Unnecessarily specialized language is used to humiliate those who are not supposed to feel entitled. It sells the illusion that only those who can wi… - Aurora Levins Morales

If disability is defined as people who, because of variations in our body-minds, can't be efficiently exploited, the last thing we need is better access to exploitation, greater integration into a profit-driven society that is driving thousands of species toward mass extinction and making the planet uninhabitable for humans. The last thing we need is more opportunities to do our part in keeping the interlocking wheels of class, white supremacy, heteromale supremacy, and imperialism turning. This doesn't mean that we don't fight for what we need in order to survive, that we don't fight for the crappy job or inadequate benefits that will keep us alive for now. Life jackets keep us from drowning, but the only lasting access is universal inclusion, which means universal justice. ("The Truths Our Bodies Tell")

I remember that history is wide and deep, that there are many other lives being lived around me, and that generations stretch backward and forward from my moment in time. How I live my life right now extends the impact of ancestors and enriches the soil my descendants will plant their own lives in. Thinking this way makes the difficulties of the moment shrink against that grand background.

Memory, individual and collective, is one of the most important sites of social struggle. The "false memory" movement of the 1990s that sought to deny authority over memory to sexual abuse survivors; escalating attacks on teaching the history and literature of indigenous people and People of Color, that frame sharing any information about oppression or the cultures of the oppressed as violence against "Western civilization"; Holocaust denial that pretends the attempted Nazi genocide against primarily European Jews, Roma, lesbian, gay, and disabled people never took place; the bizarre pseudoscience of misogynist politicians claiming that pregnancy results only from consensual sex-these are all examples of the attempted erasure of collective memory and knowledge and represent backlashes against powerful popular movements attempting to wrest control of history from the ruling class.