I don’t understand how some people who have suffered feel better when someone else suffers the same way they did.
I hear a lot of that kind of nonsense when people talk about student debt loan forgiveness. Some people say stuff like, “Hey, no one forgave my college loan debt. I had to work three jobs to pay it off so they should, too!”
Let me say here that I never had a college loan debt to pay off. The cost of my college education was paid in full by the state of Illinois as part of the vocational rehabilitation program.
Maybe if I had to pay off a college loan debt I’d feel differently. But I sure as hell hope I wouldn’t. It reminds me of the time a few decades back when I was involved in the fight to make public transportation in Chicago accessible for cripples. We eventually won, but suppose some old timer cripple had come around back then and said, “We shouldn’t make the buses accessible because I couldn’t ride them back in my day so they should never be able to either." Thank God nothing like that ever happened because no one was that much of a dumbass. If the cripples of today were still just as stranded as we were, I don’t see how that would make me feel any better.
Hell, I never even get involved in diagnosis-specific cripple causes because I’m too susceptible to survivor guilt. I’m interested in doing stuff that makes life better for all cripples, not just those who are crippled for a certain reason, like they have muscular dystrophy or a spinal cord injury or whatever. Imagine if a few decades back when I was involved in the fight to make public transportation in Chicago accessible for cripples we were fighting to only make public transportation in Chicago accessible for cripples with a certain diagnosis. If I was riding a bus that was blowing past other cripples, I’d feel like shit about it. It would take all the fun out of winning.
We might’ve all had to carry around a notarized doctor’s note verifying that we were indeed the type of cripple that was officially authorized to ride public transportation That would’ve really sucked.
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