Hi there, this is demifriend’s wife using her account to post. I used to have a lemmy account but the two I had do not exist exist anymore; that was mononoke@lemmy.sdf.net, and before that, I was Ivysaur here. One of the lasting impacts I seem to have had was helping found the disabled community on here in an effort to help combat this exact sort of emerging ableism I see creeping from the woodwork everywhere. I am proud to see it still exists and has activity. Most of my posts from both accounts are still around if you search me here, and a lot of them were about covid and the left’s infuriating apathy toward it. What made me leave this place and largely stop interacting with most radical spaces online and IRL is exactly this: everything you describe. I could have written the entire thing verbatim. I have felt all of this, every day, for the last seven years. I have nothing else to add. I hear you loud and clear, and I am so thankful you are here. I hope you stay and be a voice of reason among the irrational.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton of Health Communism and Death Panel fame caught a lot of undeserved flak from so-called leftists recently for giving a panel about disability justice in the movement at a socialist conference, and I believe a large part of it was because she was still wearing a mask like she has been since the beginning of the pandemic. Frankly if this is what everyone’s communism is then we are lost. “Fix your hearts or die”—and we have chosen death. I am ultimately resigned to survival anymore; call me a coward, but I tried longer and harder more than any of my accusers ever did, or will. Organizations won’t listen, comrades won’t listen, friends won’t listen. I listen, though, and I know who’s going to be prepared for when everything goes down; it’s not the ‘a fascist lifted today’ polemic-spewing “socialists” and their ilk pushing their dreaded, inevitable future wrapped in the mangled bodies of their disabled comrades underfoot, out of sight and out of mind until the music stops and they will find themselves at last lacking any chairs. Their body is keeping the score. I have no hope that things will get better anymore, personally, but one thing is always for certain: change. This will change too, eventually. I see every day how unsustainable it all is even if everyone else does not, willfully or otherwise. The damage has already been done, unfortunately, and I think we will be living with this for the rest of our lives. I’m sorry I don’t have anything better to say. Some of us are out there still. The work must happen one way or another. Thank you for sharing, and for listening. As my favorite podcast always says by the end, stay alive another week.