I had been falling a lot. It was almost as if my small feet were suddenly too big. Then my symptoms took a darker turn.
“I can’t see!” I gasped one frigid January morning in 1997. Beside me, my boyfriend asked, “What do you mean you can’t see?”
I couldn’t catch enough breath to speak normally. My left eye hurt, and I could only see a kind of darkness that I had never seen before. It was like an abyss. My voice was too loud, too quick, too high. I was disoriented.
The ophthalmologist conducted all sorts of tests. I spent what seemed like hours looking into these big white machines that watch your eyes as you follow dots, lines, colors, and movement.
Finally, the doctor pronounced, “You have optic neuritis. The optic nerve in your brain is inflamed. That’s why you can’t see out of it. Your immune system perceives your optic nerve cells as invading cells that need to be attacked, and the attack is causing inflammation.”
The next thing he told me was even scarier: “This is a common first presentation of multiple sclerosis.”
I recovered my eyesight after about a month and a half, but my course had been set. I had MS. I was just thirty-two years old. A decade later, I began to lose my mobility. Today, I use a mobility scooter to get around.
My commute to work became unmanageable. But because of the Americans with Disabilities Act, my employer offered me reasonable accommodation to work from home. It’s only because of that accommodation that I’m not unemployed and perhaps even institutionalized.
But now, fear among people with disabilities is escalating as President Donald Trump and his unelected co-president Elon Musk are on the warpath against accessibility. Through an executive order issued on his first day in office, Trump took aim not just at DEI—diversity, equity, and inclusion—but DEIA, with the “A” standing for accessibility.
The Department of Justice has vowed to go after programs with federal funding that promote accessibility and equity in the workplace and schools. Republicans are proposing to slash $880 billion from Medicaid, a program on which more than ten million adults and children with disabilities rely. And lawmakers want to condition health care on meeting stringent work requirements.
That’s some kind of catch-twenty-two—force people with disabilities to work so that they can live, but ensure their workplaces aren’t accessible to them. Pointedly, the federal government is among the nation’s largest employers of disabled people—and their work-from-home options, often along with their jobs themselves, are disappearing under Trump. Devastating cuts to the Departments of Education and Health and Human Services will further gut programs on which people with disabilities depend.
This is terrifying for people living with disabilities today, but it should be worrying for all of us.
Whether through genetics, illness, accident, or age, nearly all of us will experience some kind of disability in our lives. Disability rights advocates worked hard to achieve the protections we do have under the Americans with Disabilities Act, signed into law by Republican President George H.W. Bush. Now that law’s protections are tumbling down.
I’m one of the lucky ones, able and allowed to work at home. But a new study from the National Partnership of Women and Families found that in 2024, disabled people were nearly twice as likely to be unemployed as non-disabled people, with Black and Latinx people with disabilities experiencing even higher rates of unemployment. Only 20.5 percent of disabled women are employed.
We need to be creating more paths to diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility in schools and workplaces, not less. With the latest attacks on the most marginalized of us, our future as a thriving, healthy, productive nation is bleak.
We can’t let that happen. I might not be able to walk anymore, but I have a voice, and I’m going to use it. Won’t you join me?
This column was produced for Progressive Perspectives, a project of The Progressive magazine, and distributed by Tribune News Service.