Do you enjoy your job?
This Jetpack app prompt presupposes you have a job. Most people do, whether they think of it as a career or a way just to eat. I guess that means most are healthy enough — emphasis on enough — to work, to have enough stamina to keep working and earning.
That’s the other thing, having a job presupposes it’s income earning. Does anyone think of a job as not providing an income, even if the income is so puny, you have to use food banks to eat? A job assumes payment. A job without payment is what? Volunteering? But that includes the idea of wanting to do it. Slavery? Isn’t that supposed to banned?
So what do you call a job that doesn’t pay or pays so little, the “income” covers only a monthly café latté? Or doesn’t pay at all even though no employer demands you show up, yet you must show up if you want to survive or eventually thrive?
You call that job, “Having a disability.” And I hate it.
Someone on Twitter said that when you have chronic illness, your illness oppresses you. When you have a disability, the world around you oppresses you, from the guy who thinks his car parked on his driveway butt up to the sidewalk leaves loads of room for a pedestrian to the city piling snow up around the audio signal button to Feds and provinces designing disability benefits so low people seek murder by doctor.
Chronic illness and disability require health care visits on and on and on, an endless job, working without pay to stay alive, resisted by the efficiency talking points, dissuaded by OHIP delistings and endless health care reform talk, and distorted by the dying-with-dignity crowd who think dignity resides in toileting instead of valuing every human being, treating all humans as if their lives matter enough to support and actively cherish them in whatever way they need.
