Disenfranchisement
2025 02 08
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This is a comment from my text message archives I left elsewhere that I thought I'd make more widely seeable.
One of the biggest barriers in Ontario for disabled people is feeling completely disenfranchised in matters of poverty in the immediate, and matters of ableism and bigotry so ingrained that people refuse to see the wider umbrella of issues associated with even the idea of disability.
If a person has spent years, even decades, being shown by government after government that they don't matter, their needs don't matter, what is there to go and vote for at all? Do people think any of us really buy into the ODSP doubling promise? We don't. Certainly not after years of federal Liberals making a promise they deliberately failed to keep that shivved the disabled financially, the NDP helping them twist the knife, and provincial Conservatives actually lowering payments and continuing to keep rates impossibly low. The Ontario Green party has been promising for years to double off the hop, but no one sees that.
This status quo, this culture, doesn't support disability, so why do people expect PWD to support a status quo that won't support them.
Funny, too, how many treat it like a side quest when it's the one thing that almost everyone will be impacted by.
Empower who with what knowledge?
I'm talking about our society in general, and politicians in specific, changing their attitudes toward disability in general. How can you empower people in a system that is not built to even see them as people. You can't.