March 1 Vigils
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"Saturday, March 1st, the disability community will gather across the nation to remember disabled victims of filicide--disabled people murdered by their family members or caregivers."
I think this is really important. If it works and people hear about it who don’t know about or think about these things, it will shock them, in a good way.
I’m the sort of person who wants to understand why people do terrible things like school shootings and murder-suicides. Condemning “evil” people isn’t something I can relate to most of the time. But that doesn’t mean I have sympathy for people who do horrible things, even if I can understand bits ad pieces of what brought them there. I think that people who think about or carry out murdering disabled spouses or children are typically victims of a combination of ingrained prejudice and institutional failures to support people who need support.
That said, when news stories telegraph the idea that these crimes are somehow more “understandable” that other murders, and then fail to question why people become so desperate, they leave the impression that it’s the disabilities that are intolerable, not the lack of support.
Plus, I don’t think we can discount the fact that at least some of the people who do these things are, for all intents and purposes, “evil” … angry, above all, that their lives have been “ruined” by “defective” relatives.
P.S.: I am really admiring the Autistic Self Advocacy Network these days. Along with ADAPT and Not Dead Yet, they are becoming a really effective team addressing the ableism in society that really matters most.