self-determination=more appropriate services, short-term increase in spending (maybe), long-term decrease in WASTING MONEY……..

basically that’s what they talked about in their presentation.

sounds like this could be a cross-disability, PoC, poor, disenfranchised people…nontraditionally employed people……..hardworking but unpaid advocates…..

How do we convince those people that think they should control our lives……..because they pay for us to have/do/use fill-in-the-blank, that letting us be in charge would actually save them money?

Completely OT: I’m not going to the extra choir practice after all……..I came back here to get something and wound up sitting around and………..it starts at 7, it’s 5 til…….i don’t feel that great……..

That reminds me of one thing I’m not sure if I’ll be able to fit in there or not: This bizarre sense of ownership that some people who work feel over those of us who are on some form of welfare benefits.

I’m sure you’ve encountered it before. It’s awful. It’s like… they act like they have a right to control and choose everything in our lives for us because they happen to pay taxes from earned income at work. And since we get our income from the result of those taxes, there are plenty of people who well and truly believe that we belong to them and have (or ought to have) very few rights and not much if any autonomy.

It’s upsetting just how pervasive this set of ideas is. I mean, I’ve rationally rejected the idea of human worth being based on one’s degree of “economic activity” (defined in some pretty weird ways)–and see that capitalism is abusive from the ground up. Still, it’s hard to totally evict the self-abusive thoughts if you’re unable to be “productive”, especially when this is a cluster of messages that’s all around you pretty much all the time. A pretty good post I could really identify with recently:
http://diaryofabenefitscrounger.blogspot.com/2011/10/heres-irony.html

Another one I read just last night, which is relevant here: “On being Buddhist and unemployed”, HTML view at http://www.smashwords.com/extreader/read/48074/140/common-or-garden-dharma-essays-on-contemporary-buddhism-volume-2 . Not so much because of Buddhism, but pointing out the difference between capitalist views and those based in worldviews that rely more on interconnection and recognize a wider range of contributions to society.
‘For this is the message which we as a society are sending to the unemployed: “You do not exist as far as the most important considerations recognized by this society are concerned. You are nothing at all”. It needs hardly to be pointed out at this stage of the argument that this message is based on a severely curtailed anthropology, that is, a narrow view of what it is to be human. People may not be economically active, but they still have their hopes and fears, their dreams, relationships and daily activities. In many and diverse ways, they too are contributing to the totality of human experience. Who are we to call them “unemployed”?’

But I’m not an econ or poli sci major or someone who would know this for a fact………

My guess as to why it is how it is, is that unfortunately things like this tend to be overrepresented by people who’ve been reasonably comfortably off and then had the bottom drop out from under them (rather than people who’ve been used to oppression for a really long time). And people in that position, tend to have all the various biases that come with that position and that make it harder for other sorts of people to take part. Many such people are becoming poorer now, but it doesn’t give them the same perspective as the people who’ve been poor all along. Most of the people I know who’ve actually taken part are not middle class, but that’s probably more because most of the people I know are working class and/or poor and/or disabled, so the sample’s skewed.

(Also, I know that some disabled people aren’t taking part for the same reason I’m not: Inability to survive in those conditions. If I could actually leave the house for long enough to take part, I’d be in a situation where the cops would quite possibly confiscate my communication equipment. And I can’t go that long without meds. Etc. Early on, two of the reports I heard were that the cops had pepper sprayed a deaf woman in the eyes, so that she couldn’t communicate adequately, and knocked over someone’s wheelchair and arrested anyone who tried to help that person get up. So they definitely seem to be going after us in fairly nasty ways that cause us more potential problems than the average person.)

What really weirds me out, though, is that they’ve been taking direction from people of color around the world, and yet they don’t make it very accessible for people of color right here. (There’s some groups of people of color who have been trying to change that — for instance Occupy The Hood — but still there’s a lot of obvious problems. I read something by a black woman who described how everyone was trying to zoom in on her and take photos to show that black people really were involved. Ugh.)

I know it’s early days yet for the movement, so maybe the relative lack of diversity we’re seeing now will shift over time to be more inclusive. But it’s frustrating to see the SAME GROUPS OF PEOPLE who are so often excluded from everything else be excluded AGAIN in precisely the kind of movement that OUGHT to be partly ABOUT THEM. People living in poverty, indigenous populations, people with disabilities, people who live in rural areas, people of color, women, children, elderly people, etc. etc., all are more likely to be under served by the economy whether the economy is doing well or not — they’re just hurt more when it isn’t.

I didn’t see anything about disabilities in particular, but I wasn’t really looking – mostly I just wanted to drop off my donations and get out of the crowd. They do have a library there, though – perhaps it would be useful to send some relevant literature to them? (Suggestions?)