I’ve lived with multiple disabilities my entire life. I know how society treats People with Disabilities. Men with Disabilities often have our manhood questioned, we’re seen as weak, women are generally not interested in us romantically. It’s the same for Women with Disabilities. Most People with Disabilities spent their entire lives lonely and it’s little wonder that there is a high rate of suicides among People with Disabilities.
We’re seen as burdens, as lazy, as frauds. We’re mocked, degraded, dehumanized, infantilized and we face barriers at every turn, barriers that nondisabled people don’t notice and think nothing of. We’re pressured to try to be like everyone else and we’re chided when we’re unable to do that. The constant ableism is physically and mentally exhausting for People with Disabilities.
Those of us who lived with disabilities our entire lives have always known these things. People who become disabled later in life will learn the struggles of living with disabilities. The same is true of soldiers who went to war as nondisabled people and came home with disabilities, and that is what Sarah Handley-Cousins writes about in Bodies in Blue.
Bodies in Blue covers the various ways that soldiers in the Civil War were wounded and left with life-changing conditions. Usually when people think about disabilities from war, they think about missing limbs. But the reality is, amputees are not as common as you might think, not even during the Civil War era. There are numerous other ways that soldiers are wounded and disabled for the rest their lives. I had a hard time reading about some of these wounds that Bodies in Blue talks about.
After the war, Soldiers with Disabilities go home and try to resume the lives they had before the war. But things are changed, they don’t have the same abilities anymore and they’re made to feel worthless or less than men. In many cases, their wives leave them or they’re institutionalized. Doctors don’t take them seriously when they complain about their struggles. The government ignores them when they request the pensions they deserve.
It was that way during the Civil War, and it’s that way now. I’m thinking about my uncle Gary now, who was a veteran of the Vietnam War. He had a condition where he was always shaking, so bad that he had trouble talking. When he would go to the VA for help, the doctors there would tell him he was faking his condition and send him home with nothing.
Gary died in 2002. I think he was still in his fifties when he died. Just a few years older than I am now.
I’ll leave you with this quote from Bodies in Blue.
“Disability profoundly changed the ways that soldiers existed in and interacted with their world. Soldiers praised as exemplars of Northern manhood were also mocked and segregated. They were stripped of the power to determine their own identity or to control their own bodies.”
