Can we see each other?
In ways that are equally ordinary and extraordinary, Crip Camp — A Disability Revolution tells the profoundly and universally human stories of real people with disabilities and their individual and collective struggles to be seen. The film begins in the early 1970s at Camp Jened, a Catskills camp for teenagers with disabilities, and describes the ties of this unpretentious hippie camp and a group of teens to the nascent movement for disability rights.[1]
At this time, teenagers with disabilities still faced a life of discrimination and marginalization — and even institutionalization. What is so moving about this story, as is the case with many stories about struggles for fundamental human rights, is the degree to which these people were fighting to “just be human.”[2] It wasn’t until 1990 that these basic human rights were recognized with the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA).
“What we saw at that camp was that our lives could be better.” — Jimmy Lebrecht, Crip Camp — Jened Camper, Filmmaker, and Activist
While their dreams were modest, their ambitions were anything but. In order to live the lives they aspired to live, they would need to change the world — and to do that, they would need to change the way the world saw them.
Moral relativism is the view that moral principles exist relative to some particular society, culture, or period in time, and that none is right or wrong in an absolute sense. From a young age, I came to understand that some people believed relativism had infiltrated my education and was undermining the moral and ethical upbringing of my generation. We were told we were being brainwashed with ideas suggesting that laws weren’t always just or that our parents weren’t always right. The objective morality (as well as the bias and stereotypes of class, gender, and race) of our Dick and Jane readers was being called into question.
Former Congressman Paul Ryan, a central voice of American conservatism, once famously claimed, “If you ask me what the biggest problem in America is, I’m not going to tell you debt, deficits, statistics, economics — I’ll tell you it’s moral relativism.”[3]
“My doctor came in, and he gave me a pelvic exam and said, ‘You know… I think you might have gonorrhea.’ And for one brief moment, I was so proud of myself. [He had assumed] how could I be sexually active?” — Denise Sherer Jacobson, Crip Camp — Jened Camper, Writer, and Activist
Fast forward to 2016, however, when Jonathan Merritt argued in The Atlantic that moral relativism was, in fact, dead. He cited David Brooks, who argued that while American college campuses were “awash in moral relativism” as late as the 1980s, a “shame culture” had replaced it.[4]
But America’s new moral code was much different from that predating the cultural revolution of the 1960s and 70s and isn’t a return to the values that conservatives wished for. Instead of being centered on gender roles, family values, reverence for institutions, and religious observance, it revolved around values like tolerance, inclusion, and empathy. Many religious conservatives disliked this mushy morality as much as the relativism it replaced.[5]
The key test of any moral code is its ability to help answer the tough questions faced by society. How, for instance, do we view our current existential crises of the pandemic, climate, equity, and racial justice in the context of this new moral code? I would argue that the new morality ultimately faces the same obstacles as the old one: corruption and hypocrisy. Unless these evils are confronted and called out for what they are, we cannot create a moral society.
“The world doesn’t want us around and wants us dead. We live with that reality… you have to be willing to thrive or you’re not gonna make it.” — Corbett O’Toole, Crip Camp— Jened Camper and Activist
In order to create a barrier-free society, the Crip Camp-ers needed to overcome corporate interests opposed to the high costs of creating physical accessibility. A moral code based on religious values would have certainly supported the demands of disabled people, but those demands were up against powerful forces of hypocrisy and economic greed. And those forces, like most evils, disguise themselves in deceptive ways.
It was self-serving corruption and hypocrisy among the politicians in power, dressed up as a defense of liberty and freedom, that underpinned our approach to the pandemic and fostered a destructive, cynical divide in America. Corruption and greed are similarly at the root of our woefully inadequate response to climate change, nowhere more evident than in the man-made crisis unfolding in Texas. Even when the effects of our duplicity are causing immediate hardship, devastation, and loss, those in power point fingers in patently ridiculous directions.
One of the clearest fault lines in the fight for economic justice is the $15 federal minimum wage. The opposition tends to focus on the effect a higher minimum wage might have on employment with a secondary emphasis on inflation fears. While there is substantial evidence that both of these effects would be modest, these arguments aren’t even relevant.[6] The question is, what kind of society and what kind of economy do we believe in?
“If I have to feel thankful about an accessible bathroom, when am I ever gonna be equal in the community?” — Judith Huemann, Crip Camp — Jened Camper and Activist
Right now, our minimum wage literally legislates poverty and promotes destitution, offering crumbs to those at the bottom of the economic ladder. A $15 minimum wage would lift 1.3 million people out of poverty, half of them children. It would push an additional $8 billion a year in earnings to families below today’s poverty line, and another $14 billion a year to households just above it.[7]
While these benefits come at no cost to the government, conservatives still argue that we can’t afford them. But who can’t afford them? And in a moral context, what does this even mean? If something we want relies on people being paid a poverty wage, maybe that’s the thing we can’t afford. Some costs are simply necessary to a functioning society. Just like the mandates ushered in by the ADA, which politicians on the right also argued were unaffordable, there are some things we must do because they are just and humane.
“…when you grow up being disabled…you’re not considered either a man or a woman…you’re just thought of as a disabled person.” — Judith Heumann, Crip Camp
It’s time that we see each other. Not just as workers or voters or protestors, but as fellow humans. When we think about the future, I think we all want that future to look healthy, fair, secure, just, and prosperous.
[2] Heumann, Judith with Kristen Joiner. Being Heumann: An Unrepentant Memoir of A Disability Rights Activist, Beacon Press (February 25, 2020).
[3] McCormick, John, “Paul Ryan: The Biggest Problem in America Isn’t Debt, It’s Moral Relativism,” from the Archives of The Weekly Standard, November 18, 2011, www.WashingtonExaminer.com.
[4] Merritt, Jonathan, “The Death of Moral Relativism,” The Atlantic, March 25, 2016.
[5] Ibid.
[6] Lowery, Annie, “The Counterintuitive Workings of the Minimum Wage,” The Atlantic, January 29, 2021.
[7] Ibid.
