't fun.