The news for us disabled is not good. How do you like your optimism now little fella?
Actor and film maker, and noted disability rights activist Steve Way has posted about the efforts to eliminate in home health supports for disabled citizens by the Trump administration. You can read his substack column here: https://substack.com/@thesteveway/note/p-214895440?utm_source=notes-share-action&r=1g5gg8
Things are not OK in disability land. The right to live at home, in the least restrictive environment has been the law for a long long time. People fought for this right. Its now been taken away. How do you like your optimism little fella?
I like my hopefulness. I like it that people of all backgrounds are waking up. But I’m also afraid. Very very afraid.
Way writes: “On June 18 the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel issued a 39-page opinion concluding that neither Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act nor Title II of the ADA requires states to serve disabled people in the most integrated setting appropriate.”
As my eccentric and sometimes literally explosive grandfather like to say: “this is happy horseshit.”
I have to get up now and go teach a class on disability and the history of accommodations. I feel like a man with an anvil on his back.
Everyone I know in disability communities is justly terrified. This is not a drill. This is primetime leveraged ableism with side dish of eugenics.
As I said in the class aforementioned just two days ago: the Trump administration likes to issue edicts but with no outcomes analysis. If you take the disabled out of their homes, then where will they go? One of my students said with a shiver: “to an ICE detention center?”
Gramsci: “Pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will.” Can will be reduced to naïveté?
Whatever did Gramsci mean by optimism? Here’s a small quote from “Claude”:
The “pessimism of the intellect” half is the demand for total honesty about conditions: look at the balance of forces, the history, the structures of power, and don’t flinch from how bad or entrenched things are. Gramsci was scathing about wishful thinking that skipped this step.
The “optimism of the will” half is what you do anyway. It’s not a belief that victory is likely — it’s a commitment to act, organize, and build alternatives as though change is possible, precisely because resignation guarantees nothing changes. For Gramsci, writing partly from prison under Mussolini, this had real stakes: intellectual honesty about fascism’s strength didn’t excuse passivity.
Read Steve Way.
Poet, Essayist, Blogger, Journalist, Memoirist, Disability Rights Advocate, Public Speaker, Professor, Syracuse University
