(What’s So Funny ’Bout) Patience and Understanding
I’m not interested in getting into Freddie deBoer’s primary contention about people faking disabilities (via Sara Hendren), if only because I had my worst-ever fatigue day yesterday and today had to be up early for the landlord to come fix the intermittent beeping coming from my basement, which as a sensory experience certainly didn’t at all help the fatigue.
I’m interested in this:
And I understand that society simply can’t function without the right to question whether a person who says they’re sick isn’t really sick. This is true in more obvious practical scenarios, such as when assessing whether someone is an appropriate recipient for disability benefits. It’s also true in the more abstract sense of recognizing that society cannot provide accommodations for everyone, whether formal legal ADA accommodations or in the broader sense of extending more patience and understanding to people with disabilities.
There’s a few things happening here, not the least of which is that for “society” you have to read “our society as we’ve chosen to construct it” because of course we always could decide to construct it in some other way. What’s more, deBoer does little to interrogate that our society as we’ve chosen to construct it too much relies upon this idea that some people, in some place, at some point have faked or are faking an illness, in order to dramatically over-police people with disabilities and their need for financial supports.
I know this because I’ve a very real need for financial supports: I’m disabled despite the Social Security Administration very much incorrectly thinking otherwise. Once my parental financial support dries up, my quality of life will take a precipitous dive the Federal government is completely uninterested in helping me to avoid, all because we have to watch out for “whether someone is an appropriate recipient for disability benefits”.
(One way we could construct society differently? The implementation of universal basic income would reduce the administrative pressures we place upon the disability system to screen applicants, as some degree fewer people with disabilities would need to apply for disability benefits specifically. Then we’d have to find something else to wring our hands over. Curiously, deBoer apparently supports UBI but doesn’t bring it into this discussion of needing to police people’s disability benefits.)
My suspicion here is that the problem of people with disabilities receiving insufficient, if any, support is exponentially larger than the problem of people faking sickness, illness, or disability—be it for money, for likes, or for lulz—and so is far more deserving of the application of a raft of words to describe and denounce it.
That last bit, though, in some ways is the kicker: this idea that not only can we not accommodate everyone but we can’t even be bothered to “[extend] more patience and understanding to people with disabilities”.
You can just feel the implication that because we can’t possibly accommodate everyone, we should curtail our efforts to accommodate as many people as possible, but I don’t at all know what to do with the apparent idea that it’s simply too much for disabled people even to expect patience and understanding. I so much don’t know what to do with this idea that I can’t even quite think of how one should respond to it.
(It’s not a tangent to note that there are design principles and approaches out there through which by accommodating the disabled we often end up accommodating, well, if not everyone more people than originally thought. So, “accommodate everyone” actually should be the abstract goal guiding the ways in which we build things, be it architecture or law.)
Patience and understanding together literally comprise the lowest possible bar we should be striving to meet in our dealings with each other, be it in our neighborhoods or in our politics. I’m not entirely sure why when it comes to extending these to people with disabilities we should just shrug, give up, and walk away.
Then again, patience and understanding evidently are not qualities for which deBoer is known.