Who Decides Where You're Allowed to Exist
There's a specific kind of power that doesn't look like power at first glance: the power to decide, on someone else's behalf, what their life should look like from the outside, and to call that decision care. I think about this every time a story surfaces about disabled people and where they're "allowed" to live, because underneath the policy language there's always the same question, asked in a hundred bureaucratic dialects: who gets to say what a good life looks like for a person who isn't you? A Supreme Court ruling in 1999, Olmstead v. L.C. , said the state doesn't get to make that call unilaterally, that warehousing someone in an institution when they're capable of community life, and want it, is discrimination, full stop. It's a good ruling. It's also, twenty-seven years later, a ruling that only means something if somebody keeps enforcing it, and this year the federal government signaled it might not bother as hard. I'm not w...