The cruelty is the point

Heartbreaking letters from disabled Americans

The cruelty is the point.

The cruelty is THE POINT.

As is the chaos. The confusion. The pain.

The despair hitting you like a wave and making you feel like you can’t breathe. The feelings of helplessness, the pointlessness, the insignificance of your small life against the overwhelming hatred being thrown at you.

These are not unintended side effects. They are the whole point.

In my latest batch of letters from America, this reality was hammered home again and again, particularly by people who are living with disability. The failures of the system for disabled people have long been known - this is not a recent thing. A study in 2022 found that people with disabilities experience homelessness 2.5x higher than the overall population. The existing ‘safety nets’ were already failing; the ‘big beautiful bill’ is slashing them to pieces. This is putting people who were already in poverty into risk of starvation, homelessness and simply dying from lack of access to medication. In one particularly heartbreaking letter, my penpal wrote:

Many of the disabled people I know have been thinking about an exit plan. By exit plan, I mean suicide. I don’t mean that they are suicidal, I don’t mean that they want to die. I mean they are thinking that at some point, it might be preferable to kill themselves than to allow the Trump regime to kill them…

I wanted to tell you this because I’m not seeing many people talk about it openly, but it is absolutely what disabled people are talking about….

I’ve talked to three different people who are disabled themselves and also have disabled children. They are considering taking their children with them and yes, I mean killing themselves and their disabled children. I want you to understand what it takes for a parent who has cared for a disabled child for years to come to this point. Not just to admit it to themselves but also to admit it to another person. And not because they don’t love their children. But because they love them so much they can’t imagine leaving them behind, allowing them to end up in a work camp or worse.

This isn’t a far off, unimaginable dystopia. This is present day America, where the Secretary of Health and Human Services, the profoundly underqualified RFK Jr., is suggesting creating an autism registry and sending people to ‘wellness farms’ (read labour camps). So it seems that tens of thousands, perhaps millions, of people across the US are making real plans about what they will do if it comes to this final awful choice.

And it is not hard to see that this is perhaps the point of it all. The government knows that the cuts it is planning will remove critical medical coverage for people who need it and cannot afford it otherwise. And therefore those people will die. As another penpal put it:

The 'eugenics’ of it all is unavoidable at this point (although I am aware that this has been happening for years). And don’t forget (as if we could), that MAGA is the group that claims to be Chrisian, to be ‘pro-life’, to be about protecting women and ‘family values’. And yet here they are, casually signing the death warrants of thousands of people that they simply do not see the value in.

I also had a number of letters from the LGBTQ community, and their parents, worried about who will be ‘next’ on the list, who will be the next vulnerable group to be dehumanised and targeted. One woman described how difficult things are for her teenage transgender daughter, who has been struggling to get the medication she needed and faces being kicked off the sports teams that she has played in for years. To be clear, this teenage girl transitioned years ago - she has not ‘switched sides’ in order to gain a competitive advantage, she is just trying to live a normal, highschool existence. What threat exactly does she represent, versus the violence and brutality we witnessed in the LA protests by ICE and the LAPD against women?

In amongst all this darkness, however, I do feel a small light of hope shining. The 13.1 million people who mobilised for the No Kings day protests on July 14th, plus the millions who supported from home/work, represent a significant milestone in the resistance. I am also hopeful because of the progress being made by SMART elections on the Rockland county case (see details here) and the Election Truth Alliance in Pennsylvania - latest press release here. Both these cases are part of a legal noose that is tightening around the Trump regime - it is slow, but it is making progress and when they are able to provide the final proof (which I’m confident they will), it will be a significant part of how America gets its democracy back.

This final point is really important - if nothing else, Americans need to be fighting to ensure free and fair elections. The ONLY democratic, non-violent route out of this mess is by making sure every vote is counted and counted correctly. One of my penpals wrote about this:

I hope that the work being done by legal teams across the US will mean that this is not true - but the fight is far from over.

As of today I have replied to every letter that I have received. If you would like to be my penpal, please write to:

Charlotte Richards

Le Village

65370 Mauleon Barousse

France

This project continues to feel more and more important as time passes - as both a historical archive but also as a means of reaching out to people who may be thinking the same things but feeling alone. I promise I understand the weight of it, and I feel very fortunate to receive each of these little pieces of history.