Disability Day of Mourning 2016

I would have liked to drive to my nearest vigil site, Atlanta, but the dead are beyond help. The best thing I could do for the living today was gritting my teeth and doing school. When class let out, I ran outside to listen to the reading of names on my homemade laptop, named for a dead, autistic friend. The sun set over the beautiful, comfortable law school building. As I listened to the names over a rickety relay of connections of wifi connections, webcam to webcam to cheap headphones, it sounded distant and metallic, like very early sound recordings from the 1910s-20s. In my mind’s eye, I saw the potter’s field at Central State Hospital in Milledgeville, Georgia, where many people buried then died of malnutrition-caused pellagra while state officials bragged about how little they spent providing for patients.

This list of names sounded like ancient history, and it should be. It should stop getting longer, year-by-year, spilling over onto more sheets of poster board and ever-lengthening recitations. We hold the Day of Mourning to mourn our dead but also to show the world that this should be ancient history with powerful speeches, hushed voices, signs, pictures on the internet that glow like saints’ candles, bowed heads, tears, and scenes of us comforting each other. We should be past this, past the idea that a disabled life is less valuable, past the idea that killings, sometimes with fire or caustic poisons, can be merciful.

Commemorate this day, stand up for the value of disabled lives every day, report abuse, share ASAN’s anti-filicide resource in your community, and, if you think you might ever hurt a vulnerable adult or child, do everything you can, immediately, to get that person away from you. Do that and there might be a smaller group of names added to the list next year.