Let’s start there. Let’s not dance around it. Let’s not sanitize it with phrases like “standard procedure” or “peaceful detainment.” You zip-tied elderly, disabled Americans. You zip-tied their trembling hands to the steel arms of their wheelchairs while they chanted for the right to keep breathing.
Not protesting for sport. Not stirring up chaos. Begging for Medicaid.
And for what? Because they had the audacity to exist in the rotunda while the Senate tried to trade their lives for a billionaire tax cut
Because they refused to die quietly in the shadows while Mitch McConnell smirked and told America to get over it?
No. No, we’re not getting over it.
We’re not forgetting.
We saw you.
We saw the officers wrapping flex cuffs around bodies that couldn’t stand. We saw the banner—“DON’T KILL US”—ripped from the hands of people who could barely lift their arms. We saw Capitol Police treat mobility aids like battering rams and disabled citizens like threats.
This isn’t a policy disagreement.
This is a fucking war on the disabled.
This is what fascism looks like in a suit and tie, flanked by PR-trained officers and gutless lawmakers who still collect government health plans while telling the rest of us to go die quietly.
And don’t you dare call this civil disobedience.
This is not performative.
This is survival.
When your ventilator is on the line, when your home care hours are getting slashed, when the insulin you need is just one Senate vote away from unaffordable, you fight with everything you’ve got.
Even if all you’ve got is a banner.
Even if all you’ve got is a wheelchair.
Even if all you’ve got is your voice, shaking, pleading, hoarse.
So yeah—they fought.
And you shackled them like criminals.
Because that’s the only language your diseased government understands.
You want law and order?
Then order your conscience to wake the hell up.
Because if a nation chooses to arrest its most vulnerable for wanting to live, then maybe it doesn’t deserve to exist.
This post has been syndicated from Closer to the Edge, where it was published under this address.