As far as I know, there isn't a cripple equivalent of Stonewall.
And that's a damn shame. But I'm still holding out hope that someday it'll happen.
In 1969, in just about every state, it was illegal to be gay, or at least to admit it publicly. So there were underground gay bars.
That summer, New York City police raided Stonewall, which was one of those bars. It wasn't the first such raid but this time, instead of dispersing, a lot of people got pissed off and resisted and fought back. And that freed the gay rights movement from the tyranny of operating within the constraints of politeness and civil discourse.
Cripples could sure use a galvanizing moment like that, where somebody finally says they're tired of being fucked with and they're not gonna take it anymore and that frees a whole bunch more of us to do the same.
But the battleground probably won't be a bar, because I don't think there are any underground cripple bars, or any above ground cripple bars either. About the only establishments that specifically cater to cripples are nursing homes. And those places are like fly paper for cripples. Once they go in they get stuck there until they die.
So maybe what'll happen will be that during some quiet nursing home mealtime some cripple will knock their tray off of the table and there'll be a loud clatter and crash and that cripple will shout out, "I'm sick of this slop!" And that cripple will storm out of the nursing home and other revved up cripples will follow and pretty soon there'll be a big cripple protest outside of the nursing home. And the warden of the nursing home will call the police. And the riot squad will show up. But it won't be like Stonewall, where the cops tried to strong-arm, bully and drag the gay people out of the place. In this case, the riot squad will try to strong-arm, bully and drag the cripples back into the nursing home. But the cripples will fight back by pelting the riot cops with the slop the nursing home feeds them.
And then cripples in nursing homes all over world will join in the fun. It'll be an enormous, global food fight! Won't that be cool?
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