What Are Our Lives Worth?

Years ago, I was leaving a hospital when a stranger handed me his Christian prayer book and zoomed away like he was going for the “Mario Kart” world record. The incident was so sudden and bizarre that I laughed. I remember my mother, herself a devout Christian, looking upset. I didn’t care why, though. My primary concern was carrot cake from the hospital café.

I realized years later that the stranger gave me the prayer book because I was disabled, because he thought I should be praying for salvation from the curse he perceived my life to be.

That 10-second episode was my first memory of ableism — arguably one of the last forms of discrimination that society deems acceptable, even while disabled people represent the world’s largest minority group. Implicit sexuality bias has dropped 64 percent over 14 years; in that time, explicit disability bias has dropped 37 percent, but implicit disability bias only 3 percent. Ableism takes countless forms depending on one’s disability and intersectional identities, and it’ll be a recurring topic throughout this column.

A deep-rooted assumption underlying explicit and implicit ableism, as that prayer book taught me, is that disabled people’s lives aren’t worth living — that they’re better off dead, that they’re worthless. Many culturally-prominent literary works from around the world display this association between disability and futility. From Tiny Tim to Pollyanna to the god Hephaestus, disabled figures often face a predictable fate: to “become normal” and magically lose their disability, or else to die, physically or metaphorically; to lead an artificially triumphant existence, or a tragic one. If you’re disabled, the natural course is to give up, disappear, and stop suffering.

I’ve endured that message for as long as I can remember. But people used to at least keep it subtle, before the pandemic.

A week ago, everyone in Quincy received an email from a fellow student advocating for Harvard to end all Covid restrictions and immediately return to normal. This email was eloquently written, and it also contained among the most explicit ableism I’ve ever experienced.

“We must ask ourselves what are we going to give up in exchange for what,” the email’s argument read. (I’m omitting the more disturbing parts.) Citing data that Omicron is mild and raising mental health concerns — extremely critical, but a false binary with Covid safety — it asserted that we can’t afford to continue avoiding infection.

That may mostly work, if you’re abled. But what if you’re disabled or immunocompromised? A simple cold once hospitalized me. Assuming I survive Covid, a threat beyond anything I’ve experienced before (and being high-risk doesn’t mean I worry about dying whenever I get sick), long Covid could give me another disability. “Giving something up” sounds reasonable — until you realize you’re talking about people’s lives like a disposable resource and making implicit judgments about worth, handing out metaphorical prayer books.

I’m not here to discuss what the best Covid policies are. That’s outside my scope. People can, and should, debate that; I want Harvard’s policies changed too. My issue lies with a return to pre-pandemic normalcy, because our safety and inclusion on campus cannot be a debate.

Unfortunately, ableist attitudes towards the pandemic aren’t limited to that email and the thread it spawned. The Harvard administration, expecting everyone to get infected, has given up on Covid, ending isolation housing and contact tracing. The anonymous Crimson OpenGov app shows the student body leaning towards drastically reducing restrictions.

The message, now shouted aloud, is that disabled people don’t matter, that we’re expected either to fatalistically await infection or to disappear, hiding ourselves away on our own campus for abled people’s convenience; no in-between. We’re broken already, the subconscious rationalization goes.

If I’m broken, it’s because systemic prejudice has broken me.

“You are not entitled to our deaths,” Mia Mingus writes. Mingus is a disability advocate who received the Robert Coles “Call of Service” Award at the PBHA last fall, though it seems we’ve already forgotten her. “You are not entitled to the deaths of our loved ones in the name of capital, privilege, and ‘normal.’ You are not entitled to our silence,” she continues.

Rendering the ableism long buried deep in society painfully explicit, the pandemic is only the next event in a world history that has told disabled people they don’t belong. Now, whenever I meet new classmates, I have to wonder how, beneath their smiles, they view my presence in this community; to question whether I truly exist here.

Living a disabled life means living a life others consider not worth living, worth valuing. But I like myself as I am, more or less, so I don’t want your misdirected prayer book. I want your action towards changing the culture around us, for everyone’s sake. Don’t forget the older faculty, the staff with young children, the healthy students who’ll develop long Covid and become disabled; all the people you’ll never meet but whose lives you may irreversibly affect.

“We are bound together, by virtue of existing on this planet,” Mingus emphasizes.

Our lives are worth living, deserve life. Every single one matters.

Remember.

Ben T. Elwy ’23 is a joint concentrator in Linguistics and Classics in Quincy House. His column “Living a Disabled Life” appears on alternate Tuesdays.

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