When power means not having to care about anyone else
A while ago I went to a talk on accessibility given by a tech bro. The premise of his talk was that when he got hit by a bus (literally) he suddenly realized that -- wait for it -- the world is hard to navigate if you can't walk.
One aspect of privilege is the ability to not care about the experiences of other people. The lower down you are in the social hierarchy, the more you know about the people above you and the less they know about you.
As an able bodied white man with an ivy league education, he had made it to the age of 30 without ever actually seeing any of the people around him who have mobility issues -- wheelchair users, sure, but also the tons of people using canes, walkers, leg braces, or even those ubiquitous air casts. He'd never carted laundry to the laundromat or pushed a stroller.
And now he felt qualified to speak on behalf of people with disabilities after his temporary stint as one of them.
So many times when there's a new app that's going to 'solve' caregiving, there's someone like him behind it. Just like those headlines proclaiming that a 14 year old invented something to solve plastic pollution or a 12 year old solved the clean water crisis, this is always nonsense. It's a clever idea by someone with no clue about how complex the world actually is.
My hunch is that much of the caregiving crisis is caused by well-intentioned systems designed by people who are clueless about anyone other than themselves.
I'm a little bit scared to think that people are who make it adulthood without helping their ill friends and family are making any sort of decision. They must be monsters! But we've all known that perfectly lovable person who does not know that the soap dispensers don't refill themselves and is conspicuously absent when the diaper needs to be changed.
Hopefully there are ways to teach people empathy without them having to be hit by a bus.
PS. Can that be criteria for politics and hiring decisions? Okay, sure, I want to know your qualifications and goals, but also do you put a new roll of toilet paper on top of the empty roll instead of changing it?