8/12/25 - A Medicaid cuts calendar, and remembering a Disability Justice trailblazer
Good afternoon ...
Let's just get right to the links shall we?
Medicaid, SNAP, and Education Changes
The Arc of the United States Facebook page - August 4, 2025
"You might not feel the impact yet, but big cuts to Medicaid are in the new budget bill, and the timeline to implement is on the way."
Cheers to The Arc for doing this. I started it in my Facebook feed a few days ago, and thought how useful it would be to see complicated disability policy issues broken down and illustrated this way more often. I also can't help thinking that it would have been even more useful to see this and be able to share it before the bill passed, when it might have had some influence on the outcome – or at least on how disabled Americans understood the threat, or maybe failed to.
The Late Patty Berne Was a Visionary Leader in the Disability Justice Movement
Elliot Kukla, Truthout - August 7, 2025
"They were a visionary artist and one of the primary architects of the Disability Justice movement, which connected the struggle for disabled liberation with other fights for freedom for the first time in the early 2000s."
In Remembrance of Patty Berne, January 21, 1967 – May 29, 2025
Alice Wong, Disability Visibility Project - August 9, 2025
"Patty was a revolutionary, an elder, and an oracle. Their wisdom spanned across space and time and will forever leave a mark on our spirits. They are now on the ancestral plane where they joins other disabled ancestors who left us too early."
I have come to realize that I simply do not have a revolutionary temperament. I am more of an incrementalist. In the realm of disability, I am interested most in how adjustments to disability policy can make disabled people's lives a bit better and more free – and in how most disabled people think about their disabilities, including those who don't think that they think about their disabilities at all.
But I also have developed a deep appreciation for disabled people like Patty Berne, who push beyond mere advocacy to more transformative and ideologically challenging and rewarding ways of thinking about disability – and who encourage us to act more boldly as disabled people in the wider world of social justice.
The Truthout article describes another difference that also helps me locate my own place in disability culture. It divides recent disability activism into two "waves," similar to how people speak of different waves of feminism. It describes first wave disability activism as disability rights, while a more recent second wave is about disability justice, a movement in which Patty Berne was a pioneer. Thinking about it this way, I think I sit somewhere between first and second-wave disability activism – between the pride in the Americans with Disabilities Act and restlessness about first wave disability activism's political isolation and lack of inclusion.
Where do you see yourself in the vast and complex arena of disability activism? And who do you look to as revered elders in disability culture? Please share in the comments!
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