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The Disabled Must Become a Unified Political Front If We Expect Our Leaders to Truly Listen to Us

© William Robb

I'm sorry that I'm so late this month but to put it mildly, in the words of FDR, this is a month which will go down in infamy so far as my association Suite101 is concerned.

It all started out with a gigantic thunder storm which took out my DSL capabilities as well as my wireless network. This fiasco cost me almost two weeks before I was back up functioning normally. Then to make sure that the storm hadn't injured my computer I took it in for an annual check-up. This check-up cost me almost another two weeks. My computer gurus discovered that the storm had damaged some of my files so they had to reformat my hard drive. After this I got back a computer with no software installed so guess who had to reinstall it. You guessed right--me. So I'm just now getting everything ready so that I can write my article for Suite 101. Guess it is better late than never. With this apology behind me, here is my new writing. I hope that it will help some of the disabled understand why we must unite as a political group if we want things to change for the better.

The Disabled must become a unified Political Front if we expect our leaders to truly listen to us.

Why must we unite? The answer is simple: So long as we are fragmented into competing groups our leaders can ignore us because we don't have the voting clout needed to attract their attention. In my country if this were to take place then disabled political action front would be over 60,000,000 strong. This figure is representative of the disabled voters only and does not include their extended family. If you were to add the extended family into the equation, then the disabled voting power could be well over 300,000,000.

A voting block this large would attract leaders' attention because we could say if you help us then we will help you or if you don't help us then come next election we will vote you out of office. This is why we must unite, not because one disability is greater than another, but because the whole is larger than the sum of its parts.

This will be true of the disabled in any country. If they unite for the common good, not just the good of one group, then they will be able to influence political leaders. Political leaders survive by the vote and a voting block as great as the disabled will surely attract their attention.

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