Being impaired or not being normal (which, as I have said, with the help of family and technology and with perseverance can be overcome) is not sexy by common standards and neither is dependence. The fact is that impairment reveals our interdependence and threatens our belief in our own autonomy. And this is where we return to work: the ultimate sign of an individual’s independence. For many disabled people employment is unattainable. We often simply make inefficient workers, and inefficient is the antithesis of what a good worker should be. For this reason, we are discriminated against by employers. We require what may be pricey adaptations and priceless understanding. Western culture has a very limited idea of what being useful to society is. People can be useful in ways other than monetarily. The individuals who I marched with may not have paying jobs, but they spend hours each day organizing protests and freeing people from lives in institutions. Isn’t this a valuable way to spend ones time? Disabled people have to find meaning in other aspects of their lives and this meaning is threatening to our culture’s value system. Though education, legislation, and technological developments may work to level the employment field for some impaired individuals, we should keep some fundamental insights from Marxist economic theory in mind, particularly the theory of surplus value, which dictates that higher profits result from the ability to pay less for labor power than the value imparted by the worker. The same rule that often excludes the impaired from the traditional workplace also exploits the able-bodied who have no other choice but to participate. The right not to work is an ideal worthy of the impaired and able-bodied alike.