I’ve seen this word said a lot, specifically for Americans. I understand the basic throughline, that Americans benefit from imperialism and thus are complicit in its crimes.
But…what would be the difference in action if they weren’t?
There is land back, but that doesn’t include what happened in Africa and the middle east. If the average American is complicit in the genocide of Palestinians, what do you do about it? Is it just supposed to guilttrip them? Is it reparations? Is it a mass trial of a couple hundred million people…?
Yeah, disabled people are hardly the ones to be criticizing for inaction. How debilitating a disability is can vary; some people would be more able to help than others. But even if someone is on the less disabled range of disabled, it’s still shitty to portray it like they’re making an excuse for inaction. Recognizing that disabilities make it harder to take various actions for the person, that they can’t simply overcome this with willpower, is like half the battle with fighting against ableism. Now sometimes a disabled person may be able to get help that makes it easier to overcome the limitations of their disability, but that’s far from a bootstraps thing. It should be a community responsibility to help them out.
But individualism can tripped up on thinking people are supposed to individually arrive at the correct place of their own volition (literally or figuratively), which is far less effective and highly unreliable compared to organizing them.
Like imagine if I said “people should really be meeting me at xyz address at n time of day” and I pushed this as a view online for years on end. And then I showed up at that address at that time every day. I might get some people to show up now and then (and god knows who), but it would not be anything resembling a reliable organization. Point being, we can try to steer people in the right direction (ex: with political education), but we can’t organize them via individualist proclamations about responsibility and neglect of it.