In case you haven’t noticed the term disability has been transformed in these past decades.  In the 1980s and 90s people with functional differences from the mainstream stripped the prefix ‘dis’ from disability and decided that the only issues that counted was their new adapted abilities and reasonable accommodation.  The strategy worked because of the courage and dexterity of these people who were forced to adapt, they shook the term disability.  You will find many of them thriving and contributing in the mainstream of this country.  But there are people whose insight, circumstances or resources still prevent them from getting beyond disability, or the mainstream structure keeps them locked up in various ways preventing their adapted abilities to perform. The focus remains on what they can’t do. 

I am wondering now as I watch this new administration lumbering along  with absolutely no sense of the scope of pain and confusion they are causing if the DSM should perhaps classify terminal obscene wealth as a disability.  After all, here is a group of people whose capacity for empathy for fellow humans has withered from a kind of sensory inhibition that only unlimited money can effect.  The numbing impact of obscene wealth can also diminish the attribute ‘wisdom’ which is starved out due to the profound insulation wealth causes separating them from the world we all have to navigate with its great pains and pleasures.  They are frequently consequence impaired. They handle delicate issues and problems that have broad long term impact like any classical guitar player wearing two arctic mittens which is to say with great clumsiness.  Living with great wealth without knowledge of its limiting effects prepares a person for nothing but living with great wealth; which after they get over the transient pleasures of the bling and luxuries of the rich, life with wealth impairment from a human perspective becomes very, very impoverished. They need help, not power. Power acts like cocaine for the obscenely wealth impaired. The more they get the more they need.

Good in this case is sadly closely related to truth. We need to vote for people whose life experience is broad enough to understand the impact of public policy on the broad spectrum of lives of as possible. We need to elect people who know and acknowledge what they don’t know and are capable of learning more about this famously diverse land and population. Yes there are wealthy people who can make good leaders, but they need to know how important it is to seek reasonable accommodations for this new disability. Making America great again is off the table. Good in this democracy is helping America become great again.