April 5: It’s Okay to Sit One Out

On April 5, 2025, tens of thousands of traumatized human beings took to a thousand different streets to tell the temporary inhabitants of the White House and their nazi-saluting cronies to keep their hands off the imperfect aspirations of American benevolence. 

I was not one of them. 

Instead, I was at home, high on tramadol, waging mortal combat with a recalcitrant body and a wheelchair that refused to turn left (my preferred direction). Which got me thinking: how does one promote universal social justice in the face of the banal cruelties of a sociopathic billionaire elite when one can barely get out the front door? 

On April 5, 1977, forty-eight years to the day before the Hands Off protest, over a hundred disabled activists and their allies occupied the San Francisco offices of what was then called the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (now Health and Human Services) for its failure to enforce Section 504 of 1973’s Rehabilitation Act, which plainly stated that: “No otherwise qualified handicapped individual in the United States shall solely on the basis of his handicap, be excluded from the participation, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any program or activity receiving federal financial assistance."  

While the word “handicapped” has vanished from the justice lexicon over the years, thankfully the ideas detailed in the above paragraph have not, and the credit for that rests solely on the arthritic, scoliotic, slippery-jointed shoulders of those brave disabled freedom fighters who for 25 DAYS found ways to not only avoid arrest on their way to government capitulation, but, perhaps more amazing to me, did so despite an algorithm of existence that included catheter use and an inability to sleep on the floor. 

On March 12, 1990, a thousand disabled activists and their allies marched from the White House to the US Capitol in support of the stalled Americans with Disabilities Act. When they got there, nearly four score (plus or minus seven) shed their assistive equipment and dragged their reluctant bodies up the hundred steps that barred their path to power in an all-too-human feat of endurance known as the Capitol Crawl, which helped push the bill into law four months later. 

On June 22, 2017, ADAPT (American Disabled for Attendant Programs Today) staged a die-in outside Mitch McConnell’s office to protest Republican-led efforts to kneecap Medicaid and eliminate the Affordable Care Act, resulting in indelible images of police tearing people from their wheelchairs and otherwise abusing fragile bodies—a surprise to no one who has ever sat between a cop and their even-more-fragile ego. Weeks later, John McCain shot his famous thumbs-down on the Senate floor in a last gasp of right-wing spinefulness, vindicating yet another self-sacrificial battering of disabled bodies.  

Last weekend, whispers of those three seminal events swayed through my fug of synthetic opioid bliss, suffocating my usual trip of warm love and solidarity with clouds of guilt and FOMO and self-recrimination at missing yet another vital protest. But then I started thinking about the ancillary characters in the high drama of those pivotal days in 1977, 1990, and 2017: the girl with quadriplegia who spent two hours at the San Francisco HEW offices before going home to peg-tube a blended burrito, the autistic man who stimmed out on the way to the Capitol and went to the library instead, the new DSA member named me who opted for Dennison’s chili instead of Domino’s pizza so he could parlay that saved ten bucks into a donation to ADAPT in 2017. 

In short, I realized that every single one of us matters to this mass movement just the way we are, regardless of spoons or arrests or protests logged. Whether I make the next one or not, what matters is that I face cruelty with kindness, injustice with defiance, and bilateral neuropathy with 25mg of that sweet peace-and-love potion currently warming my red-blooded veins. 

So if you’re feeling bummed out you couldn’t find childcare, or a ride, or a negative COVID test, and had to save your clever sign ideas for another day, know that no excuse is necessary. Your continued existence is protest enough, indeed the most primordial resistance of all. 

Or maybe that’s just the drugs talking.