“What’s it like to have it all?” Marianna Dawson inquired one morning as her personal care assistant Sari came into her room and pulled up her three blinds one after the other to allow in the winter morning’s harsh sunlight.

“What do you mean?”

“Able-bodied people, I realize, have it all in ways that I can’t ever hope to. You have the privilege, the power, you can do whatever you want, whenever you want.”

“It’s too early for deep conversations,” Sari said, unplugging Marianna’s electric wheelchair, pushing it over to her bedside, sitting her up, positioning her feet, pulling her into standing position, and swinging her into the chair. “We’ll be late if we get into this now.”

Hours later, Marianna, seated behind her slow sales table, secretly envied the men in their suits who were prowling the arty mall, shopping for that chic present that would make the wife forget how many late nights they had been working. No one was buying her handmade poetry books today. Art sales, she knew were the first casualty of any economic downturn. As much as people needed art to keep themselves sane they refused to spend money on it, preferring instead to put their money into the gas tanks of their climate change causing SUV’s instead.

This reaction was typical of the way Marianna had been feeling lately. Normally she had no desire to be a businessman, trapped in a boring 60 hour a week job she hated, married to woman who only allowed him to have marital privileges when he increased the limit on her credit card or bought her diamonds of some kind.

But for the past month or so, in what everyone who knew the disability rights activist had consider a substantial change of status, envied most of the able-bodied people she encountered. Envied the way they could simply come and go whenever and to wherever they wanted, without so much as a second thought for the most part. Whereas she, in her electric wheelchair with her daily care needs, couldn’t just leave whenever she felt like it. She needed to find a traveling companion, who was willing to take her to the bathroom, dress, and wash her in exchange for a too small government payment, before she could board a plane, train, or bus.