Politics & Power Quote by Major Owens

Owens is describing a before-and-after moment: disability wasn t just a category of need, it became a constituency. The phrase "alive, politically alive" does double work. It suggests a community that had always existed socially and materially, but had been treated as inert in the one arena that converts presence into leverage. By repeating "alive", Owens turns political engagement into a kind of second birth, a shift from being managed to being heard.

The praise for Justin Dart is less about hero worship than about infrastructure. "He traveled to every state" isn t a fun fact; it is a theory of change. Dart s legitimacy comes from showing up, stitching together people who were isolated by geography, institutions, and stigma into a shared identity that could act in unison. The subtext is that disability rights could not rely on sympathetic elites alone. It needed organizers who understood that visibility is power only when it is coordinated.

Owens also slips in a hard-edged realism: "made people... understand that they had some political power". That verb, "made", acknowledges how thoroughly the system teaches marginalized groups to expect nothing. Political power here is not framed as inspiration, but as recognition of facts: numbers, votes, lawsuits, local pressure, federal legislation. Coming from a politician, the line reads as both tribute and admission. Elected officials respond to organized demand; Dart helped convert diffuse frustration into the kind of pressure that changes laws and budgets.

Contextually, it echoes the ADA era, when disability rights became a national project rather than a set of private struggles. The intent is clear: remember who built the muscle, not just who passed the bill.