Some people have a penchant for nostalgia but I’m not one of them. I don’t think the past was better—any effort to frame the past is fraught with a hundred anxieties. Today is motionless, snagged in the dendrites of one or more sadnesses. Let’s return to yesteryear with a lollipop. I’ve been damaged by my education. Its a global education. A friend says, “It was better in the 1950’s” and I say, “Not if you were black, a woman, a person with a disability, a citizen ofGuatemala. Perhaps my dendrites are impaired, but they haven’t gone blank.
Nostalgia is almost impossible for people with disabilities. “Oh for the good old days of the iron lung!” “The asylum was grand, especially the little cookies.” My childhood played out before the Americans with Disabilities Act and it was a horror show. I still harbor rancor for a famous professor at the University of Iowa who said if I was blind I shouldn’t be in his class. The year was 1984. When I went to the chair of the English department to complain I was told I was a “whiner”. You can see why I distrust nostalgia.
But nostalgia isn’t always about the past. It can become a projective prologue, a kind of “reaction formation” as Freud would say. We project our conscious and unconscious motives not on people but on the future. We do it through the agency of cultural theory and activism and in the best sense we hope the future will be affected by our work, our troubling work. We want to break down ableism, hetero-normativity, all the isms. But often we fail to understand our visions are utopian, Arcadian, and just as precariously balanced upon our anxieties as common nostalgia.
This doesn’t mean activism and probative cultural scholarship is unnecessary. Far from it. It’s more vital now than at any time in history since we must assert human rights in an age when the split between the developing world and the post-industrial world is mediated by everything from transhumanism to cyborgian fantasy.
That disability scholarship and activism are important is unquestionable. What I’m arguing is that what we may imagine as “the future perfect” is flawed if we’re guilty of visioning narrow or singular fantasies.
There is a split in Disability Studies between post-normativity (which is vital if we’re to imagine a human future) and life on the street (where “the disabled” are losing benefits, going homeless, and committing suicide.)
This split as I’m calling it has a good deal to do with projective nostalgia. We ought to critique this. We should know the names of our own privileges.
Planet of the Blind 
I wonder then, where a project like my own work fits in: looking at the past to develop the future? Certainly not life on the street.
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