5 snouts up for crip camp: a disability revolution streaming on netflix now. last evening i needed to be protected from myself (& my belief that mindless streaming was what was going to make me “feel better”). my husband is one of those engaged citizens whose capacity to watch in depth news programs and documentaries is bottomless. i am one of those citizens who thinks of myself as engaged but mostly wants to disengage when i watch what we used to call “television.”
loved it
it doesn’t matter what i wanted to watch, instead we watched crip camp, a “feel good documentary” produced by the obamas about a community of disabled people that met at a camp in new york’s catskills near woodstock in the late sixties. i absolutely loved every minute of it and it was exactly what i needed to see during the pandemic.
heroes
seeing these amazing young people laugh, connect, be profane together would have been enough to make it a four snout affair. seeing them grow up, move to berkeley and become disability rights heroes was life, energy, mind-altering in the best sense of the word.
learning about disability rights leader judy heumann alone would have been worth the price of admission. i don’t know how many other such activists gave at this level but it seems like she needs to be up there with cesar chavez and rosa parks in terms of civil rights leaders we learn about in school.
especially in a pandemic
so, in and of itself, this documentary is wonderful and worth watching. what makes me recommend it in a pandemic is that sometimes the best antidote to a terrible reality is not fiction but a wonderful transformative connected reality. this lifted my spirits and my hopes in the way the good place as fun as it is, never could.
