A moral moment for imagination

How allyship and advocacy can help us transcend despair

Apr 11, 2025

At the beginning of this year, I wrote a post about why allyship matters for disabled people. In it I shared local stories of how people around us, Lucia’s friends, the director of transportation in her school district, her nursing company, and her doctor had come alongside us to lift not just the heavy load of advocacy, but the feeling that you’re all alone when you’re up against the odds as a disabled person in this world.

My girl working hard to express herself with her eye gaze this week. Photo mine.

What I didn’t get into in that post is that allyship also helps disabled people imagine a better future. And at times like this, when the threats to disabled ways of life are so numerous and scary, it’s so downright reasonable to actually despair. Caring people in my life ask me how I’m doing all the time, and it’s so hard to know how to answer. For the moment, we are safe—Lucia’s services have not been disrupted, and we are okay. But, of course, other people are not. Not only are there public, unlawful deportations, colossal impact on program, jobs, and people cut from federal service, but fellow disabled people, for instance, those who benefit from the Administration for Community Living, social security, and even programs like Meals on Wheels, have already experienced disruptions to their service.

Our family lives with an ever present sense of dread that our lives, too, could change, overnight.

I realize that part of the weight of this political moment is that if you’re a vigilant, caring person, you are spending so much energy on trying to prevent horrible realities from coming to fruition. But one of the taxes of that vigilance is that in so doing, you’re also forced to confront and constantly imagine the dark future that you seek to prevent. That’s literally anxiety producing. And it’s not healthy.
It’s psychological warfare.

As I processed all this in therapy, I’ve realized that while despair is a reasonable possibility, I also owe it to myself, not just as a psychological respite, but as a reality check, to spend time conjuring, imagining, perhaps praying—if that’s your way—for another better, brighter future, even if sometimes I lack the actual hope to even believe in it.

And this is where the allies come in.

In the last few weeks, my own Senator, Cory Booker, stood up on the Senate floor for over 25 hours, removing Strom Thurmond’s previous filibuster blight from the record books and replacing it with an eloquent, passionate speech that called out the injustices of the Trump administration, including the proposed cuts to Medicaid my family is so worried about, and got the country’s attention.

The following weekend, it’s estimated that millions of you came out to march in protest against the Trump administration’s dismantling of USAID, unlawful deportations, and grabs at Medicaid, again marking as Cory Booker did, this moral moment.

And finally, midweek, the president of my own university went on record to say that we will not compromise academic freedom in the face of pressure from the federal government, that we would stand up for what we believe in despite the costs.

Fred Rogers once shared that his mother told him when the news is scary to look for the helpers. But when you don’t even need to look, because the allies are bold enough to stick their necks out, to stand up for 25 hours when others can’t, to march for families like ours, or to use their privilege to speak up on behalf of all universities, it helps you start to believe that a better future is not only possible, but in reach.

When Senator Cory Booker claimed that this is a moral moment, I think he did so in at least two senses. For one, it is critical that we stand up to hate and bigotry and harm. There is no other way when the moment demands it. But I think he also means that this moment is moral because it demands of us to resist not just by pushing back, but by calling people in to imagine a future that will do better, will be better and can be better because it will be bolstered by a diverse, coalition-al force for change.

In my previous post about my family's Medicaid story, I was careful to say that accommodations are actually not good enough for disabled people. They’re not what justice really looks like. Rather, I want to live in a world where everything is accessible to all people, including disabled people; disabled people aren’t just accommodated, they’re centered. When I wrote my book about churches doing disability ministry, it was tempting to despair that disabled people were frustrated because churches often settled for inclusion, rather than following them toward justice. But disabled people, in ministry and leadership, gave us what I call “glimmers of the kingdom”: they were already ushering in a new vision for the church, even if churches were often not yet able to receive it.

Why am I spending so much time imagining the future when the world is burning?

Well, sometimes I do wonder that myself.

Signs of spring. Daffodils in New Jersey. Photo mine.

But the disruptive resistance of despair is that which finds a way not just to camp out and survive in this world but makes way for another one. It’s the same spirit that despite the wilderness, can see beyond it. And it’s a vision all of us, those of us in the trenches, the streets, and the academies, can help share and conjure and realize, to get us out of this mess.

So, who are the advocates and allies that are helping you imagine a better future today? Will you allow yourself, in the midst of all of the necessary resisting of the bad to also consider, contemplate, and imagine the possible good?

Erin’s Substack

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