The World Works Better With Us (Just Don't Enforce It)

"The world works better with us." That's this year's Disability Pride Month theme, timed to the ADA's July 26 anniversary — thirty-six years since the law that was supposed to make the built world answer to the people it kept locking out. It's a good theme. It's also landing in the same week the Department of Justice quietly announced that its own major ADA guidance documents aren't enforceable. Not repealed. Not replaced. Just downgraded to suggestion, days before the anniversary of the law those documents were written to explain.

I've spent my life being told, one way or another, that the world would work fine without accommodating me specifically. Autistic, with ADHD wired underneath it, in a family that denied both and treated the difference as something to correct rather than something to build around. Nobody drafted an accommodation for a kid whose brain processed the world sideways; they decided the kid was the problem. I've carried that lesson into adulthood the hard way, and I'm dying now with a pair of lungs that don't work right either, which means I've spent a fair amount of time recently in rooms where the same math plays out again: is this person's need worth the paperwork, or will "yes" stay expensive enough that people give up before they get it.

That's what "not enforceable" means, in practice. It's not a repeal — repeals get challenged in court, get press, get a fight. "Not enforceable" is quieter. It tells every business, every local government, every landlord and employer and transit authority: the guidance that used to define compliance is now advisory. You can still follow it. Nobody's going to make you. The American Bar Association's own disability rights committee said the plain part out loud — this doesn't create clarity, it creates the absence of consequence, and absence of consequence has a name. It's called permission.

Layer on top of that a Justice Department reportedly reconsidering how hard it enforces Olmstead — the 1999 Supreme Court decision holding that warehousing disabled people in institutions instead of their own communities is itself a form of discrimination — and you get a pattern, not a coincidence. Guidance loses its teeth. A landmark deinstitutionalization ruling gets a second look from the people whose job is defending it. Digital accessibility deadlines get pushed to 2027 and 2028, again. Each one alone reads as bureaucratic. Together, they're a direction.

So here's my problem with "the world works better with us," said this particular July: it's true, and I believe it, and it's also a slogan doing the work an enforcement mechanism used to do. Pride is supposed to be a claim on the world as it should be — not the only thing standing where a law used to stand. I didn't get better at existing in rooms that weren't built for me. I got tired, and built a life anyway, on my own terms, on borrowed time. "The world works better with us" isn't a request. It was supposed to be a fact the law backed up. Ask whoever wrote "not enforceable" into a guidance document why it isn't backing it up anymore.