"The Right Not to Work: Power and Disability" (2004)

Look what I found!

Disabled people, however, define independence differently, seeing it as the ability to be in control of and make decisions about one’s life, rather than doing things alone or without help.”10 Today, independence is more about an individual being in control of their own services (be it education, plumbing, electrical, medical, dietary, or personal care), than it is about an individual being completely physically self-sufficient; this is true not only for the disabled population, but for the population in general. This ideal of physical self-sufficiency is a byproduct of the rhetoric of economic self-sufficiency. But no one partakes in American capitalism independently; there is no such thing as a “self-made” individual.

Western culture has a very limited idea of what being useful to society is. People can be useful in ways other than monetarily.

Of course myself still having my hands around is not comparable case .. but something definitely resonates!

EDIT: there is additional article about Sunaura Taylor