Please bear with me. This could be a long post.
Since I was a child in the earliest of the 60's this has been an important issue for me. I had aunts and cousins afflicted with severe arthritis. As a kid their condition had me thinking "retarded." Wrong, wrong, wrong in so many ways.
As a high schooler I put in hours upon hours mingling with and working with "disadvantaged" kids and adults." Peeling through a layer or two of juvenile idiocy revealed a touch of reality. People are people and deserve respect and recognition.
I "put in time" with autistic children as a requirement as a Notre Dame student. Without a doubt this was the most trying and emotionally wrenching time in my life. I later married a woman with a Down Syndrome nephew. He was (and is) as loving a kid as you'd want to meet. That he still jumps on my back and wraps his arms around my neck as he did when he was four is still a thing of joy.
Did I tell you that he is now three inches taller and fifty pounds heavier than me? He puts my health and mortality at risk, but I ain't about to complain. Not one little bit.
When my son's high school voted a Down Syndrome young man Homecoming King in 2001 he couldn't understand why it was such a big deal to me. He thought my saving the newspaper article and crying was a bit "wack."
I was happy that he and his classmates were so "evolved" that "it weren't no big deal."
I find it difficult to imagine that my high school classmates would have done the same thing "in the day." Today they'd do it in the blink of an eye.
Getting old ain't always a bad thing. The king is dead. Long live the king.
