Sometimes it's better to light a flamethrower than curse the darkness

Here's a thing I said on social media earlier today:

You know, not that long ago Facebook tells me we had the sixth anniversary of the first time after I started using a white cane where people tried to sneak in front of me in a supermarket queue.

I pretty much had a year off of this because of social distancing rules. People don't really keep anything like 2m apart but they did at least stop grabbing me, stop colliding with me and stop queue jumping me.

But this white woman in Tesco just tried to sneak in front of me. I guess nature is healing.

I was pretty proud of that last line, implying how deeply I expect ableism in interactions with strangers. But it turns out another way things are getting "back to normal" or natural for me is that my friend's responses are things like "You should hit them with your cane because you can't see them" or "you should have a sword in your cane," sometimes even with an elaborate description of some blind character in a media property I haven't seen where the blind person is a total badass: their cane is probably a sword too.

This is always what happens when I talk about these kinds of exhausting and disabling experiences I have -- I remember someone I barely even talk to any more making jokes about how I should have a cattle prod on the end of my cane. But my reactions to this have evolved quite a bit. At first I was totally there for it: I recognized my friend's responses as solidarity, I enjoyed the fantasies of cartoon violence and wished I could be a badass. Lately I've started to find such reactions a bit tiring and point-missing themselves. Today I hit some kind of critical mass where I figured out why I'm feeling unsettled.

Much as I sometimes love thwacking someone's car with my white cane when they stop in a crosswalk (I did this all the time in the way I used to get between the bus and Piccadilly station; gosh I won't miss going that way!), I'm not actually a huge fan of the "*thwack* Oh I didn't see you" type of joke.

It leaves me feeling incapable and incompetent. Even exploiting that for revenge on those who don't get it, or laughs with those who do, feels a bit like buying into the trope that bind people can't be expected to behave decently. Which I'm feeling increasingly uncomfortable with. I'm just wary of that "blind people are ignorant of their surroundings and/or can't be responsible for our actions" trope even if it's working "for" me, because I just hate it so much. It's embedded in our culture and it does so much damage.

Also, I'm aware of the power imbalance inherent in this interaction. If I fight back I'm the one likely to be "told off" or punished in some overt or covert way.

I'm really starting to find it unsatisfying even though I know my friends mean to be helpful and supportive because it's still saying the best I can hope for is to react well. I wish people would instead say "That shouldn't happen to you. I didn't know this could be a problem." I didn't, before it started happening to me! "Now that I know, I'll look out for it. I'll yell if I see disabled people not being treated properly, and I'm aware now that people actually expect blind people not to know how strangers are mistreating them." People who appear to not be white as well as appearing to be blind will particularly benefit from this, because the power imbalance between them and those taking advantage of them will be even greater.

I don't want cartoon violence and I don't want to be entertaining to bystanders or my friends hearing the anecdote later on. I need backup. I need accomplices.