Disabled Dog Quotes

We are not easy to help. Nor are we easy to be around. Nobody with a serious illness is easy to be around. Although not obviously physically disabled, we struggle to get things done. Our energy levels are dangerously low. Sometimes, we find it hard to talk. We get angry and frustrated. We fall into despair. We cry, for no apparent reason. Sometimes we find it difficult to eat, or to sleep. Often, we have to go to bed in the afternoon or all day. So do most people with a serious illness. We are no different.

Everything is inspiration. If you look at the world as the incredible place it is, then each moment is a feast.

We are not easy to help. Nor are we easy to be around. Nobody with a serious illness is easy to be around. Although not obviously physically disabled, we struggle to get things done. Our energy levels are dangerously low. Sometimes, we find it hard to talk. We get angry and frustrated. We fall into despair. We cry, for no apparent reason. Sometimes we find it difficult to eat, or to sleep. Often, we have to go to bed in the afternoon or all day.

Finally, especially in the case of medical-response canines and those that serve handlers with invisible disabilities, it's not merely the necessity of the dog that's questioned but also the existance of the disability itself. And for these partnerships, some of the greatest problems arise.

All of you losers, the Great Woolly Mammoth said. The undocumented and disabled. The forgotten ones. The left behinds. The last will be first. It's our turn. All of you need to fight together, every which way you can, and then some, and then some more, and even after you do all that, you will probably fail, and then die.

While our life remains more chaotic than not, we continue to land on our blistered feet, drag each other out of the quicksand, beg for forgiveness as we wander out of the doghouse, and dig for the humor beneath our grief. So our family, four-pawed members included, continues to bound forward celebrating our canine connection and sharing hope with all who need healing.

Pets, he says, are trapped in a state from which there is no escape. “Domestication has essentially created a mentally disabled child bred to be dependent on us. My dogs will never get to the point where they’ll become wolves and live the way they’re supposed to live.” We wonder why our pets are neurotic, he says, why dogs chew themselves raw and cats shred the drapes. “It’s because they’re not supposed to be living with us. They exist in this netherworld between humans and animals.

…He needed to find some little poor kids to playfully spray with a hose, while he was helping out at a charity carwash for the handicapped or something.  Maybe rent a wet dog for the afternoon, and get it to shake its head in slow motion, while he laughed like some douchebag asshole and tried to lightheartedly block the soapy droplets with his hands or one of the little wheelchair kids or something.  Women loved that shit if movies were to be believed.  They ate it up. Sadly, he had no idea how to go about doing any of that though.  None of the pet shops had been open to the idea of him using their puppies as a prop in a seduction fantasy, and all of the schools for the disabled he called had refused to give him an hourly rate on renting their students.

For many of us with physical disabilities, the forest is often a dangerous place to be. There's no hope of taking a wheelchair into the trees unless there's a clearly marked and flattened path; it can be difficult to navigate a forest even with a guide dog at your side. I'd wager than the forest presents trouble perhaps even for those whose disabilities are often deemed invisible--it can be a dark place, filled with all manner of smells and sensory onslaughts, a place where even the able-bodied can lose themselves.

Grazer and Cohn - two outsiders with learning disabilities-played a trick. They bluffed their way into professions that would have been closed to them. The man in the cab assumed that no one would be so audacious as to say he knew how to trade options if he didn't. And it never occurred to the people Brian Grazer called that when he said he was Brian Grazer from Warner Brothers, what he meant was that he was Brian Grazer who pushed the mail cart around at Warner Brothers. What they did is not "right," just as it is not "right" to send children against police dogs. But we need to remember that our definition of what right is, often as not, simply the way that people in positions of privilege close the door on those on the outside. David has nothing to lose, and because he has nothing to lose, he has the freedom to thumb his nose at the rules set by others. That's how people with brains a little bit different from the rest of ours get jobs as options traders and Hollywood producers-and a small band of protesters armed with nothing but their wits have a chance against the likes of Bull Connor

A brick could be used to show you how to live a richer, fuller, more satisfying life. Don’t you want to have fulfillment and meaning saturating your existence? I can show you how you can achieve this and so much more with just a simple brick. For just $99.99—not even an even hundred bucks, I’ll send you my exclusive life philosophy that’s built around a brick. Man’s used bricks to build houses for centuries. Now let one man, me, show you how a brick can be used to build your life up bigger and stronger than you ever imagined. But act now, because supplies are limited. This amazing offer won’t last forever. You don’t want to wake up in ten years to find yourself divorced, homeless, and missing your testicles because you waited even two hours too long to obtain this information. Become a hero today—save your life. Procrastination is only for the painful things in life. We prolong the boring, but why put off for tomorrow the exciting life you could be living today? If you’re not satisfied with the information I’m providing, I’m willing to offer you a no money back guarantee. That’s right, you read that wrong. If you are not 100% dissatisfied with my product, I’ll give you your money back. For $99.99 I’m offering 99.99%, but you’ve got to be willing to penny up that percentage to 100. Why delay? The life you really want is mine, and I’m willing to give it to you—for a price. That price is a one-time fee of $99.99, which of course everyone can afford—even if they can’t afford it. Homeless people can’t afford it, but they’re the people who need my product the most. Buy my product, or face the fact that in all probability you are going to end up homeless and sexless and unloved and filthy and stinky and probably even disabled, if not physically than certainly mentally. I don’t care if your testicles taste like peanut butter—if you don’t buy my product, even a dog won’t lick your balls you miserable cur. I curse you! God damn it, what are you, slow? Pay me my money so I can show you the path to true wealth. Don’t you want to be rich? Everything takes money—your marriage, your mortgage, and even prostitutes. I can show you the path to prostitution—and it starts by ignoring my pleas to help you. I’m not the bad guy here. I just want to help. You have some serious trust issues, my friend. I have the chance to earn your trust, and all it’s going to cost you is a measly $99.99. Would it help you to trust me if I told you that I trust you? Well, I do. Sure, I trust you. I trust you to make the smart decision for your life and order my product today. Don’t sleep on this decision, because you’ll only wake up in eight hours to find yourself living in a miserable future. And the future indeed looks bleak, my friend. War, famine, children forced to pimp out their parents just to feed the dog. Is this the kind of tomorrow you’d like to live in today? I can show you how to provide enough dog food to feed your grandpa for decades. In the future I’m offering you, your wife isn’t a whore that you sell for a knife swipe of peanut butter because you’re so hungry you actually considered eating your children. Become a hero—and save your kids’ lives. Your wife doesn’t want to spread her legs for strangers. Or maybe she does, and that was a bad example. Still, the principle stands. But you won’t be standing—in the future. Remember, you’ll be confined to a wheelchair. Mushrooms are for pizzas, not clouds, but without me, your life will atom bomb into oblivion. Nobody’s dropping a bomb while I’m around. The only thing I’m dropping is the price. Boom! I just lowered the price for you, just to show you that you are a valued customer. As a VIP, your new price on my product is just $99.96. That’s a savings of over two pennies (three, to be precise). And I’ll even throw in a jar of peanut butter for free. That’s a value of over $.99. But wait, there’s more! If you call within the next ten minutes, I’ll even throw in a blanket free of charge. . .

A strange mood has seized the almost-educated young. They’re on the march, angry at times, but mostly needful, longing for authority’s blessing, its validation of their chosen identities. The decline of the West in new guise perhaps. Or the exaltation and liberation of the self. A social-media site famously proposes seventy-one gender options—neutrois, two spirit, bigender…any colour you like, Mr. Ford. Biology is not destiny after all, and there’s cause for celebration. A shrimp is neither limiting nor stable. I declare my undeniable feeling for who I am. If I turn out to be white, I may identify as black. And vice versa. I may announce myself as disabled, or disabled in context. If my identity is that of a believer, I’m easily wounded, my flesh torn to bleeding by any questioning of my faith. Offended, I enter a state of grace. Should inconvenient opinions hover near me like fallen angels or evil djinn (a mile being too near), I’ll be in need of the special campus safe room equipped with Play-Doh and looped footage of gambolling puppies. Ah, the intellectual life! I may need advance warning if upsetting books or ideas threaten my very being by coming too close, breathing on my face, my brain, like unwholesome dogs.

My shrink suggested that if I was going to continue traveling so much that I could look into getting a service animal expressly trained to provide emotional support to people with anxiety disorders. I considered getting Hunter S. Thomcat trained, but then I remembered that he gets spontaneous nervous diarrhea every time he's in a moving car, and I'd imagine that holding a cat who seems to have explosive plane dysentery wouldn't necessarily *help* my anxiety as give me something new (and horribly unsanitary) to be anxious about. I called around to different service-animal specialists and spoke to a woman who told me it's better to get an animal who has already been trained and has the right temperament. She also told me cats aren’t preferred emotional-support animals for anxiety disorder, but my cats hate dogs so I figured I was fucked, but then she told me that the Americans with Disabilities Act was recently interpreted as allowing “people with anxiety disorders to travel with an emotional-support pony on airlines.” So basically I could bring a goddamn pony on board with me. I’m pretty sure a pony wouldn’t fit under my seat or in my lap, but I rather liked the idea of a small medicinal horse standing in the aisle beside me while I braided his mane. Plus, Pony Danza would make a great pack animal and instead of bringing suitcases I could just put my extra clothes on him and that way I wouldn’t have to pay to check a bag. Plus, the pony wouldn’t get cold because it would be wearing my pajamas.

While the overall systems of heterosexism and ableism are still with us, they have adapted in limited ways. These adaptations are held up as reassurance to those who fought long and hard for a particular change that equality has now been achieved. These milestones—such as the recognition of same-sex marriage, the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act, Title 9, the election of Barack Obama—are, of course, significant and worthy of celebration. But systems of oppression are deeply rooted and not overcome with the simple passage of legislation. Advances are also tenuous, as we can see in recent challenges to the rights of LGBTQI (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer or questioning, and intersex) people. Systems of oppression are not completely inflexible. But they are far less flexible than popular ideology would acknowledge, and the collective impact of the inequitable distribution of resources continues across history. COLOR-BLIND RACISM What is termed color-blind racism is an example of racism’s ability to adapt to cultural changes.3 According to this ideology, if we pretend not to notice race, then there can be no racism. The idea is based on a line from the famous “I Have a Dream” speech given by Dr. Martin Luther King in 1963 during the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. At the time of King’s speech, it was much more socially acceptable for white people to admit to their racial prejudices and belief in white racial superiority. But many white people had never witnessed the kind of violence to which blacks were subjected. Because the struggle for civil rights was televised, whites across the nation watched in horror as black men, women, and children were attacked by police dogs and fire hoses during peaceful protests and beaten and dragged away from lunch counters.

There’s no efficient way to kill yourself with a dressmaker’s pin (I wouldn’t call contracting gangrene an efficient way to kill yourself) – I puzzled over it for a long time, seeing as they’d left the pins there, but it’s just not possible. Useful for picking locks though. I so loved the burglary lessons we got when we were training. Didn’t so much enjoy the bleak aftermath of my unsuccessful attempt to put them to use – very good at picking locks but not so good at getting out of the building. Our prison cells are only hotel bedrooms, but we are guarded like royalty. And also, there are dogs. After that episode with the pins, they had a good go at making sure I wouldn’t be able to walk if I did manage to get out – don’t know where you pick up the skills for disabling a person without actually breaking her legs, Nazi School of Assault and Battery? Like everything else it wasn’t permanent damage, nothing left this week but the bruises, and they check me carefully now for stray bits of metal. I got caught yesterday trying to hide a pen nib in my hair (I didn’t have a plan for it, but you never know). Oh – often I forget I am not writing this for myself, and then it’s too late to scratch it out. The evil Engel always snatches everything away from me and raises an alarm if she sees me trying to retract anything. Yesterday I tried ripping off the bottom of the page and eating it, but she got to it first. (It was when I realised I had thoughtlessly mentioned the factory at Swinley. It is refreshing sometimes to fight with her. She has the advantage of freedom, but I am a lot more imaginative. Also I am willing to use my teeth which she is squeamish about.) Where was I? Hauptsturmführer von Linden has taken away everything I wrote yesterday. It is your own fault, you cold and soulless Jerry bastard, if I repeat myself.

Without even discussing the question of talent, can a person become a jailer in a prison or camp if he is capable of the very least kind of useful activity? Let us ask: On the whole, can a camp keeper be a good human being? What system of moral selection does life arrange for them? The first selection takes place on assignment to the MVD armies, MVD schools, or MVD courses. Every man with the slightest speck of spiritual training, with a minimally circumspect conscience, or capacity to distinguish good from evil, is instinctively going to back out and use every available means to avoid joining this dark legion. But let us concede that he did not succeed in backing out. A second selection comes during training and the first service assignment, when the bosses themselves take a close look and eliminate all those who manifest laxity (kindness) instead of strong will and firmness (cruelty and mercilessness). And then a third selection takes place over a period of many years: All those who had not visualized where and into what they were getting themselves now come to understand and are horrified. To be constantly a weapon of violence, a constant participant in evil! Not everyone can bring himself to this, and certainly not right off. You see, you are trampling on others' lives. And inside yourself something tightens and bursts. You can't go on this was any longer! And although it is belated, men can still begin to fight their way out, report themselves ill, get disability certificates, accept lower pay, take off their shoulder boards—anything just to get out, get out, get out! Does that mean the rest of them have got used to it? Yes. The rest of them have got used to it, and their life already seems normal to them. And useful too, of course. And even honorable. And some didn't have to get used to it; they had been that way from the start.

While we sat at the bar, Dave told me the most important advice about talking to women I had ever received, and that was to be as relaxed as possible and not fear rejection. Dave then began hooking up with some girl who looked like a hybrid of Rosie O’Donnell and Miss Piggy, leaving me alone to ponder his words.” “When I was in 8th grade, there was this girl named Sandra who I used to ride the school bus with. Sandra was about 5’2, 120 lbs, and looked like the Hamburglar. She was the prettiest girl in my class.” “In my mind I was the life of the party and felt as though I could do no wrong when it came to interacting with the opposite sex. That was until Marissa caught me red handed hooking up with some girl who looked like a combination of John Madden and Andre the Giant, tapping me on the shoulder and kicking me square in the nuts.” “I was starting to feel bad about how I treated women. Oh wait, no I wasn’t. The girls at Binghamton were nothing more than a bunch of dumb sluts that just wanted to get drunk and suck dick, and besides, they were all going to make a lot more money than me in the future. So I may as well catch brains while these bitches were dumb enough to blow me.” “Out of all the people I could’ve stumbled into blackout drunk, why did it have to be THE MOOSE? As son as she saw me her 300 lb frame waddled over, and she jammed her tongue down my throat, devouring me as though I were a Big Mac. This was embarrassing. Here I was making out with some girl who looked like Eric Cartman in a dress, and everybody was watching. My life was effectively over.” “After annihilating Ruben’s toilet, I looked over my shoulder for some much-needed toilet paper, when to my shock and dismay there was not a single sheet of paper in sight. There’s no way in hell I was rejoining the party covered in poop and I would have wiped my ass with anything. That’s when I noticed his New York Yankees bath towel.” “I spent the rest of my week off getting completely shitfaced with Chris, and that’s when I realized I might be developing a drinking problem. At Bar None, hooking up with some girl who looked like the Loch Ness Monster; this shit had to stop. Alcohol was turning me into a drunken mess, and I vowed right then and there to quit drinking and start smoking more weed immediately.” “I got a new roommate. His name was Erick and he was an ex-marine. Erick and I didn’t know each other, but he knew Kevin, and he also knew that I didn’t shower and that last semester I left a used condom on the floor for two weeks without throwing it away. Eric therefore did not want to live with me.” “Believe it or not, I got another job working with the disabled. See, Manny was nice enough to hook me up with a position as a job coach at the Lavelle School for the Blind. The kid’s name was Fred and he was blind with cerebral palsy. Fred loved dogs and I loved smoking week. Bad combination, and I was fired with 3 days left in the program after allowing Fred to run across the street into oncoming traffic, because I had smoked a bowl an hour earlier. Manny and I never spoke again.” “My life was a dream and a nightmare rolled into one. Here I was living this carefree existence, getting drunk, boning bitches, and playing Sega Genesis in between. Oh wait, what am I talking about? My life was awesome. It’s the rest of my life that’s going to suck.

Shah Mamu the handsome dog’s grand arrival obviously made an impact on the old maid but he was told to wait. After standing around politely for a while, not his style at all, he barged straight into the drawing room where the extra class was on, and brazenly demanded that she let me off. Miss Perry held her ground until something sounding suspiciously like profanity to her ears was said. She blanched and weakly threatened to send him to the Principal. My hair stood on end when I heard him snarl, ‘What the damn Principal will do? He’ll hang me?’ And to my utter astonishment, instead of pulling his ears for his atrocious grammar and taking the ‘skin off his back’ with her feather duster after disabling him with one of her roundhouse forehands, or much worse, putting a hex on him and turning him to stone, she actually caved in and turned quite mild before letting me off the hook. Valiant valiant Shah Mamu!

They reached the garden, and Beryl turned to him. “Is it safe for him to play on his own here?” “Define safe.” “No dog-eating plants, he can’t open the doors and run away, that sort of thing.” “I can disable to the motion-sensing feature on the entrance,” Zylar said, doing so as he offered. “And there are no aggressive botanical lifeforms cultivated here. Those are contained in the secure greeneries.” Beryl’s eyes widened. “You’re growing attack petunias somewhere?” “I don’t understand.” “Never mind.” She knelt and put her hands on Snaps’s face, so the fur-person had to look at her. “Don’t eat anything in here. You understand? It might make you sick.” “Eat nothing. Smell everything. I got it!” Snaps said. “Can I dig?” “It’s probably fine. Just don’t hurt the plants.” She pulled the cord off him, setting him free to explore, while Zylar tried to understand why Snaps wanted to dig. “I have nothing to bury,” Snaps said sadly, then he bounded off.

Married couples who talk about having children worry about changing messy diapers. Couples who have children just change messy diapers without thinking twice about it. Small problems have a way of shrinking to nothing when you love someone.

Most of all Ginny--part Schnauzer, part Siberian Husky, part angel from heaven--has taught me the most important lesson in life, that life is not worth living without love, that giving love is more rewarding than getting it, and that the humblest creatures, the least advantaged creatures, are worthy of the greatest outpouring of love. It's a spiritual message, that all life is precious (matters), all life is short, and that, just as human beings have immortal souls, so do animals have immortal souls, because they, too, were created by God. (word in parentheses by poster)

Professor Peter Singer of Princeton University advocates the killing of disabled newborns. Reports the New York Times, “To Singer, a newborn has no greater right to life than any other being of comparable rationality and capacity for emotion, including pigs, cows and dogs.”6 This is evil. Equating newborn humans with animals is absolutely sickening. But that is what Singer is teaching in his course at Princeton.

A prediction about safety is not, of course, merely statistical or demographic. If it were, a woman crossing a park alone one late afternoon could calculate risk like this: there are 200 people in the park; 100 are children, so they cause no concern. Of the remaining 100, all but 20 are part of couples; 5 of those 20 are women, meaning concern would appropriately attach to about 15 people she might encounter (men alone). But rather than acting just on these demographics, the woman’s intuition will focus on the behavior of the 15 (and on the context of that behavior). Any man alone may get her attention for an instant, but among those, only the ones doing certain things will be moved closer to the center of the predictive circle. Men who look at her, show special interest in her, follow her, appear furtive, or approach her will be far closer to the center than those who walk by without apparent interest, or those playing with a dog, or those on a bicycle, or those asleep on the grass. Speaking of crossing a park alone, I often see women violating some of nature’s basic safety rules. The woman who jogs along enjoying music through Walkman headphones has disabled the survival sense most likely to warn her about dangerous approaches: her hearing. To make matters worse, those wires leading up to her ears display her vulnerability for everyone to see. Another example is that while women wouldn’t walk around blind-folded, of course, many do not use the full resources of their vision; they are reluctant to look squarely at strangers who concern them. Believing she is being followed, a woman might take just a tentative look, hoping to see if someone is visible in her peripheral vision. It is better to turn completely, take in everything, and look squarely at someone who concerns you. This not only gives you information, but it communicates to him that you are not a tentative, frightened victim-in-waiting. You are an animal of nature, fully endowed with hearing, sight, intellect, and dangerous defenses. You are not easy prey, so don’t act like you are.

There are,” I countered, with a conviction that surged from the tips of my toes, “certain people who have been front-loaded with trauma that shapes who they are. They are disabled. Psychologically. And this does not make them victims. It makes them soldiers.” I thought of people whose limbs were not long enough to step over the mess or swat it away. They tried and failed. Why? Did they lack strength of character? Were they simply not dogged enough?

Grant placed a glass of wine into Emily's hand and tapped her glass with his. "Here's to the remarkable woman who races across the country on Monday to save her company and turns out a beautiful meal on a moment's notice on Friday." Down the Aisle

I observe that I too must alter my vocabulary. No longer is it proper to say, as I have all my life, that someone “is mentally retarded.” As I discover on other websites, by using the new “People First Language,” one focuses on the person first, the disability last, as in “a woman who has mental retardation,” or “a man with mental retardation.” The analogy is that people with cancer have cancer, they are not cancer itself; the disability is only one aspect of who they are. In addition, with People First Language, one can avoid using the word “retarded,” which is too close to the familiar slur. In fact, some websites minimize the use of “mental retardation” by using as synonyms terms such as “developmental disability,” “intellectual disability,” and “cognitive disability.” As I scribble down this People First Language, I realize that many of my acquaintances might disparage such linguistic changes as mere nods to political correctness, and for a moment I do, too. But then I think, Look at how many cultural barriers Beth has had to deal with throughout her life—and how many physical barriers people with other disabilities experience: sidewalks without curb cuts, restrooms lacking accessible facilities, cabs that refuse guide dogs. Altering the way I speak is nothing compared to what she, and they, go through almost all day, almost every day. And it is such a simple way to help transform the cultural landscape that it seems arrogant and misguided to resist doing so.

Autistic savants tend to have left-brain dysfunction coupled with right-brain compensation, and this has led numerous research groups to wonder if sabotaging a portion of the left brain might grant savant-like abilities. Numerous experimenters, but most especially neurobiologist Allan Snyder at the University of Sydney in Australia, have used magnetic pulses to temporarily disable the left anterior temporal lobe of the brain in ordinary people before giving them specific tasks.8 In one case, participants were given a minute to draw a horse, dog, or face. In others, they were given challenging proofreading or number-estimation tasks after being exposed to the magnetic pulse. In all experiments, a portion of the participants showed dramatic improvements.9 After one drawing experiment, one man could not believe that the highly accurate drawings were his own. Yet the effects were not universal; savantlike skills were not induced in everyone. Nobody knows why. That’s obviously worth looking into, but even more intriguing is what happens to these superhuman abilities when autism is ultimately cured.

I know more than one genius organizer—usually a Black or brown sick or disabled woman or nonbinary person who doesn’t have a ton of disability community—who’s casually told me that they’ll be dead by the age of fifty. I respect that crip years are like dog years, and sometimes we live really huge lives in short amounts of time, but I can’t help but think that it doesn’t have to be that way. We’re soaked since birth in narratives that we will die young, that our lives aren’t worth living, and that we’re up against everything from insurance denials to police trying to kill us who want to do the same damn thing.

The ability to communicate may be relevant to whether we make you the host of a talk show, or give you a job teaching in a university, but it is not relevant to whether we should kill you and remove your organs for transplant into another human, or whether we should enslave you so that you may labor for those without your particular disability.

Some of the service-dog organizations raising animals for the disabled, for example, will start five hundred to a thousand well-bred puppies a year—only to have less than 50 percent achieve an appropriate level of working ability.

The costs of military service are substantial. Many costs are readily apparent; others are less apparent but no less important. Among the most pervasive and potentially disabling consequences of these costs is the threat to the psychological health of our nation's fighting forces, and their families, and their survivors. -- Department of Defense Task Force, 2007

Pavlov's findings were confirmed in the most dis­tressing manner, and on a very large scale, during the two World Wars. As the result of a single catastrophic experience, or of a succession of terrors less appalling but frequently repeated, soldiers develop a number of disabling psychophysical symptoms. Temporary unconsciousness, extreme agitation, lethargy, functional blindness or paralysis, completely unrealistic responses to the challenge of events, strange reversals of lifelong patterns of behavior -- all the symptoms, which Pavlov observed in his dogs, reappeared among the victims of what in the First World War was called "shell shock," in the Second, "battle fatigue." Every man, like every dog, has his own individual limit of endurance. Most men reach their limit after about thirty days of more or less continuous stress under the conditions of mod­ern combat. The more than averagely susceptible suc­cumb in only fifteen days. The more than averagely tough can resist for forty-five or even fifty days. Strong or weak, in the long run all of them break down. All, that is to say, of those who are initially sane. For, ironically enough, the only people who can hold up indefinitely under the stress of modern war are psychotics. Individual insanity is immune to the consequences of collective insanity.

I know more than one genius organizer, usually a Black or brown, sick or disabled woman or non-binary person who doesn't have a ton of disability community, who's casually told me that they'll be dead by the age of fifty. I respect that crip years are like dog years and sometimes we live really huge lives in short amounts of time. But I can't help but think that it doesn't have to be that way. We're soaked since birth in narratives that we will die young, that our lives aren't worth living, and we're up against everything from insurance denials to police trying to kill us who want to do the same damn thing. But as I hear my friends talking about how they're sure they'll die young, I wonder if changing the narratives around care might change their expectations.

Xxons gifts are certainly logistical. He is trained in useful commands as nuanced as “find the counter” at a hotel of store; “find the empty seat” in a waiting room; or “find inside” in a parking lot. But his companionship is equally valuable therapeutically. “It's difficult to return from combat, and a disability only compounds it,” Malarsie explains. “If | didn’t have Xxon, no one would talk to me.

We’re not going to let a hypocritical society give us a token education and then bury us,” I told one reporter. When it came time for my segment on Today, I went on completely revved up. Poor Bob Hermann. He wasn’t necessarily against me, but I went after him like a dog with a bone. It was, I felt, no longer about me. It was about all the people. Yes, I did want to be a teacher, but in my mind, it was about all the stories I’d heard about someone’s brother or sister, or their father, their mother, their cousin, or they themselves—and how they had this problem or that problem and no one was listening and things weren’t happening. A dam had broken. After all this time, all the years of being ignored and dismissed, I felt like we had an opportunity to call attention and start to make it right. We could do something.

You are the most loving, thoughtful man on the planet, Dhruv. The way you support and care for me is incredible. You'll be a fabulous father. From the Heart

She bent over, as she did every morning, to kiss the top of his head. "You are my remarkable, brilliant boy," she whispered in his ear, as she rubbed his chest. From the Heart

It's easy to misread things in emotional situations like these," Grant said. "Best not to worry until you know you have something to worry about." From the Heart

Sugar, Rocco, and I trotted over to our people. Something big was happening, and we needed to be part of it. From the Heart

I thought the day Emily and I met had been the happiest of my life. I learned a valuable lesson: that happiness could always get happier. From the Heart

I looked from Emily to Martha. Based on the set of their jaws and the stiffness in their shoulders, I knew this silence was conveying a lot. From the Heart

Emily says that she may not see people's reactions, but she can hear them by the way they move and breathe. From the Heart