This morning I made a jubilant Facebook post about my granny cart:
Wheeled transportation does not have to involve motors… I forgot I had this granny cart, and have been astonished by how much more independence I have now that I’m using it again. Milk and orange juice and yogurt in the same grocery run! 😁
And then, being me, the person who worries constantly about being caught in a compromising position with any ism, I had a long conversation with myself on the walk home about whether or not my post was ableist. And whether I was not, just a little bit, letting my privilege hang out.
I decided that the question is not complicated, but it is complex.
The first part: is this ableist? Not intentionally, but maybe? Although I do have chronic physical illnesses, my legs are strong enough to allow me to walk the mile home from the store, I have at least one good arm with which to pull the cart, and my back is strong enough that I can carry a 20-pound backpack without crumpling to the ground. I know many people who cannot say all of these things.
The second part: is this privileged? Again, not intentionally, but again, maybe yeah. I look at it as “I get to bring the groceries home all by myself,” not as “I have to.”
So many factors come together to make this viewpoint my reality:
- I don’t have a car, so to get where I’m going I rely on my feet, public transit, taxis, or friends and relatives with cars. But not having a car was a conscious choice. I don’t even have a driver’s license.
- Because I do not have a car, I need my house to be on a bus route, and within walking distance to the grocery store, the pharmacy, and my workplace. But this requires me to live in an urban area, and not everybody can afford that. Part of the reason that I can is that I choose not to have a car.
- I don’t have kids. You may or may not consider that to be a privilege. But it means that I don’t need a car to shuttle anybody back and forth. And I’m not paying for anybody else’s food or education. And I don’t have to buy (and carry home) twenty bags of groceries every week just to keep my dependants from starving. (Cat food is another matter; but again, having a cat and being able to feed her higher-end food are both privileges, and the result of having privileges.)
The complexity comes in when I realize that not everybody gets to make the same choices that I do. That there are economic and medical and social forces that come into play for every person who has to make a decision about whether or not to drive a car, whether or not to have kids, where they are going to live, and whether it’s even possible to have milk and orange juice and yogurt in the same grocery run.
That some people have no choice but to use a granny cat, and aren’t enjoying that “independence” as much as I am.
In the exuberant moment when I made that Facebook post, all I really wanted to say was, “Right now, right here, it feels good to be who I am.”
We should all be so lucky.