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Dear John,
In high school, one of my teachers put two worksheets on my desk. One of the worksheets was mine and after reading the name written at the top of the other worksheet, I realized I had been handed back my twin brother's worksheet as well.
I went up to my teacher to hand back my brother's assignment when she told me to read his answer to #12.
Who is the bravest person you know?
Ned had chosen to write about me. And I had chosen to write about him.
I knew why Ned had written about me—I am the conventional definition of bravery. I would fight the dragons, the bullies, the monsters under the bed. I'd cover his eyes for the scary parts of movies and watch for when they were over so he wouldn't have nightmares.
Ned is a different sort of brave. There are things that are hard for him to do, but he does them anyway. He drives his own car, he grocery shops, he went to college away from home and met new people, he speaks up when spoken to, and sometimes he'll hold eye contact while you're speaking with him because he knows that's what he's supposed to do.
When I went home and showed my brother my answer on the worksheet, he looked at it for a while. Finally he said, you really think I'm brave?
Ned had never been called brave before. He had been called all other terrible things, he'd been mocked, bullied, and harassed for how he speaks, for how he thinks, for how he's different. Some things are harder for him than they are for me, and maybe you—and he does them anyway. I think that's really fucking brave.
John Fetterman is currently under attack for having a stroke. His cognition is fully intact, the same way Ned's is, but how Fetterman verbalizes his inner thoughts has been temporarily impaired. John's stances on all the important issues remain unchanged. His ability to make critical decisions is entirely unaffected. But he's being bullied —for needing time to recover.
The rhetoric surrounding his impairments are disgusting, lack compassion, and are very, very public.
I think of the entire community of people who can relate to John — whether we have our own disability or impairment, or we've had to recover from a near death experience, or we've watched a family member or friends struggle with being treated "different." We are watching and hearing the way John is being treated—as it plays out on the biggest public stage imaginable.
And it's setting a scary precedent that people with disabilities or impairments can't have a place in leadership or can't run for office or can't be a voice for change — that people with disabilities can't be considered brave.
The attacks on John are ableist in the worst way.
When I first decided to run for Congress, I promised all of you I'd be a fighter against injustices like this. I'm punching back against these lies. It's not going to be easy; politics has become a vipers pit where the nasty, the ugly, the hate-filled all go to flourish.
So how do we reverse course? We show up. We make politics become kind and empathetic and nuanced. We transform.
We'll have to be brave . . . But, man, what a better country we'd be for it.
— Alexandra Hunt
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