Sarah Jones ‘Disposable’ Excerpt: How Fringe Captured Right

How the Fringe Captured the Right Feb. 15, 2025

This is adapted from Sarah Jones’s forthcoming book, Disposable: America’s Contempt for the Underclass, available from Avid Reader Press on February 18.

Earla Dawn Dimitriadis sought beauty in life and looked for it on her deathbed, her daughter, Jennifer Ritz Sullivan, said. No stranger to ugliness, Earla wanted the happiness that others had often denied her. “She grew up in a poor household with a lot of abuse at the hands of her parents,” Jennifer explains. At the age of fifteen, her parents forced her out of school and into a marriage that turned abusive. A determined Dimitriadis earned her GED when she was in her thirties and attended night classes at a local community college before getting a master’s degree from the University of Phoenix at age fifty-eight. She worked hard at a variety of jobs, but she especially loved working with children as a teacher’s assistant.“This woman was beyond creative,” Jennifer remembers. Give her a toilet paper roll and some construction paper and Earla could create anything. For Halloween, her children always had handmade costumes. She had a lively spirit, Jennifer adds. “My mom would go to shows with me a lot, and we’d be rocking and dancing and singing and just in the moment, and not worried about what anybody’s going to say,” she says. When she came out as queer, Earla wore a rainbow pin to support her daughter.In 2020, when the virus immobilized the nation, Earla took her health seriously and rarely ventured out. She got sick anyway. From her hospital bed in the ICU, she posted regular Facebook updates along with photos of bedazzled butterflies and dragonflies: small joys in a bleak place. But her prognosis was never good. “By the time she got there, there was damage done to her lungs and she had pneumonia set in,” Jennifer says. “So she wasn’t able to talk due to the lack of oxygen.” She and her sister arranged a final, devastating call with their mother. For fourteen minutes, Earla made a gurgling, almost suffocating sound in between gasps of conversation. She told her daughters that she didn’t want to be on a ventilator, that she was in too much pain, and that she was ready to be done. –Read more—