|
 |
Last week, a few people I know found out they will soon lose their jobs here in Minot. They were part of a group of 23 employees whose positions at the North Dakota Center for Persons with Disabilities (NDCPD) are going away due to DOGE’s chainsaw amputations of things the Trump administration doesn’t care about and will never make the effort to understand. The administration’s cuts to services for the disabled are not surprising, especially considering Elon Musk’s affinity for eugenics and Donald Trump’s mocking of a disabled reporter. Trump also once told his nephew and others, “The shape they’re in, all the expenses, maybe those kinds of people should just die.” Later, in a phone conversation with his nephew about the nephew’s disabled son, Donald said, “He doesn’t recognize you. Maybe you should just let him die and move down to Florida.”
The NDCPD has operated at Minot State University since its inception in 1990. (90!!-If you know, you know.) It is one of 68 University Centers for Excellence in Developmental Disabilities across the country administered and funded through the Administration for Community Living (ACL) in the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). Among other things, NDCPD programs have helped disabled people find employment and become self-reliant: things conservative Republicans once thought of as worthy goals. No longer. This is Naked and Afraid time, baby. If these disabled people do find jobs, they better have some “skin in the game”—the federal income tax game—as far as Republican politicians are concerned. No more letting billionaires carry the load for the lame and lazy.
The ACL has been “restructured” out of existence, along with many other HHS entities that looked out for Americans’ health and safety. Over at the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), for instance, teams streamlined into uselessness include those that focused on traumatic brain injury, rape prevention and education (of course), and drowning.
Before I reached my twenties, I had been in real danger of drowning in a river and in a lake. I had twice struggled out of flooded roadside ditches. Once, while duck hunting, I slipped into an underwater hole deep enough to fill my chest waders with water. The Universe may have been trying to send me a message, but I was a nine-year-old boy or an indestructible teenager, and the signal was not getting through. The message I received was that I would always be able to extract myself from a water emergency through sheer will. I would beat the water into submission.
I wasn’t a total rock. I could mimic Tarzan’s freestyle stroke from Saturday morning cartoons, my sidestroke was decent, and I could swim a respectable distance underwater—though probably not while wearing chest waders. I pounded my way through the swim test at Navy bootcamp and swim classes at the Naval Academy. The 400-meter swim in a khaki uniform my senior year was an exhausting struggle, but I completed it. Things went acceptably well, though not quite swimmingly, until water survival training at the beginning of flight school in Pensacola, Florida.
My Achilles’ heel was in my ankles and my anxiety. I often did not turn one foot or the other outward enough for an efficient frog kick, and I saw the water as an obstacle or even an adversary, so I was never relaxed in the training pool. An imperfect frog kick and some discomfort in the water were no big deal, I thought, until I was treading water in steel-toed boots.
Before my Aviation Indoctrination (AI) class’s five-minute tread test in full flight gear, an instructor bundled together a helmet, flight suit, boots, and survival vest. He tossed them into the water to demonstrate that the gear was at least neutrally buoyant. I was not fooled. I had seen video footage of a cobras hanging out among villagers in India like community pets, but that didn’t make me forget that tens of thousands of people die from snake bites in India each year. I had no urge to travel to that village and read poetry to cobras. On my body, that semi-buoyant bundle of flight gear felt as floaty as a suit of armor. The instructor’s demonstration hadn’t eased my anxiety at all, but I had a strategy: Since touching the edge meant failure, I would go to the very center of the pool and remove that option entirely.
The time started once everyone was treading water. I knew almost immediately that I was working way too hard. My inefficient frog kick was getting me less than nothing, so my arms were going at a furious pace. I tried my much stronger scissors kick, but scissors kicking in boots makes a student naval aviator negatively buoyant. Soon, I was gasping for each breath and blowing clouds of water in the air like a humpback whale. And then I got the hook. Once they extend the hook to you, it’s over. The hook isn’t there in case you need it; it’s there because you have failed and will be pulled to the edge of the pool. I had lasted just over a minute.
I had failed (FAILED!) the tread. The rest of my AI class advanced without me. It was embarrassing. Awful. How would I ever get beyond it? The best option was probably to go back to North Dakota and mow lawns for the rest of my life. Unfortunately, I still had a service obligation for my Naval Academy education, so the Marine Corps would find something else for me to do. Perhaps I would spend a few years reading poetry to poisonous snakes in India before the Corps drummed me out.
The next morning, I was back at the training pool with a Marine Corps instructor who called himself “Captain Swim.” He helped me correct my kick and make minor fixes to my form. More importantly, he got me to relax in the water. Before an hour had passed, I did a practice test in all my gear. Captain Swim timed me. I made the five minutes so comfortably that he quietly let me go for over seven, and I could have continued for seventy. When an aircrew class came in for training, I demonstrated the tread in full gear. First, I tightened my muscles and sank to the bottom of the pool to show the class that I was no Corky McFloatsalot, and then I resurfaced and hung out with my head out of the water like a curious manatee. Failing the tread was one of the best things that ever happened to me.
A lot of people fail and flail. For some, it is all they have ever known. They live paycheck to paycheck for their entire lives and have skin in the game at every turn. Some are drowning. They are drowning in debt or despair or addiction. They are treading water furiously every day, while the hooks we use to pull them to safety are cut away with a chainsaw. Programs to help them with housing, heating, and recovery are being slashed indiscriminately even though the programs’ current funding wasn’t enough to serve everyone who was eligible.
Perhaps there are Trump voters who are not happy to see disability services reduced and who would prefer that we help disabled Americans find jobs and become self-reliant. At this point, it would be hard to convince me that those people exist. I have witnessed far too much celebration of mean-spiritedness.
America cannot call itself great if we do not look out even for those who will never find jobs or be self-reliant, those who will never have skin in the federal income tax game. That’s one reason I have run for office three times as a Democrat: We don’t let people drown.
You’re currently a free subscriber to Trygve’s Substack. For the full experience, including access to the archives, upgrade your subscription.
| ||||||||||
