@iBlame and he might well have been. But you respond to illness and disability with an intelligence, character, and personality in a social context. If the general attitude is that your life is ruined and you're better off dead etc.... some people can't get past that. Can't accept, adapt, reorient, find a different life path.

And if you're told your body is gross now and you're a burden and nobody will ever want you, you can react by rejecting everybody else first.

It's enough to make a person bitter. But it isn't the polio itself or the disfiguring accident or whatever and when families and communities buy the ableism and unthinkingly put 2 and 2 together and get 5, it's stigmatizing. You eventually wind up with this trope of the bitter, evil criminal in the Bond movie or the self-sacrificing, romantically suicidal one in that unspeakable eugenicist novel and the rest of us get stuck battling the stereotypes.

Some of us will lose that fight.

The inspirational President is also a problem but that's another rant for another day 😆

#FuckRFK