Wampum

Stop Mocking Special Needs Kids

I am getting pretty tired of folks mocking special needs kids. A polical flier that mocks Special Olympic particpants is the latest example.

The incident involves a flier depicting George W. Bush as a child running in a Special Olympic race. The caption says "Voting for George Bush is like running in the Special Olympics. Even if you win, you're still retarded." A copy of the flyer is here.

Either the flyer was being distributed by the campaign office of Democratic Tennessee state representative Craig Fitzhugh, or is part of a dirty trick operation by the GOP. Bill Hobbs thinks it was distributed by the Democrats. Nick Confessore at Tapped thinks it is part of a dirty trick campaign.

AP stories about the flyer are here and here.

Was the flier distributed by the Democrats or was it part of a GOP dirty trick? I think the later for several reasons.

First, the Democrat, Graig Fitzhugh, immediately denied any involvement and immediately provided a witness to support his position:

Fitzhugh's office put AP in touch with a woman named Katie Honey, who said she was one of the two volunteers in the office the day the fliers were delivered last week.

"Someone brought them in and they left. I looked at them and said, 'This is not something we need in here. This goes in the trash,' " she said. "Well, here comes a man up and raising Cain and Mr. (David) Reynolds (the other volunteer) told him they were out in the trash. He went and picked it out of the trash and said, 'Well, this is going in the paper.' "

She said the second man did not come back after picking the flier out of the trash.

That sounds like a set up to me.

Secondly, the Republican challenger, Dave Dahl, who was hyping the story, could not immediately provide AP with the name of a person to whom the flier was distributed. Dahl told AP that the person who could verify the distribution "was out of town and could not immediately be reached."

Dahl, however, contends that the flier was distributed at Fitzhugh's office for at least two weeks. If that is true, one person being out of town should have been no obstacle to providing a witness to the distribution.

The Traditional Values Coalition was also pushing the story. When the TVC finally gave the AP the name of a person, James Mitchell, who it said could verify the distribution, Mr. Mitchell did not do so:

But the man conservative activists promised could finger Fitzhugh told The Associated Press only that ''someone'' got it from ''somebody.'' ...

Andrea Lafferty with the Washington-based Traditional Values Coalition adamantly told The AP she knew the man who could implicate the Fitzhugh campaign with the flier. But James Mitchell of Ripley said he has no idea where it came from.

''This should not be a political thing. This is something making fun of special needs children,'' Mitchell said in a phone interview. ''I don't want it pinned on Fitzhugh, I want it pinned on the one who done it. Fitzhugh is a nice man.''

Mitchell said he didn't know who did it.

''I don't feel like talking anymore about this,'' he said.

Third, Dahl has taken the flier down from the Team GOP website to which Dahl belongs. If he had Fitzhugh dead to rights, he would be pushing the story, not backing away from it.

Finally, conservatives often mock special needs kids. I have previously discussed Michael Savage mocking autistic children. Rush Limbaugh mocks people with Asperger's Syndrome saying that their difficulties with social skills would disappear with the consumption of "copious quantities of adult beverages."

Neal Boortz describes ADHD as a phony disease made up by lazy teachers and bad parents.

For some reason, mocking special needs kids is acceptable in conservative circles. It is not acceptable in polite circles. That makes me think the the dirty trick scenario is more likely.

Whoever chose to mock special needs kids and the Special Olympics should stop. There is nothing funny about it.

Last Tuesday, it was my turn to meet the bus returning my nine year old autistic son, Bobby, home from school. We came into the house and I began to fix his after school snack. Bobby was having none of it and repeatedly pushed his backpack into my hands. That is Bobby's way of making a request as he is not yet verbal.

I opened the backpack and took out the notebook containing the daily report from Bobby's teacher. I read that Bobby's class had attended a Special Olympics bowling event. As I was reading, Bobby was looking through the backpack. He emerged, beaming from ear to ear, holding a yellow ribbon signifying that he had placed third (out of seven) in the Special Olympics bowling event.

He placed the ribbon in my hand and stood beside me expectantly. After a while, Bobby's far too dense father figured out that Bobby was waiting to be "awarded" the ribbon for his accomplishment. I made a production out of it, praising Bobby for his expert bowling (he scored 53 which is not bad even considering that the management had closed the gutters, preventing any turn from scoring zero), and pinning the ribbon to his shirt. He accepted the award proudly, then immediately took off the ribbon and placed it back in my hand.

He was ready for a repeat performance of the award ceremony. We repeated the ceremony several more times, each time with Bobby exhibiting pride in his accomplishment and his award.

When my wife returned home, Bobby insisted on having the ceremony several more times amid lots of praise and fanfare. Bobby kept the ribbon with him until I took it away to put him in the tub. While I was distracted, he got out of the tub, retreived his prize, and reentered the tub. The ribbon did not surive the bath, but the memory of the accomplishment surely will.

Finishing third of seven in a bowling tournament for autistic kids may not seem like much to you, but it meant a lot to my son. It meant a lot to us as well, as we considered it evidence that Bobby is making progress.

Bobby, like many autistics, has trouble recognizing symbolism. To him, a picture is a piece of paper that looks a certain way but he has rarely shown that he makes any connection between the image and the person depicted. Only recently has he become capivated by images in a mirror.

His pride in being awarded the ribbon was a recognition that the ribbon represented something. He was using the ribbon as a symbol of his accomplishment. That is progress and we relished it. We latch onto and savor any and every small indicator of progress. I call that the Jesse Jackson approach. It helps us to "keep hope alive."

What it is about Bobby's pride in his acheivement and our small measure of hope that causes conservative commentators, and perhaps GOP dirty tricksters, to want to mock us, I do not know. I do know that they should stop.

Posted by Dwight Meredith at October 15, 2004 11:49 PM | TrackBack