Don't Die At Sea

The FBI cut the phone lines during the 1977 disability rights sit-in. Then they turned off the hot water.

They locked the doors from the outside. One hundred and fifty people were trapped on the fourth floor. Half of them used wheelchairs. The government assumed they would leave.

Kitty Cone was thirty-three. She had muscular dystrophy. Her muscles were failing, but her logistics were flawless. She knew how to organize people.

The federal government had promised to sign regulations protecting disabled Americans from discrimination. The policy was known as Section 504. They printed the promise on paper. Then they stalled. Without a signature, it was just typography.

The protesters entered the regional Health, Education, and Welfare building in San Francisco on a Tuesday morning. They took the elevators to the director's office. They brought sleeping bags and catheters. They informed the staff they were not leaving until the law was signed.

By sunset, the police surrounded the exits. Kitty sat near the windows. She organized the floor plan. She assigned committees for security and sanitation. She kept her medication in a small cooler.

According to federal memorandums released decades later, the strategy to end the occupation relied on medical attrition. The building was not equipped for long-term habitation. The FBI calculated that a population requiring ventilators, specialized diets, and daily medical aides would voluntarily evacuate if the environment became sufficiently hostile. They instituted a blockade.

The blockade went into effect immediately. No food deliveries allowed. No medical supplies permitted through the lobby. Guards stood at the main doors checking identification.

Kitty's muscles deteriorated faster under the physical strain. She couldn't walk. When the phone lines went dead, the fourth floor lost contact with the press. The government waited for the quiet.

Kitty dropped to the floor. She realized the barricades were designed for standing adults. The police had blocked the hallways at waist height. They hadn't blocked the linoleum.

The floors were covered in cigarette ash and spilled coffee. She dragged her body through it. She crawled under the barricades to reach the restricted elevator shafts and unguarded offices.

She carried notes in her pockets. She found a single working payphone the FBI missed. She called the local news desks. She called the mayor's office.

She crawled back. When her arms failed, someone pulled her by her ankles. The Black Panthers heard the news reports. They crossed the police lines with hot meals. The FBI could not stop them without a riot.

They shut off the elevators, so she crawled.

The occupation lasted twenty-five days. It remains the longest non-violent occupation of a federal building in American history. On April 28, the Secretary of HEW signed the regulations without a single alteration.

The protesters left the building the next morning. They went back to their apartments. The Rehabilitation Act regulations laid the groundwork for every accessibility law that followed. The HEW building still stands on United Nations Plaza. The elevators run on a schedule. The doors are heavy glass.

Kitty Cone: the woman who crawled under the barricades.

Source: Kitty Cone's oral history, Bancroft Library.

Verified via: National Museum of American History.

y'all if any of you have issues with heat sores from bed (or just being overheated in general, I'm in chronic pain groups so I like to clearly specify it's helpful for people who are bedbound/have limited or restricted movement, especially due to heat sensitivity in the summer) Aldi's FINALLY HAS THE COOLING PADS AGAIN!!!! they're fantastic for slapping on your mattress, don't leak and don't need to be pre-frozen, and the cooling lasts a good 6-8 hrs and refreshes itself over the next couple of hours. I get 2 or 3 and rotate them through the night/whenever I'm stuck in bed for the day, by the time one states getting hot the other one is ready to go. and since it's meant for dog claws it's not gonna pop on you because you scratched it with a hangnail or whatever. (also you can wipe it with a wet towel to clean it if need-be). they're FIFTEEN USD and they last for several months of daily usage (mine eventually died about a year later, but unfortunately they didn't sell them last year and it was Pure Hell™ 🥲)

And of course a lot of these studies suck. A lot of them didn't actually think to ask WHEN the schizophrenic acquired the cat, so it's just always presumed that the cat came before the schizophrenia. Most don't really account for the fact that a schizophrenia diagnosis is often a very slow and complex process due to specific regional legalities associated with having "doctors can turn your rights off whenever" disorder. Basically, the same scientific half-truths that surround the phenomenon of "drug-induced schizophrenia," that is the conflation of schizophrenics self-medicating before their formal diagnosis is set and the ambiguity of proving when symptoms onset in relation to that, has been completely replicated for cat-induced schizophrenia lol.

And I love this because it's kind of a perfect demonstration of how the stigma associated with schizophrenia works in medical and scientific settings, right. Everything becomes possible to pathologize, from smoking weed to owning a cat. While the science here is usually pretty bad, "science communication" outlets make it much worse because they run with the most broad dumbass versions of these stories and present them to the public as if there's a clear causal relationship between owning a cat and having schizophrenia, instead of actually reading through the research with an appropriate critical lens and demanding real actual meta-review of obviously flawed studies.

Which is not to say that schizophrenia can't be caused by cats or THC exposure, but that the standard for a concept to become "scientifically true" when dealing with schizophrenia is uh, let's say lower?

I often compare disability/class/age-based eugenics to sex-selective abortion. Banning sex-selective abortion does not solve the problem; it just violates people's bodily autonomy, builds parental resentment of their children, and compounds the misogyny that leads to the demand for sex-selective abortion in the first place.

People practice sex-selective abortion because having a child AMAB is more beneficial to the parents' social and economic standing than having a child AFAB. The solution to that problem has to be changing those social and economic conditions so that a child's gender or AGAB has no bearing on their parents' social and economic standing -- so that sex-selective abortion is no longer a rational choice in response to the parents' circumstances.

And the only way to prevent disability-selective abortion is to make disabled people so socially and economically equal to abled people that disability-selective abortion no longer looks like a rational choice.

The only way to prevent economic/class eugenics is economic equality. The only way to prevent age/status-based eugenics is social equality.

This is the main impetus that drove me to socialism. I used to be more of a center-left social democrat; I figured "Complete economic equality would be nice, but it's a pipe dream; the important thing is that everyone. It doesn't really matter if the CEO is richer than everyone else, as long as no one is hungry or homeless. Besides, it's kind of 'fair' in a way for people with more specialized/demanding jobs to be compensated more."

But the thing is, as long as inequality exists, parents will want their children to rise to the top of the hierarchy. As long as inequality exists, parents will want to prevent their children from falling lower in the hierarchy. As long as inequality exists, parents will do anything to coerce and pressure and abuse and modify their children to give them a "competitive edge."

And as long as inequality exists, and certain physical/cognitive traits correlate with "success," choosing children with those "successful" traits will be a rational choice.

Americans in disability liberation discussions tend to blame our country's ableism on our lack of social safety nets and universal healthcare... but countries with robust social safety nets are just as ableist as we are, sometimes more so. The abortion rate for fetuses with Down Syndrome is higher in Iceland than in the U.S., even though an Icelandic child with Down Syndrome would have access to healthcare. Iceland, while deeply flawed, has a decent enough social safety net that someone born with Down Syndrome would probably not starve or be homeless. But they would be at the bottom of the social hierarchy. There is still a social hierarchy. Eugenics is still a rational choice. Changing that behavior requires changing the social hierarchy that values so-called "general intelligence" and devalues disabled people.

The same is true of other kinds of eugenics -- as long as raising children is a net financial loss for families, avoiding having children "you can't afford" will remain a rational choice. As long as having children means a decrease in the birthing parent's educational or professional opportunities, people will avoid giving birth to children they "can't afford."

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