Danny Whitty and his sister Tara talk in this podcast episode about how disabled lives and interdependence are valued in society and how this affects nonspeaking people and our supporters. (Please listen to other episodes too! Their podcast is so valuable.)
Danny: And I believe I have value. I am not a disposable mistake. I am a full human, and I have inherent worth. I am a child of the universe. I feel and think and love. And though for most of my life, I have been made to feel like I don't deserve to exist, my heart knows that I do.
I want to take a stroll down not so nice memory lane. After I aged out of special education, I was put into the community adult day program. It was somehow even worse than special education. We would be taken out on outings to recycle bottles and to do menial tasks in shops. Then we would go to fast food restaurants for lunch, even though many of us had gut issues and needed to be on healthy diets. It all highlighted that our only way to be valued was to pitifully scratch away at activities that were at least marginally seen as productive. That our health didn't matter. That we didn't matter but had to mimic productivity for its own sake.
I am not insulting the work of recycling bottles or tiny tasks in shops. But we were forced to do these things without any other activities that would bring us joy or ignite our interest. We were made to feel that the only way to be worthwhile was to be a small negligible imitation of economic productivity. We could not envision being more than that.
