Leadership Quote by Major Owens

Owens is naming a quiet but corrosive cultural pivot: accessibility has been recast from a civil right into a “perk.” The line lands because it’s structured like a before-and-after photo of public conscience. “Didn’t always” is a deceptively gentle phrase that smuggles in an accusation: the country is not merely failing to progress, it’s backsliding into suspicion and resentment.

His sharpest move is quoting the heckler’s logic in plain speech. “Why do we have to go to great expense for these people?” isn’t just about budgets; it’s a moral sorting mechanism. The pronoun “these” does what policy talk often does in American life: it turns neighbors into a cost center, a separate category whose claims are always optional. Owens understands that the fight over ramps and elevators is rarely a fight over concrete and cables. It’s a fight over who counts as part of “we.”

As a politician shaped by the late-20th-century push for disability rights (and the backlash that often follows rights gains), Owens is pointing to the familiar pattern where inclusion gets reframed as unfair advantage. The subtext is that resentment politics thrives on mistaking accommodation for favoritism, then calling that misreading “common sense.” Ramps become symbols in a larger argument about scarcity: if someone else is helped, you must be cheated.

The intent is to make that reframing visible, because once you hear it clearly, it sounds as brutal as it is.