Leadership Quote by Major Owens

Owens is naming an ugly comfort: the way exclusion can feel like safety to the people doing the excluding. “Sick security” is a deliberately jarring phrase, because it frames avoidance not as neutrality or “preference,” but as a dependence. The security is “sick” precisely because it’s purchased by shrinking your world and refusing to be changed by contact with difference.

His target isn’t only overt prejudice against disabled people; it’s the broader American habit of treating disability as contamination, a disruption of the fantasy that life should be seamless, efficient, and aesthetically “normal.” That’s what “totally pure and all-American” is doing here: it’s a satire of a national self-image built on cleanliness, self-reliance, and a kind of moral hygiene. Owens punctures that myth by showing how it demands constant border patrol - not at the edge of the country, but at the edge of one’s empathy.

The sharpest line is “requires them to do any thinking.” He’s indicting laziness dressed up as virtue: the reflex to avoid situations that might complicate your political beliefs, your theology of merit, or your sense of who deserves public resources. In political context, that’s a direct challenge to the then-dominant framing of disability as private tragedy rather than a civil-rights issue requiring ramps, accommodations, funding, and law. Owens is arguing that avoidance isn’t passive; it’s an active strategy for preserving innocence, and innocence is often the most expensive thing society asks disabled people to pay for.