When Cal Montgomery wrote one of his most famous disability rights essays in Ragged Edge Magazine in 2001, he titled it Critic of the Dawn. He included a quote from a Phil Ochs song to explain the context:
To a nightmare of knowledge, he opens up the gate
And a blinding revelation is laid upon his plate
That beneath the greatest love is a hurricane of hate
And God help the critic of the dawn
I’ve thought a lot about that quote over the years.
I don’t actually literally believe there’s hate under the greatest love in the world. I can see a deep love that underlies everything.
But that’s not the point of the quote.
The point, as I see it, is glamour. At least, glamour always comes into this sort of thing for me.
Glamour is a term from folklore for a kind of fairy magic. It tells us to perceive something different than what’s actually in front of us. A cave may look like a castle. Rotting garbage may smell and taste like a feast. Generally glamour tells you whatever you’re looking at is better than what it actually is. It can show you what you want to see, what the fairy wants you to see. Whatever’s beneath it can just be shabby-looking, or else be sinister as all fuck.
I’ve lived my whole life surrounded by glamour, drowning in glamour, learning to see through glamour for my own protection and that of those around me. Learning to react to what is really there, not to what people want me to see, want me to believe. I had to learn early the difference between the taste of love and the taste of saccharine-coated poison if I was to survive the world.
These are valuable skills to have, and to use.
It’s also dangerous.
It’s also often thankless.
But it’s important to learn to see through glamour.
It’s important to learn when you’re being fooled by glamour.
It’s important to know that even if you can’t always see the truth, there is a truth to see.
I know it puts me at a disadvantage, sometimes even in danger, but in many interactions I can only react to what’s there, not to the glamour. I can’t help this. It’s not a choice I make.
Unfortunately, a lot of people want to be fooled by glamour. It makes them feel safer and more secure. It makes them feel the world is more predictable.
Those of us who have to live with the fallout have other ideas.
How do you tell people that sometimes it’d be safer for you as a disabled person to die on a street corner than get care in a hospital?
How do you tell people that you live in a world where the police aren’t gonna protect you?
How do you tell people that the developmental disability service system is largely a dystopia while everyone involved seems to want to believe (or convince everyone else to believe) it’s a utopia?
How do you tell parts of the disability rights movement that hospice is not the kinder gentler alternative to euthanasia, but rather can and often does become a creepy-ass safe haven for euthanasia and worse?
How do you tell people that you can close all the state institutions and group homes and ICF/DDs and have everyone receiving services in their own homes and still basically have an institution?
How do you tell the Independent Living Movement that nursing homes aren’t the end-all and be-all of institutions for disabled people?
How do you tell people that seeking psychiatric help when you’re suffering terribly may be the worst decision some people could possibly make?
How do you tell people that when people like you get murdered by caregivers and family members, most of your society including the judicial system rushes to defend your murderers before they even know what happened?
How do you tell people that people with developmental disabilities can come from utterly dysfunctional families just as much as anyone else and that relying on family for care, or even information about what care to give, is not safe for a lot of us?
How do you tell people that when people like you are abused, neglected, murdered, it’s not because you’re just so difficult to live with that everyone around you snaps?
How do you tell people that the scary violent kids often come from scary violent environments but are scapegoated as The Troubled One as if everything going on around us isn’t happening… and then are subjected to even more scary violence that everyone applauds?
How do you tell people that all the systems supposedly set up to protect elderly and disabled people (among others) are just as likely to contain us, trap us, even kill us?
How do you tell those people trying so kindly to convince the elderly woman one bed over from you in the hospital, that she needs to go to a nursing home because she falls, that people fall and die in nursing homes too, and people die faster in nursing homes, and nursing homes aren’t protective against anything, they’re just places to forget about people?
How do you tell people that when it comes what’s directed your way, much of what is called loving, benevolent, supportive, wonderful, perfect, even utopian… is a whirlwind of hate and destruction and death?
How do you show them that things aren’t what they have been taught, aren’t what they seem, aren’t what they expect, pretty much ever?
How do you show them what’s underneath the glamour?
How do you show them what’s underneath the glamour?
How do you show them what’s underneath the glamour?
How do you make anyone care what’s happening to people like you?
People who are invisible beneath all the glamour thrown on top of you?
I don’t know. I keep trying. I keep hold of my rocks with holes in them and I keep trying, I keep trying, I keep trying. If we all keep believing the glamour, we’ll end up eating poisonous garbage and calling it baklava.
One rule of thumb: Love and hate can be actions, not just emotions. If someone tells you they loved their child so much they just had to at least consider murdering them, that ain’t love, people.
God help the critic of the dawn, indeed.
“Noncompliance Is A Social Skill” t-shirts come from RealSocialSkills.org, an amazing website by Ruti Regan. From the about page: “‘Social skills’ is often a slur meaning ‘teaching disabled people to be seen and not heard.’ I am reclaiming that slur by taking ‘social skills’ literally. Social skills really do exist, and they’re not about fading powerlessly into the background. Real social skills are about learning effective and ethical ways to interact with other people. Some of these skills enable us to stop internalizing ableism, misogyny, and other forms of dehumanization.”
Thank you to Cal Montgomery and Ruti Regan, among many others, for continuing each in your own way to do your best to show the reality underneath some of people’s most cherished glamour illusions. It means the world to me that there are other people doing this.
Cussin' and Discussin' 