As I began my journey as a disability activist, I went from feeling like disability was my own isolated experience to seeing it everywhere. I realized that disability’s presence in U.S. culture is inescapable even on a rhetorical level. We say that “the economy is crippled,” or that someone who feels incapable or unable to do something is in a state of “paralysis.” We talk of blindness as if it means ignorance or naïveté; we describe things that we think are ignorant or unfair as “retarded.”
