International Day of Persons with Disabilities
Every year on December 3rd, the International Day of Persons with Disabilities arrives with the soft thud of a well-meaning holiday, acknowledged, applauded, and then swiftly shelved for the next twelve months. In 2025, however, the day feels heavier, carrying the weight of a global pattern that many prefer not to name: the quiet normalization of cutting care for those who need it most.
Let’s be honest. We have entered an era where disability rights are praised in speeches and undermined in budgets. The tension between rhetoric and reality has never been so stark, and people with disabilities are expected perversely to be grateful that the contradiction is merely awkward rather than lethal. But gratitude is difficult to summon when the institutions that claim to protect you do so with one hand while reaching for a red pen with the other.
This year, governments across continents have discovered a new enthusiasm for “efficiency,” the kind that finds its purest expression in healthcare cuts. The euphemisms are familiar: streamlining, restructuring, modernizing. But for disabled people, these are not abstract policy terms; they manifest as lost services, longer waits, shuttered clinics, withdrawn supports. In some places, “efficiency” has meant replacing home-care visits with phone check-ins, as if loneliness and isolation were simply technical issues that could be toggled on a screen.
Of course, discrimination has never needed austerity to survive, but the two make exquisite companions. Cutting care for disabled people is easily justified because disability is still widely understood, though rarely admitted as a personal burden rather than a societal failure. The disabled person is expected to endure, adjust, self-improve, or at least remain discreetly out of view. And when their needs become politically inconvenient, the narrative shifts: We simply don’t have the resources right now. As if dignity were a luxury item.
The cruelest part is that disabled people are often painted as “resilient,” a word that has been polished into a compliment but functions more like an absolution. If they are resilient, then the rest of us can relax. Resilience is comforting precisely because it allows us to imagine that cuts won’t hurt them as much as they actually do. It implies that support is optional, a courtesy rather than a right. It transforms suffering into a kind of noble achievement.
But try telling that to the people who rely on mobility aids that are now months late due to procurement freezes. Or to the families who have lost speech therapy access because the program that funded it was quietly phased out. Or to the chronically ill patients whose lifesaving medications have been moved out of coverage lists, replaced by cheaper alternatives that work fine—if one happens not to have the disability in question.
Discrimination takes subtler forms, too: the doctor who assumes a disabled patient’s symptoms are simply “part of their condition,” the employer who swears that remote work is impossible despite years of evidence to the contrary; the school that insists it supports inclusion while refusing to provide aides, devices, or training. These small violences accumulate, forming a sediment of exclusion that becomes difficult to dislodge.
What makes 2025 particularly striking is not that these injustices exist, they always have but that they are becoming increasingly, almost theatrically, normalized. The public conversation has learned to shrug. It is, after all, easier to ignore something once enough people begin ignoring it together. Disability discrimination has drifted into the background noise of civic life, drowned out by more fashionable outrages.
Yet history suggests that societies are revealed not in their crises but in their care: whom they choose to protect, and at what cost. The current trajectory reveals a troubling truth, much of the world is deeply uncomfortable with disability, not because it is rare, but because it is universal. Everyone is a future member of the same club, and that inevitability carries a discomfort we would rather outsource to policy documents.
Using International Day of Persons with Disabilities as an annual showcase of compassion feels increasingly performative when the rest of the year erodes the systems that make compassion tangible. This is not a matter of resource scarcity; it is a matter of political will, imagination, and empathy, qualities that are apparently easier to express in speeches than spreadsheets.
The irony is that investing in disability support is not, and has never been, charity. It is infrastructure. It is workforce policy. It is family policy. It is education policy. It is a collective insurance plan not just for the people who need accommodations today, but for everyone who will eventually need them tomorrow. Cuts to disability care are cuts to societal resilience, though that word is rarely applied where it belongs.
So how do we honour this day without falling into the trap of ceremonial concern? By refusing to treat disability as an optional line item. By recognizing discrimination not as an unfortunate side effect of modern life but as a structural choice. By insisting that the right to exist with dignity does not ebb and flow with budget cycles. And by remembering, perhaps most urgently, that disabled people do not need resilience as much as they need justice.
In 2025, celebrating this day requires more than symbolic gestures. It requires admitting that the fabric of disability rights is fraying and that we have grown far too comfortable watching the threads loosen. It requires discomfort, the kind that forces introspection and, ideally, change.
And it requires most of all, a collective refusal to let austerity masquerade as inevitability.
If the International Day of Persons with Disabilities is to mean anything this year, it must be a reminder that the measure of a society is not how it honours disability on a calendar but how it supports disabled people on every other day of the year.
No comments:
Post a Comment