This happened on reddit today. Someone made a post on casualUK, talking about how privileged we are to live in the UK. So I wrote the following reply:
Privileged to live in the UK? Try being disabled and on benefits. Even being blind, having cancer or unable to walk, or all three, people treat you like a scrounger. Even if you worked and paid taxes for decades beforehand. Getting reassessed by the DWP every year or two, even though multiple doctors have written them letters saying your condition won't improve and will actually deteriorate. Having your benefits stopped at each assessment and having to go through appeal to get them reinstated because the assessor tells blatant lies. And while you're going through appeal, having absolutely no money whatsoever. Yeah I feel so privileged to live in a country where it's considered acceptable for me to be really hungry and under constant threat of homelessness, because I committed the sin of no longer being able to work.
Not to mention all the stuff that goes along with being in poverty in a country that's falling apart at the seams. For example, someone in my position is theoretically entitled to free dental treatment. But are there any NHS dentists taking patients? No of course not. So, I need dental treatment, have no money, no free dentist will take me. Cue all kinds of dental problems and pain.
And people who don't live like this act like there's so much easily available help. "Just go to a food bank!" So... wait a week for an appointment with a GP or citizens advice to get a referral, then wait a few days for your food bank appointment, then get given three days worth of food, then starve for a week while you go through the whole process again.
Can't get a dentist?
"Just contact NHS England/Just complain to the ombudsman/your MP/just ask for an emergency appointment" Yeah tried all of those. All the NHS dentists I called charge for emergency appointments if you're not already registered with them and the people I complained to don't help.
And NHS waiting lists. I had a stroke. According to my physio, if I'd been given physiotherapy in a timely manner I might not be so disabled now. But the waiting list was long and the damage done is now severe and life changing.
This country is just like america now - all fine and dandy if you have money. Actually a wretched and thoroughly miserable place to live if you don't.
Of course, it got downvoted and then removed. It's bad enough that it's so difficult for people in circumstances like disability and/or poverty to access help, and so impossible for us to have a chance at a decent quality of life. But we are constantly shut down, censored, denied and gaslit whenever we try to talk about it. There is an absolutely disgusting culture of ignoring and downplaying the lived reality of millions of people, blaming them for circumstances beyond their control and actually being angry with them for daring to mention it. There is more anger directed towards a severely disabled person getting a pittance each month than there is towards billionaires hoarding obscene amounts of wealth and business owners committing wage theft against the lowest paid workers. What is wrong with this country, why are so many people like this? Yeah I am hangry but everything I'm saying is still true. I then tried posting it in GreenAndPleasant, a supposed socialist **** who are meant to be helpful towards the disabled. Even they removed it! Where on earth are we allowed to talk about our lives as disabled people and the effect societies policies have on us?
I tried posting it on the leftist **** too, they also immediately removed it. If even the political side that is meant to be supporting us is silencing us, where can we talk about this?
