Movie theaters are dark; and Netflix subscriptions are up. Maybe you, like me, are both eager for all this to be over, and apprehensive about what the future might bring. For a dose of optimism, reflections on freedom, and a very good film, check outCrip Camp: a Disability Revolution.I had the good fortune to see itwith a very vociferous and appreciative crowd at the2020Sundance Film Festival in Salt Lake City, where it also won the Audience Award.

Directed by Nicole Newnham and Jim LeBrecht, the film draws on extensive archival footage from Camp Jened, a summer camp forteenagers with disabilities that becamea countercultural haven in the early 1970s, andfrom the twenty-six day occupation of the San Francisco Federal Building in 1977 by disability rights activists, including many former campers. It weaves together the archival footage and interviews with some of the campers today, like occupation organizer and lifelong disability rights activistJudy Heumann, and director LeBrecht, who was himself a Jened camper.

Crip Campbegins with footage from Jened, located down the road from Woodstock in the Catskill Mountains. Campers wore tie-dyed t-shirts, cooked, had sex, played music, swam, danced, and carried one another when they could. They had hierarchies too—the “polios” were at the top, and the “cerebral palsies” were at the bottom. Returning to their regular lives was often a terrible disappointment of inaccessible schools, unemployment, and unwelcoming communities, and the film depicts this too.

A number of the Jened campers ended up involved in the Independent Living Movement in Berkeley; the film has footage from this period as well. There, they continued their support for one another and for others they came to know. The power of their solidarity became apparent when the federal government, with Joseph Califano—head of the Department of Health, Education and Welfare under President Jimmy Carter—stalled in issuing the regulations needed to implement the Rehabilitation Act of 1973. The Rehab Act prohibited discrimination on the basis of disability in all federally funded programs and became the prototype for the Americans with Disabilities Act. But without regulations to enforce it, the Rehab Act had no impact. The 1977 occupation of the San Francisco Federal Building ultimately succeeded in getting these regulations signed into law.

Crip Camp从很多方面说明了残疾人权利运动的基本前提:“没有我们，就没有我们。”在电影中，不同残疾的人们一起工作，即兴解决问题。露营者并不总是像其他青少年那样表达感情，但他们表达感情的方式确实非常有效。他们不会按照别人告诉他们的方式做事，但他们会把事情做好。参加夏令营的人会有自己的职业，结婚生子。能力，是自己命里弄清楚的，不要求符合规定的期望。

但詹德营的自由并不是你想做什么就做什么的自由，只要你不伤害别人。It was not the libertarian idea of liberty—to be free from constraints or duties to others that you have not yourself chosen, so long as you don’t lie to them, cheat them, or (in the unforgettable image of Robert Nozick inAnarchy, State, and Utopia) leave a knife in their back. It’s freedom built on solidarity: the commitment to support one another that enables each to do more than they could do alone. It’s the kind of freedom we need in these tough days of Covid-19.