All You Need is Love
Just Open Up Your Heart
A friend told me he wouldn’t read my blogs any more because they are all so negative and he challenged me to write something upbeat and so I got to work, first flushing my brain of the sadness and anger of the events in Afghanistan, the stupidity and self-serving gall of politicians who rail against wearing masks, those with raisin-sized brains who still cling to the fantasy that trump won re-election and lastly, I want to void myself of those vile racists who claim white superiority and hatred of Jews and Muslims.
There, now that I am temporarily purged I can begin to write positively and the subject is my planned entre in to the world of the Arc of Somerset where I will train for three weeks, starting next week, to be a mentor for a few of the nation’s estimated 6 million people who have developmental shortfalls. Being a mentor is really just fancy language for being a friend and isn’t it unfortunate that there are people who have no friends because of their disabilities.
Let me say first that my daughter has a developmental disability as she is on the autism spectrum. She can’t explain a Pythagorean theorem but she loves the Beatles and the Lion King and Toy Story and she can laugh as hardy as anyone and she comes up with some pretty interesting questions and makes some pretty savvy observations and yes, I am biased.
People look at men and women with Down syndrome or cerebral palsy or if they are on the autism spectrum, as if they are aliens without the same needs as us lucky Earthlings. Too often typical people are repulsed, confused or simply frightened by the physical appearance of people with developmental problems, as if the disabilities might be contagious and these different people ought to be just locked away in a closet where they can’t upset “normal” people, kind of like how the nation once did treat people who are different by imprisoning them in big, ugly, unhealthy institutions. Too often, people think that all people with Down syndrome are the same and they still harbor stereotypes that all people on the autism spectrum wear helmets and bang their heads into walls, kind of like how I feel when I meet a trumper, but I won’t digress and I will keep this positive.
People may assume the young man with Down syndrome doesn’t laugh much or cry much, that he can’t express himself or that he doesn’t understand baseball or that he doesn’t get angry when people won’t address him directly and they refer to him as a child in the third person. Or that the child on the autism spectrum doesn’t like rock and roll and doesn’t understand or cry when she is shunned by the other kids. And that these people who are different may very well turn violent and threatening and they are hopelessly defective and deviant. People with disabilities are often treated as children, though they may be adults. The worst are those adults who express their deepest sympathy and tell us how sorry they are that we have to bare the burden of having a child with a developmental disability and these are the people who I would like to remind that they are incredibility disabled by their stupidity and insensitivity and then I would lock them away and throw away the key.
Because my daughter is on the autism spectrum, I have lived in the world of developmental disabilities and one thing I know is that people with disabilities come in all shapes, sizes and appearances and are as different from each other as I am from you. I used to regularly bring my daughter to a social skills program in Budd Lake that is no longer there and I would hang out in the waiting room with the other parents until the session was over. I can’t tell you how many times I couldn’t tell the “typical” people in the waiting room from those with developmental disabilities and more than once I assumed someone had disabilities only to find that they were “typical” and I wondered if people thought the same about me.
The thing is that once you get past the stereotypes and start to see people with developmental disabilities as just people, then you can start to appreciate the diversity of it all and offer something of yourself. People who are developmentally disabled have challenges that you and I may never understand and they are often stronger than you or I may ever be. They may be young or old, they may have problems with communicating or their appearance may be different and jarring and something you’re not used to, they may be intellectually limited but they all need compassion and love, just like you and me.
The Family Service Foundation says that to be considered a developmental disability, a child must have a severe, chronic disability which originated at birth or during childhood, is expected to continue indefinitely, and significantly restricts the child’s functioning in normal life. That covers a lot of people who are struggling in this world.
I know from personal experience the importance of friendship to a person with a disability as my daughter has a mentor who she meets with three times a week and they go to Dunkin Donuts, they may go shopping at WalMart and then have lunch at Applebee’s where my daughter always orders the same thing, hamburger, fries, hot sauce and a diet Coke and she loves it and always look forward to spending time with her mentor. I think there is a tendency for typical people to think that people with developmental disabilities may be somehow oblivious and don’t feel the same emotions that typical people feel, like loneliness, sadness, happiness and boredom. So that will be my responsibility, to help someone to cut their loneliness a little, maybe bring a little joy to them and give them something interesting to do.
I believe it will be richly rewarding. See I can write a positive blog, I think.