Disable Children Quotes

The worst thing you can do is nothing. (re: teaching children with autism)

The most upsetting thing about Society’s attitude towards disabled people is that many millions of disabled people became disabled while trying to please Society, the very same bitch that secretly regards them as subhuman.

There was a story going around about the Special Olympics. For the hundred-yard dash, there were nine contestants, all of them so-called physically or mentally disabled. All nine of them assembled at the starting line and, at the sound of the gun, they took off. But one little boy didn't get very far. He stumbled and fell and hurt his knee and began to cry. The other eight children heard the boy crying. They slowed down, turned around, and ran back to him--every one of them ran back to him. The little boy got up, and he and the rest of the runners linked their arms together and joyfully walked to the finish line. They all finished the race at the same time. And when they did, everyone in the stadium stood up and clapped and whistled and cheered for a long, long time. And you know why? Because deep down we know that what matters in this life is more than winning for ourselves. What really matters is helping others win, too, even if it means slowing down and changing our course now and then.

Children with disabilities are stronger than we know, they fight the battles that most will never know.

Presuming that a nonspeaking child has nothing to say is like presuming that an adult without a car has nowhere to go.

What would happen, they conjectured, if they simply went on assuming their children would do everything. Perhaps not quickly. Perhaps not by the book. But what if they simply erased those growth and development charts, with their precise, constricting points and curves? What if they kept their expectations but erased the time line? What harm could it do? Why not try?

I Have a Dream... someday my son, Zyon and ALL individuals with disabilities will be seen as HUMAN beings. I Have a Dream... someday the human & civil rights of individuals with disabilities are honored and they are treated as equals. I Have a Dream... someday ALL parents who have children with disabilities see their child as a blessing and not a burden. I Have a Dream... someday there will be more jobs and opportunities for individuals with disabilities. I Have a Dream... someday there will be UNITY "within" the disabled community. I HAVE A DREAM!!!

Everything is inspiration. If you look at the world as the incredible place it is, then each moment is a feast.

We are all broken by something. We have all hurt someone and have been hurt. We all share the condition of brokenness even if our brokenness is not equivalent. I desperately wanted mercy for Jimmy Dill and would have done anything to create justice for him, but I couldn’t pretend that his struggle was disconnected from my own. The ways in which I have been hurt—and have hurt others—are different from the ways Jimmy Dill suffered and caused suffering. But our shared brokenness connected us. Paul Farmer, the renowned physician who has spent his life trying to cure the world’s sickest and poorest people, once quoted me something that the writer Thomas Merton said: We are bodies of broken bones. I guess I’d always known but never fully considered that being broken is what makes us human. We all have our reasons. Sometimes we’re fractured by the choices we make; sometimes we’re shattered by things we would never have chosen. But our brokenness is also the source of our common humanity, the basis for our shared search for comfort, meaning, and healing. Our shared vulnerability and imperfection nurtures and sustains our capacity for compassion. We have a choice. We can embrace our humanness, which means embracing our broken natures and the compassion that remains our best hope for healing. Or we can deny our brokenness, forswear compassion, and, as a result, deny our own humanity. I thought of the guards strapping Jimmy Dill to the gurney that very hour. I thought of the people who would cheer his death and see it as some kind of victory. I realized they were broken people, too, even if they would never admit it. So many of us have become afraid and angry. We’ve become so fearful and vengeful that we’ve thrown away children, discarded the disabled, and sanctioned the imprisonment of the sick and the weak—not because they are a threat to public safety or beyond rehabilitation but because we think it makes us seem tough, less broken. I thought of the victims of violent crime and the survivors of murdered loved ones, and how we’ve pressured them to recycle their pain and anguish and give it back to the offenders we prosecute. I thought of the many ways we’ve legalized vengeful and cruel punishments, how we’ve allowed our victimization to justify the victimization of others. We’ve submitted to the harsh instinct to crush those among us whose brokenness is most visible. But simply punishing the broken—walking away from them or hiding them from sight—only ensures that they remain broken and we do, too. There is no wholeness outside of our reciprocal humanity.

If the only time a child looks as if he has bipolar disorder is when he’s frustrated, that’s not bipolar disorder; that’s a learning disability in the domains of flexibility and frustration tolerance.

Finally, there was the impediment of his nature. In the secret parts of his peculiar brain, those unhappy and inextricable tangles which he felt at the roots, the boy was disabled by something which we cannot explain. He could not have explained either, and for us it is all too long ago. He loved Arthur and he loved Guenever and he hated himself. The best knight of the world: everybody envied the self-esteem which must surely be his. But Lancelot never believed he was good or nice. Under the grotesque, magnificent shell with a face like Quasimodo’s, there was shame and self-loathing which had been planted there when he was tiny, by something which it is now too late to trace. It is so fatally easy to make young children believe that they are horrible.

Are there any Nazis left that I could hunt down and bring to justice?” Augustus asked while we leaned over the vitrines reading Otto’s letters and the gutting replies that no, no one had seen his children after the liberation. “I think they’re all dead. But it’s not like the Nazis had a monopoly on evil.” “True,” he said. “That’s what we should do, Hazel Grace: We should team up and be this disabled vigilante duo roaring through the world, righting wrongs, defending the weak, protecting the endangered.” Although it was his dream and not mine, I indulged it. He’d indulged mine, after all. “Our fearlessness shall be our secret weapon,” I said. “The tales of our exploits will survive as long as the human voice itself,” he said. “And even after that, when the robots recall the human absurdities of sacrifice and compassion, they will remember us.” “They will robot-laugh at our courageous folly,” he said. “But something in their iron robot hearts will yearn to have lived and died as we did: on the hero’s errand.

We are not “differently abled”—we are disabled, robbed of empowerment and agency in a world that is not built for us. “Differently abled,” “handi-capable,” and similar euphemisms were created in the 1980s by the abled parents of disabled children, who wished to minimize their children’s marginalized status. These terms were popularized further by politicians[76] who similarly felt uncomfortable acknowledging disabled people’s actual experiences of oppression.

It was inevitable: the scent of bitter almonds always reminded him of the fate of unrequited love. Dr. Juvenal Urbino noticed it as soon as he entered the still darkened house where he has hurried on an urgent call to attend a case that for him had lost all urgency many years before. The Antillean refugee Jeremiah de Saint-Amour, disabled war veteran, photographer of children, and his most sympathetic opponent in chess, had escaped the torments of memory with the aromatic fumes of gold cyanide.

Children need to see themselves in books. They need to see their gender. They need to see their color, hair texture, their disability, themselves. Picture books are like many children’s first introduction to the world. Seeing yourself is almost like a message. It’s saying, you matter, you are visible, and you’re valuable

They said 'specialist children's wards,' But they meant children-killing centers. They said 'final medical assistance' But they meant murder.

I know of other mothers who have children with disabilities,and right away they loved them and decided to fight for them. That isn’t my story.

Many masked Autistics are sent to gifted education as children, instead of being referred to disability services.[18] Our apparent high intelligence puts us in a double bind: we are expected to accomplish great things to justify our oddness, and because we possess an enviable, socially prized quality, it’s assumed we need less help than other people, not more.

Folks don’t give themselves enough credit. The mother who endures cavities so her children can get braces. The father who works a dead-end job so his kids can have a roof over their heads. The daughter who sacrifices college so she can take care of her disabled mother. They are all heroes, and don’t you believe otherwise.

Labeling a child’s mind as diseased—whether with autism, intellectual disabilities, or transgenderism—may reflect the discomfort that mind gives parents more than any discomfort it causes their child. Much gets corrected that might better have been left alone.

But early in the twenty-first century it became clear that the planet was incapable of sustaining everyone alive at Western levels, and at that point the richest pulled away into their fortress mansions, bought the governments or disabled them from action against them, and bolted their doors to wait it out until some poorly theorized better time, which really came down to just the remainder of their lives, and perhaps the lives of their children if they were feeling optimistic— beyond that, après moi le déluge.

Understanding our children’s frustrations with dyslexia and giving them the tools to blossom will give them the confidence to reach their true potential. We can help our children channel their interests and talents and ignite the passion within.

Crip time is time travel. Disability and illness have the power to extract us from linear, progressive time with its normative life stages and cast us into a wormhole of backward and forward acceleration, jerky stops and starts, tedious intervals and abrupt endings. Some of us contend with the impairments of old age while still young; some of us are treated like children no matter how old we get.

There is something ironic in prejudice against the disabled and their families, because their plight might befall anybody. Straight men are unlikely to wake up gay one morning, and white children don't become black; but any of us could be disabled in an instant. People with disabilities make up the largest minority in America; they constitute 15 percent of the population, though only 15 percent of those were born with their disability and about a third are over sixty-five. Worldwide, some 550 million people are disabled. The disability-rights scholar Tobin Siebers has written, "The cycle of life runs in actuality from disability to temporary ability back to disablity, and that only if you are among the most fortunate.

health, social life, job, house, partners, finances; leisure use, leisure amount; working time, education, income, children; food, water, shelter, clothing, sex, health care; mobility; physical safety, social safety, job security, savings account, insurance, disability protection, family leave, vacation; place tenure, a commons; access to wilderness, mountains, ocean; peace, political stability, political input, political satisfaction; air, water, esteem; status, recognition; home, community, neighbors, civil society, sports, the arts; longevity treatments, gender choice; the opportunity to become more what you are that's all you need

Near the end of Love's Labor, Eva Feder Kittay (1999, 154) writes that a fundamental aspect of a just society is related to the conditions and limits of mothering. In a just society, women with disabilities can mother because there is adequate emotional and material support for them to do so, and given a context of support and approval to reproduce, they can also choose not to bear children. In a just society, mothers of children with disability can mother, and they, their children, and other needed caregivers will be adequately supported." (15)

In these days, doctors know little about autism. They blame it on distant parents who don't communicate enough with their children

Religion, by its very nature as an untestable belief in undetectable beings and an unknowable afterlife, disables our reality checks. It ends the conversation. It cuts off inquiry: not only factual inquiry, but moral inquiry. Because God's law trumps human law, people who think they're obeying God can easily get cut off from their own moral instincts. And these moral contortions don't always lie in the realm of theological game-playing. They can have real-world consequences: from genocide to infanticide, from honor killings to abandoned gay children, from burned witches to battered wives to blown-up buildings.

Mental illness is now the number one reason for disability filings for children, representing half of all claims filed in 2012, compared to just 5 to 6 percent of claims twenty years prior.4

When God does not answer His children according to the letter, He does so according to the spirit. If thou askest for coarse meal, wilt thou be angered because He gives thee the finest flour? If thou seekest bodily health, shouldst thou complain if instead thereof He makes thy sickness turn to the healing of spiritual maladies?

For the rest of his life, he realized, he would be torn like this, aware of Phoebe's awkwardness, the difficulties she encountered in the world simply by being different, and ye propelled beyond all this by her direct and guileless love. By her love, yes, and, he realized...by his own new and strangely uncomplicated love for her.

If you are disabled, it is probably not your fault, but it is no good blaming the world or expecting it to take pity on you. One has to have a positive attitude and must make the best of the situation that one finds oneself in; if one is physically disabled, one cannot afford to be psychologically disabled as well. In my opinion, one should concentrate on activities in which one's physical disability will not present a serious handicap. I am afraid that Olympic Games for the disabled do not appeal to me, but it is easy for me to say that because I never liked athletics anyway. On the other hand, science is a very good area for disabled people because it goes on mainly in the mind. Of course, most kinds of experimental work are probably ruled out for most such people, but theoretical work is almost ideal. My disabilities have not been a significant handicap in my field, which is theoretical physics. Indeed, they have helped me in a way by shielding me from lecturing and administrative work that I would otherwise have been involved in. I have managed, however, only because of the large amount of help I have received from my wife, children, colleagues and students. I find that people in general are very ready to help, but you should encourage them to feel that their efforts to aid you are worthwhile by doing as well as you possibly can.

In retrospect, it seems obvious that my research about parenting was also a means to subdue my anxieties about becoming a parent.... I grew up afraid of illness and disability, inclined to avert my gaze from anyone who was too different – despite all the ways I knew myself to be different. This book helped me kill that bigoted impulse, which I had always known to be ugly. The obvious melancholy in the stories I heard should, perhaps, have made me shy away from paternity, but it had the opposite effect.

didn’t know it then, but we disable our children when we take away their suffering. We teach them that feelings are wrong or scary.

She is convinced that when language dies, out of carelessness, disuse, indifference and absence of esteem, or killed by fiat, not only she herself, but all users and makers are accountable for its demise. In her country children have bitten their tongues off and use bullets instead to iterate the voice of speechlessness, of disabled and disabling language, of language adults have abandoned altogether as a device for grappling with meaning, providing guidance, or expressing love.

Folks don’t give themselves enough credit. The mother who endures cavities so her children can get braces. The father who works a dead-end job so his kids can have a roof over their heads. The daughter who sacrifices college so she can take care of her disabled mother. They are all heroes.

Prisoners, slaves, women and children, the sick, weak, disabled, animals, the earth itself – all were fair game for the cruel sport of those who had power. It was wrong, it was evil, but it was a fact of life.

So many of us have become afraid and angry. We’ve become so fearful and vengeful that we’ve thrown away children, discarded the disabled, and sanctioned the imprisonment of the sick and the weak—not because they are a threat to public safety or beyond rehabilitation but because we think it makes us seem tough, less broken. I

Parents of medically fragile children find themselves becoming experts in lots of different areas, including laws and regulations, research and treatments, and the various specialists that support the health of their children.

Privileged women continue the tradition of compensating for their authority to men through affectations of disablement – from dieting and other disorders to substance abuse, institutionalised detachment from their children, and so on.

Communism is what Karl Marx hoped could be an economic scheme for making industrialized nations take as good care of people, and especially of children and the old and disabled, as tribes and extended families used to do, before they were dispersed by the Industrial Revolution.

We’ve become so fearful and vengeful that we’ve thrown away children, discarded the disabled, and sanctioned the imprisonment of the sick and the weak—not because they are a threat to public safety or beyond rehabilitation but because we think it makes us seem tough, less broken.

Parents’ early responses to and interactions with a child determine how that child comes to view himself. These parents are also profoundly changed by their experiences. If you have a child with a disability, you are forever the parent of a disabled child; it is one of the primary facts about you, fundamental to the way other people perceive and decipher you. Such parents tend to view aberrance as illness until habituation and love enable them to cope with their odd new reality—often by introducing the language of identity. Intimacy with difference fosters its accommodation.

Hypercritical, Shaming Parents Hypercritical and shaming parents send the same message to their children as perfectionistic parents do - that they are never good enough. Parents often deliberately shame their children into minding them without realizing the disruptive impact shame can have on a child's sense of self. Statements such as "You should be ashamed of yourself" or "Shame on you" are obvious examples. Yet these types of overtly shaming statements are actually easier for the child to defend against than are more subtle forms of shaming, such as contempt, humiliation, and public shaming. There are many ways that parents shame their children. These include belittling, blaming, contempt, humiliation, and disabling expectations. -BELITTLING. Comments such as "You're too old to want to be held" or "You're just a cry-baby" are horribly humiliating to a child. When a parent makes a negative comparison between his or her child and another, such as "Why can't you act like Jenny? See how she sits quietly while her mother is talking," it is not only humiliating but teaches a child to always compare himself or herself with peers and find himself or herself deficient by comparison. -BLAMING. When a child makes a mistake, such as breaking a vase while rough-housing, he or she needs to take responsibility. But many parents go way beyond teaching a lesson by blaming and berating the child: "You stupid idiot! Do you think money grows on trees? I don't have money to buy new vases!" The only thing this accomplishes is shaming the child to such an extent that he or she cannot find a way to walk away from the situation with his or her head held high. -CONTEMPT. Expressions of disgust or contempt communicate absolute rejection. The look of contempt (often a sneer or a raised upper lip), especially from someone who is significant to a child, can make him or her feel disgusting or offensive. When I was a child, my mother had an extremely negative attitude toward me. Much of the time she either looked at me with the kind of expectant expression that said, "What are you up to now?" or with a look of disapproval or disgust over what I had already done. These looks were extremely shaming to me, causing me to feel that there was something terribly wrong with me. -HUMILIATION. There are many ways a parent can humiliate a child, such as making him or her wear clothes that have become dirty. But as Gershen Kaufman stated in his book Shame: The Power of Caring, "There is no more humiliating experience than to have another person who is clearly the stronger and more powerful take advantage of that power and give us a beating." I can personally attest to this. In addition to shaming me with her contemptuous looks, my mother often punished me by hitting me with the branch of a tree, and she often did this outside, in front of the neighbors. The humiliation I felt was like a deep wound to my soul. -DISABLING EXPECTATIONS. Parents who have an inordinate need to have their child excel at a particular activity or skill are likely to behave in ways that pressure the child to do more and more. According to Kaufman, when a child becomes aware of the real possibility of failing to meet parental expectations, he or she often experiences a binding self-consciousness. This self-consciousness - the painful watching of oneself - is very disabling. When something is expected of us in this way, attaining the goal is made harder, if not impossible. Yet another way that parents induce shame in their children is by communicating to them that they are a disappointment to them. Such messages as "I can't believe you could do such a thing" or "I am deeply disappointed in you" accompanied by a disapproving tone of voice and facial expression can crush a child's spirit.

Helen Keller, author, speaker, and advocate for disabled persons, asserted,"Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature, nor do the children of men as a whole experience it. Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. Life is either a daring adventure or nothing.

Kligman was a problematic researcher, to say the least. For many years, he had conducted tests of Johnson’s Baby Powder, as well as Band-Aids, shampoos, and other drugs, on African American prisoners and mentally disabled children. These experiments were often exquisitely painful for his vulnerable subjects.

Aside from wanting to write cracking good books that turn children into lifelong readers, I really want to create stories that enable kids to LOOK at the world around them. To see it for what it is, with wide open, wondering eyes. Our mass media is so horribly skewed. It presents this idea of 'normalcy' which excludes and marginalises so many for an idea of commercial viability which is really nothing but blinkered prejudice. People who are black and Asian and Middle Eastern and Hispanic, people who are gay or transgendered or genderqueer, people who have disabilities, disfigurements or illnesses - all have this vision of a world which does not include them shoved down their throats almost 24-7, and they're told 'No one wants to see stories about people like you. Films and TV shows about people like you won't make money. Stories about straight, white, cisgendered, able-bodied people are universal and everyone likes them. You are small and useless and unattractive and you don't matter.' My worry is that this warped version of 'normal' eventually forms those very same blinkers on children's eyes, depriving them of their ability to see anyone who isn't the same as them, preventing them from developing the ability to empathise with and appreciate and take joy in the lives and experiences of people who are different from them. If Shadows on the Moon - or anything I write - causes a young person to look at their own life, or the life of another, and think, 'Maybe being different is cool' I will die a happy writer. -Guest blog - what diversity means to me

It takes a special reader to experience a special book, and allow the inspiration, inevitable in the process, to move him to action.

It is my hope to help children like my son, burst through the ceiling of their disabilities, into the universe of their abilities.

Inclusion is not a favor we do for others—it’s a reflection of the world we want to live in.

The two bond over their mutual lack of family ties: Saul from his disownment, Miriam from the car accident that orphaned her as a college junior. Both want children. Miriam has inherited her parents' idea of procreative legitimacy, wants to compensate for her only-child-dom. She sees in Saul the househusband who will enable her parental ambitions without disabling her autonomy. In Miriam, Saul sees the means to a book-lined study and a lifestyle conducive to mystical advancement. They are both absolutely certain these things equal love.

Audio of interview - http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=... "Savile was not only abusing all children with or without disabilities in group settings or in hospital settings, he was also invoking belief systems, doing rituals, making children believe that he had extra powers and that if they didn't obey him they would be published in an after life." "There are special things in, especially, for example, Alistair Crowley that can be used to frighten children even more, but the use of cloaks, of making spells, of making threats, of threatening what will happen after death too is something that the 5 different people that spoke to me about Jimmy Savile said that he'd been part of." - Dr Valerie Sinason, Clinic for Dissociative Studies, London

Here is what I say to the children who are our future: never underestimate how denial and a good old-fashioned mild learning disability can team up to come off as unwavering self-confidence.

Refined added sugar causes astronomically more deaths and disability per year than COVID-19 and fentanyl overdoses combined. We need to see refined added sugar for what it is: an addictive, dangerous drug that has been included in 74 percent of foods in the U.S. food system and for which the body needs zero grams in a lifetime. Of all the levers most damaging our cells and preventing Good Energy, I believe the worst offender may be added sugar. This substance has become a mainstay of food that we and our children eat regularly. As Dr. Robert Lustig has noted, sugar shows up on labels in fifty-six different names and sneaks in everywhere.

I am not sure whether you could call this abuse, but when I was (long ago) abroad in the world of dry men, I saw parents, usually upscale and educated and talented and functional and white, patient and loving and supportive and concerned and involved in their children’s lives, profilgate with compliments and diplomatic with constructive criticism, loquacious in their pronouncements of unconditional love for and approval of their children, conforming to every last jot-tittle in any conceivably definition of a good parent, I saw parent after unimpeachable parent who raised kids who were (a) emotionally retarded or (b) lethally self-indulgent or (c) chronically depressed or (d) borderline psychotic or (e) consumed with narcissistic self-loathing or (f) neurotically driven/addicted or (g) variously psychosomatically Disabled or (h) some conjunctive permutation of (a) … (g). Why is this. Why do many parents who seem relentlessly bent on producing children who feel they are good persons deserving of love produce children who grow to feel they are hideous persons not deserving of love who just happen to have lucked into having parents so marvelous that the parents love them even though they are hideous? Is it a sign of abuse if a mother produces a child who believes not that he is innately beautiful and lovable and deserving of magnificent maternal treatment but somehow that he is a hideous unlovable child who has somehow lucked in to having a really magnificent mother? Probably not. But could such a mother then really be all that magnificent, if that’s the child’s view of himself? ...I think, Mrs. Starkly, that I am speaking of Mrs. Avril M.-T. Incandenza, although the woman is so multileveled and indictment-proof that it is difficult to feel comfortable with any sort of univocal accusation of anything. Something just was not right, is the only way to put it. Something creepy, even on the culturally stellar surface.

Those who say that children must not be frightened may mean two things. They may mean (1) that we must not do anything likely to give the child those haunting, disabling, pathological fears against which ordinary courage is helpless: in fact, phobias. His mind must, if possible, be kept clear of things he can’t bear to think of. Or they may mean (2) that we must try to keep out of his mind the knowledge that he is born into a world of death, violence, wounds, adventure, heroism and cowardice, good and evil. If they mean the first I agree with them: but not if they mean the second. The second would indeed be to give children a false impression and feed them on escapism in the bad sense. There is something ludicrous in the idea of so educating a generation which is born to the Ogpu and the atomic bomb. Since it is so likely that they will meet cruel enemies, let them at least have heard of brave knights and heroic courage. Otherwise you are making their destiny not brighter but darker. Nor do most of us find that violence and bloodshed, in a story, produce any haunting dread in the minds of children. As far as that goes, I side impenitently with the human race against the modern reformer. Let there be wicked kings and beheadings, battles and dungeons, giants and dragons, and let villains be soundly killed at the end of the book. Nothing will persuade me that this causes an ordinary child any kind or degree of fear beyond what it wants, and needs, to feel. For, of course, it wants to be a little frightened.

For the first time I realized that my life was just full of brokenness. I worked in a broken system of justice. My clients were broken by mental illness, poverty, and racism. They were torn apart by disease, drugs and alcohol, pride, fear, and anger. I thought of Joe Sullivan and of Trina, Antonio, Ian, and dozens of other broken children we worked with, struggling to survive in prison. I thought of people broken by war, like Herbert Richardson; people broken by poverty, like Marsha Colbey; people broken by disability, like Avery Jenkins. In their broken state, they were judged and condemned by people whose commitment to fairness had been broken by cynicism, hopelessness, and prejudice.

Children with disabilities might, to your eyes, look stuck in a perpetual childhood, but our thoughts and sensibilities evolve constantly. So, using vocabulary the child understands, please show them how they can live their lives to the full.

Listen, Kazu. Everyone says that humans are equal, but we don’t all get the same chances in life. You know that, don’t you? You’re a big boy in fifth grade. Some people are born healthy, and others are born with illnesses and disabilities. There are beautiful people who get adored by everyone, and people of fine character who never get any credit due to their looks. Some children get good grades without studying, while others study like crazy for nothing. Plenty of things in this world are not fair and equal, Kazu. But one thing is the same for everyone, Kazu. Not only on the surface, but through and through. It affects the smart people, the rich people—no matter what they do, they cannot get more of it than their due. Do you know what I’m referring to? Time, Kazu. Time is the same for everyone. Men, women, young people, old people—everyone. A day is a day. An hour is an hour. Time is the one thing applied impartially to all humans, and to every living creature.

With this warning, Mussolini demanded and was given authority to do just about whatever he wanted; but his initial priority, surprisingly, was good government. He knew that citizens were fed up with a bureaucracy that seemed to grow bigger and less efficient each year, so he insisted on daily roll calls in ministry offices and berated employees for arriving late to work or taking long lunches. He initiated a campaign to drenare la palude (“drain the swamp”) by firing more than 35,000 civil servants. He repurposed Fascist gangs to safeguard rail cargo from thieves. He allocated money to build bridges, roads, telephone exchanges, and giant aqueducts that brought water to arid regions. He gave Italy an eight-hour workday, codified insurance benefits for the elderly and disabled, funded prenatal health care clinics, established seventeen hundred summer camps for children, and dealt the Mafia a blow by suspending the jury system and short-circuiting due process. With no jury members to threaten and judges answerable directly to the state, the courts were as incorruptible as they were docile. Contrary to legend, the dictator didn’t quite succeed in making the trains run on time, but he earned bravos for trying.

No one has ever suggested legal protections for ugly people to make up for the misaligned features that will compromise their personal and professional lives. For people disabled by inherent moral perplexity, we offer not support but imprisonment.

The next time you drive into a Walmart parking lot, pause for a second to note that this Walmart—like the more than five thousand other Walmarts across the country—costs taxpayers about $1 million in direct subsidies to the employees who don’t earn enough money to pay for an apartment, buy food, or get even the most basic health care for their children. In total, Walmart benefits from more than $7 billion in subsidies each year from taxpayers like you. Those “low, low prices” are made possible by low, low wages—and by the taxes you pay to keep those workers alive on their low, low pay. As I said earlier, I don’t think that anyone who works full-time should live in poverty. I also don’t think that bazillion-dollar companies like Walmart ought to funnel profits to shareholders while paying such low wages that taxpayers must pick up the ticket for their employees’ food, shelter, and medical care. I listen to right-wing loudmouths sound off about what an outrage welfare is and I think, “Yeah, it stinks that Walmart has been sucking up so much government assistance for so long.” But somehow I suspect that these guys aren’t talking about Walmart the Welfare Queen. Walmart isn’t alone. Every year, employers like retailers and fast-food outlets pay wages that are so low that the rest of America ponies up a collective $153 billion to subsidize their workers. That’s $153 billion every year. Anyone want to guess what we could do with that mountain of money? We could make every public college tuition-free and pay for preschool for every child—and still have tens of billions left over. We could almost double the amount we spend on services for veterans, such as disability, long-term care, and ending homelessness. We could double all federal research and development—everything: medical, scientific, engineering, climate science, behavioral health, chemistry, brain mapping, drug addiction, even defense research. Or we could more than double federal spending on transportation and water infrastructure—roads, bridges, airports, mass transit, dams and levees, water treatment plants, safe new water pipes. Yeah, the point I’m making is blindingly obvious. America could do a lot with the money taxpayers spend to keep afloat people who are working full-time but whose employers don’t pay a living wage. Of course, giant corporations know they have a sweet deal—and they plan to keep it, thank you very much. They have deployed armies of lobbyists and lawyers to fight off any efforts to give workers a chance to organize or fight for a higher wage. Giant corporations have used their mouthpiece, the national Chamber of Commerce, to oppose any increase in the minimum wage, calling it a “distraction” and a “cynical effort” to increase union membership. Lobbyists grow rich making sure that people like Gina don’t get paid more. The

During the 1980s, in California, a large number of Cambodian women went to their doctors with the same complaint: they could not see. The women were all war refugees. Before fleeing their homeland, they had witnessed the atrocities for which the Khmer Rouge, which had been in power from 1975 to 1979, was well known. Many of the women had been raped or tortured or otherwise brutalized. Most had seen family members murdered in front of them. One woman, who never again saw her husband and three children after soldiers came and took them away, said that she had lost her sight after having cried every day for four years. She was not the only one who appeared to have cried herself blind. Others suffered from blurred or partial vision, their eyes troubled by shadows and pains. The doctors examined the women - about a hundred and fifty in all - found that their eyes were normal. Further tests showed that their brains were normal as well. If the women were telling the truth - and there were some who doubted this, who thought the women might be malingering because they wanted attention or were hoping to collect disability - the only explanation was psychosomatic blindness. In other words, the women's minds, forced to take in so much horror and unable to take more, had managed to turn out the lights.

Parents of children with disabilities live in this constant elevated state of anxiety, sometimes even teetering between despair and dread. We know our children have this beaming innocence within them, but because of that they sometimes misinterpret human intention.

In the story of cancer and chemistry, the harm comes from exposure, and exposure inversely follows gradients of social power. Disproportionate harm is wrought on liberalism’s second-class citizens: the working class, women and children, the disabled, the colonized.

Disability scholars Andrienne Asch and Erik Parens, in their seminal discussion of the problem, wrote,'Pre-natal diagnosis reinforces the medical model that disability itself, not societal discrimination against people with disabilities, is the problem to be solved.

As discussed earlier, humans who lack the reflective self-awareness of normal adults, such as those with particular forms of amnesia or very young children or those with certain mental disabilities, still are self-aware and still have an interest in continuing to live. There may, of course, be a difference between the self-awareness of normal adult humans and that of other animals. But even if that is the case, it does not mean that the latter have no interest in continuing to live, and it does not justify treating the latter as commodities.

Our family was starting. We kept on moving with our young lives, shortly afterward and took Ben Young with us everywhere. But pretty soon Pegi started noticing that Ben was not doing the things some other babies were doing. Pegi was wondering if something was wrong. She was young, and nothing had ever gone wrong in her life. People told us kids grow at different rates and do things at different times. But as Ben reached six months old, we found ourselves sitting in a doctor's office. He glanced at us and offhandedly said, "Of course. Ben has cerebral palsy." I was in shock. I walked around in a for for weeks. I couldn't fathom how I had fathered two children with a rare condition that was not supposed to be hereditary, with tow different mothers. I was so angry and confused inside, projecting scenarios in my mind where people said something bad about Ben or Zeke and I would just attack them, going wild. Luckily that never did happen, but there was a root of instability inside me for a while. Although it mellowed with time, I carried that feeling around for years. Eventually Pegi and I, wanting to have another child after Ben, went to se an expert of the subject. That was Pegi's idea. Always organized and methodical in her approach to problems, Pegi planned an approach to our dilemma with her very high intelligence. We both loved children but were a little gun-shy about having another, to say the least. After evaluating our situation and our children, the doctor told us that probably Zeke dis not actually have CP-he likely had suffered a stroke in utero. The symptoms are very similar. Pegi and I weighed this information. To know someone like her and to make a decision about a subject as important as this with her was a gift beyond anything I have ever experienced. It was her idea, and she had guided us to this point. We made a decision together to go forward and have another child.

My years of struggling against inequality, abusive power, poverty, oppression, and injustice had finally revealed something to me about myself. Being close to suffering, death, executions, and cruel punishments didn't just illuminate the brokenness of others; in a moment of anguish and heartbreak, it also exposed my own brokenness. You can't effectively fight abusive power, poverty, inequality, illness, oppression, or injustice and not be broken by it. We are all broken by something. We have all hurt someone and have been hurt. We all share the condition of brokenness even if our brokenness is not equivalent. The ways in which I have been hurt - and have hurt others - are different from the ways Jimmy Dill suffered and caused suffering. But our shared brokenness connected us. Thomas Merton said: We are bodies of broken bones. I guess I'd always known but never fully considered that being broken is what makes us human. We all have our reasons. Sometimes we're fractured by the choices we make; sometimes we're shattered by things we would never have chosen. But our brokenness is also the source of our common humanity, the basis for our shared search for comfort, meaning, and healing. Our shared vulnerability and imperfection nurtures and sustains our capacity for compassion. We have a choice. We can embrace our humanness, which means embracing our broken natures and the compassion that remains our best hope for healing. Or we can deny our brokenness, forswear compassion, and, as a result, deny our own humanity. I thought of the guards strapping Jimmy Dill to the gurney that very hour. I thought of the people who would cheer his death and see it as some kind of victory. I realized they were broken people, too, even if they would never admit it. So many of us have become afraid and angry. We've become so fearful and vengeful that we've thrown away children, discarded the disabled, and sanctioned the imprisonment of the sick and the weak - not because they are a threat to public safety or beyond rehabilitation but because we think it makes us seem tough, less broken. I thought of the victims of violent crime and the survivors of murdered loved ones, and how we've pressured them to recycle their pain and anguish and give it back to the offenders we prosecute. I thought of the many ways we've legalized vengeful and cruel punishments, how we've allowed our victimization to justify the victimization of others. We've submitted to the harsh instinct to crush those among us whose brokenness is most visible. But simply punishing the broken - walking away from them or hiding them from sight - only ensures that they remain broken and we do, too. There is no wholeness outside of our reciprocal humanity. I frequently had difficult conversations with clients who were struggling and despairing over their situations - over the things they'd done, or had been done to them, that had led them to painful moments. Whenever things got really bad, and they were questioning the value of their lives, I would remind them that each of us is more than the worst thing we've ever done. I told them that if someone tells a lie, that person is not just a liar. If you take something that doesn't belong to you, you are not just a thief. Even if you kill someone, you're not just a killer. I told myself that evening what I had been telling my clients for years. I am more than broken. In fact, there is a strength, a power even, in understanding brokenness, because embracing our brokenness creates a need and desire for mercy, and perhaps a corresponding need to show mercy. When you experience mercy, you learn things that are hard to learn otherwise. You see things that you can't otherwise see; you hear things you can't otherwise hear. You begin to recognize the humanity that resides in each of us.

„Klara, you're a new model of Artificial Friend. You're designed to be a companion to a child who's been chosen by their mother and father to be an Enhanced Child. That means they have illnesses or disabilities of one kind or another. You're a specialist in helping such children.

I definitely think mothers of children with disabilities have to have extraordinary courage every day...Because we all know our children have value and worth and potential, but the everyday world sometimes doesn’t.' —Linda Strobel in Up: A Love Letter to the Down Syndrome Community

With stuff this big, almost any way of looking at it can be true. We all talked like we were going to eventually reach some grand conclusion, some correct stance, but in fact it was different for everybody, impossible to pin down. Was childbirth traumatic or transcendent? Was pregnancy a time of wonder and awe or a kind of temporary disability? Were we supposed to fit our lives around our children or fit our children into our lives? My feelings changed every minute, depending on my mood and on the company I kept. It felt essential, though, to keep asking the question.

Helen Keller, author, speaker, and advocate for disabled persons, asserted, “Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature, nor do the children of men as a whole experience it. Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. Life is either a daring adventure or nothing.

I never allowed my Autism/Asperger's to have the prerogative to neither tear nor slow me down. I earned a degree in chemistry, juggle for elementary schools, play piano for seniors on Sunday mornings, and been mentoring children/teens from K-12 at Royal Rangers almost every week for six years and counting.

So many of us have become afraid and angry. We’ve become so fearful and vengeful that we’ve thrown away children, discarded the disabled, and sanctioned the imprisonment of the sick and the weak—not because they are a threat to public safety or beyond rehabilitation but because we think it makes us seem tough, less broken. I thought of the victims of violent crime and the survivors of murdered loved ones, and how we’ve pressured them to recycle their pain and anguish and give it back to the offenders we prosecute. I thought of the many ways we’ve legalized vengeful and cruel punishments, how we’ve allowed our victimization to justify the victimization of others. We’ve submitted to the harsh instinct to crush those among us whose brokenness is most visible. But simply punishing the broken--walking away from them or hiding them from sight--only ensures that they remain broken and we do, too. There is no wholeness outside of our reciprocal humanity.

Internalized ableism—the insidious belief that I would be a better person if I were not disabled—makes me feel like an imposter as a mother. Many of my friends with disabilities worry that they should not be parents; those who already are parents fear that their physical capacities negatively affect their children. It’s much easier to ignore my insecurities in professional or academic settings—to fake it until I make it, to go through the motions until I’m more confident in them. But how can I brazen my way through parenting? Talking myself out of my deepest fears is more difficult when I want, so primally, to be able to lift my son.

I can suspend judgment on those who kill–but I think they are evil for the community; they bring in nothing except hate, and take from it all they can. I am willing to believe that they are made that way, that they are born with a disability, for which, perhaps, one should pity them; but even then, I think, not spare them–because you cannot spare them any more than you could spare the man who staggers out from a plague-stricken village in the Middle Ages to mix with innocent and healthy children in a nearby village. The innocent must be protected; they must be able to live at peace and charity with their neighbours. It frightens me that nobody seems to care about the innocent.

Our ancestors have much to answer for. Why? What did they do? ....Long ago, they used machines and drugs to keep the unhealthy and unfit ones of us alive. In that past time it was believed that all persons must have children. It was a right deemed so precious that it was forced upon even those who did not value it or should not have had it. If one of our people became pregnant, our people used all their knowledge to assure the young would be born, no matter how sick or disabled. Then, if the young lived, they injected them and dosed them and radiated them and transfused and transplanted them, to keep them alive, and then, when they were grown, they used all their skills in assisting them to have children of their own.

we have equal legal rights to spend real time with our families, where there really is equal pay, where the pressures of the long-hours culture are removed, where pay in the caring professions was made so rewarding that it did not invariably fall to women to look after the elderly, the disabled or children in nurseries, nor that teaching in primary schools was a female role.

Let’s Convince Him He’s Addicted for Life Parents consent to their children’s treatment for diseases other than taking drugs. One of the most common groups of childhood diseases is “learning disabilities,” including especially hyperactivity. Are such learning disabilities permanent? One piece of research showed that, “Contrary to the expectations of many experts, . . . boys who are hyperactive do not always have

The idea that Autism is a “boy’s” disorder goes all the way back to when the condition was first described at the turn of the twentieth century. Hans Asperger and other early Autism researchers did study girls on the spectrum, but generally left them out of their published research reports.[55] Asperger in particular avoided writing about Autistic girls because he wanted to present certain intelligent, “high-functioning” Autistic people as “valuable” to the Nazis who had taken over Austria and were beginning to exterminate disabled people en masse. As Steve Silberman describes in his excellent book NeuroTribes, Hans Asperger wanted to spare the “high functioning” Autistic boys he’d encountered from being sent to Nazi death camps. Silberman described this fact somewhat sympathetically; Asperger was a scientist who had no choice but to collude with the fascist regime and save what few children he could. However, more recently unearthed documents make it clear that Asperger was far more complicit in Nazi exterminations of disabled children than had been previously believed.[56] Though Asperger held intelligent, “little professor” type Autistics close to his heart, he knowingly sent more visibly debilitated Autistics to extermination centers.

According to Jay Belsky, a leading proponent of this view and a psychology professor and child care expert at the University of London, the reactivity of these kids’ nervous systems makes them quickly overwhelmed by childhood adversity, but also able to benefit from a nurturing environment more than other children do. In other words, orchid children are more strongly affected by all experience, both positive and negative. Scientists have known for a while that high-reactive temperaments come with risk factors. These kids are especially vulnerable to challenges like marital tension, a parent’s death, or abuse. They’re more likely than their peers to react to these events with depression, anxiety, and shyness. Indeed, about a quarter of Kagan’s high-reactive kids suffer from some degree of the condition known as “social anxiety disorder,” a chronic and disabling form of shyness.

Unfortunately, for the past decade American soldiers have returned to a country that displays many indicators of low social resilience. Resources are not shared equally, a quarter of children live in poverty, jobs are hard to get, and minimum wage is almost impossible to live on. Instead of being able to work and contribute to society—a highly therapeutic thing to do—a large percentage of veterans are just offered lifelong disability payments.

If Roe v. Wade is ever overturned, the foster care system will likely be flooded with special needs cases. Will we, as God’s people, be prepared to take care of the children who were not aborted, but then abandoned? If we claim to be “pro-life,” we must be willing to take an honest look at our attitudes toward children with disabilities. We must be honest with ourselves about how the church has handled and in some cases even mishandled this issue.

When Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the Social Security Act in 1935, old age was defined as sixty-five years, yet estimated life expectancy in the United States at the time was sixty-one years for males and sixty-four years for females.62 A senior citizen today, however, can expect to live eighteen to twenty years longer. The downside is that he or she also should expect to die more slowly. The two most common causes of death in 1935 America were respiratory diseases (pneumonia and influenza) and infectious diarrhea, both of which kill rapidly. In contrast, the two most common causes of death in 2007 America were heart disease and cancer (each accounted for about 25 percent of total deaths). Some heart attack victims die within minutes or hours, but most elderly people with heart disease survive for years while coping with complications such as high blood pressure, congestive heart failure, general weakness, and peripheral vascular disease. Many cancer patients also remain alive for several years following their diagnosis because of chemo-therapy, radiation, surgery, and other treatments. In addition, many of the other leading causes of death today are chronic illnesses such as asthma, Alzheimer’s, type 2 diabetes, and kidney disease, and there has been an upsurge in the occurrence of nonfatal but chronic illnesses such as osteoarthritis, gout, dementia, and hearing loss.63 Altogether, the growing prevalence of chronic illness among middle-aged and elderly individuals is contributing to a health-care crisis because the children born during the post–World War II baby boom are now entering old age, and an unprecedented percentage of them are suffering from lingering, disabling, and costly diseases. The term epidemiologists coined for this phenomenon is the “extension of morbidity.

How much more would I have longed for and needed to see myself in my books if I’d been disabled, gay, black, non-Christian or something else outside the mainstream message? By this time – the mid-1980s – writers’ and publishers’ consciousnesses of matters of sex, race and representation had started to be raised. The first wave of concern had come in the 1960s and 70s, mainly – or perhaps just most successfully – over the matter of heroines. There were some. But not many. And certainly not enough of the right – feisty, non-domestic, un-Meg Marchish – sort. Efforts needed to be made to overcome the teeny imbalance caused by 300 years of unreflecting patriarchal history. It’s this memory that convinces me of the importance of role models and the rightness of including (or as critics of the practice call it, ‘crowbarring in’) a wide variety of characters with different backgrounds, orientations and everything else into children’s books. If it seems – hell, even if it IS – slightly effortful at times, I suspect that the benefits (even though by their very nature as explosions of inward delight, wordless recognition, relief, succour, sustenance, those benefits are largely hidden) vastly outweigh the alleged cons. And I’m never quite sure what the cons are supposed to be anyway. Criticisms usually boil down to some variant of ‘I am used to A! B makes me uncomfortable! O, take the nasty B away!’ Which really isn’t good enough.

Those who say that children must not be frightened may mean two things. They may mean (1) that we must not do anything likely to give the child those haunting, disabling, pathological fears against which ordinary courage is helpless: in fact, phobias. His mind must, if possible, be kept clear of things he can’t bear to think of. Or they may mean (2) that we must try to keep out of his mind the knowledge that he is born into a world of death, violence, wounds, adventure, heroism and cowardice, good and evil. If they mean the first I agree with them: but not if they mean the second. The second would indeed be to give children a false impression and feed them on escapism in the bad sense. There is something ludicrous in the idea of so educating a generation which is born to the…atomic bomb. Since it is so likely that they will meet cruel enemies, let them at least have heard of brave knights and heroic courage. Otherwise you are making their destiny not brighter but darker.

Today Is A New Day/New Beginning 1. Send a food hamper to a less fortunate family 2.Tutor a neighborhood child at no cost 3.Give an elderly or disabled neighbor a ride to church 4.Buy a birthday gift for a less fortunate child 5. Donate school supplies to a nearby school 6.Donate to a Children’s charity 7. Donate new books to a library 8.Send military care packages to deployed Service members 9.Send cards to the sick in a Nursing Facility/Shut-ins 10.Cook and serve meals at a Homeless Shelter

But no matter how carefully we schedule our days, master our emotions, and try to wring our best life now from our better selves, we cannot solve the problem of finitude. We will always want more. We need more. We are carrying the weight of caregiving and addiction, chronic pain and uncertain diagnosis, struggling teenagers and kids with learning disabilities, mental illness and abusive relationships. A grandmother has been sheltering without a visitor for months, and a friend's business closed its doors. Doctors, nurses, and frontline workers are acting as levees, feeling each surge of the disease crash against them. My former students, now serving as pastors and chaplains, are in hospitals giving last rites in hazmat suits. They volunteer to be the last person to hold his hand. To smooth her hair. The truth if the pandemic is the truth of all suffering: that it is unjustly distributed. Who bears the brunt? The homeless and the prisoners. The elderly and the children. The sick and the uninsured. Immigrants and people needing social services. People of color and LGBTQ people. The burdens of ordinary evils— descriminations, brutality, predatory lending, illegal evictions, and medical exploitation— roll back on the vulnerable like a heavy stone. All of us struggle against the constraints places on our bodies, our commitments, our ambitions, and our resources, even as we're saddled with inflated expectations of invincibility. This is the strange cruelty of suffering in America, its insistence that everything is still possible.

The passion for such children contains no ego motive of anticipated reciprocity; one is choosing against, in the poet Richard Wilbur's phrase, 'loving things for reasons'. You find beauty and hope in the existence, rather than the achievements, of such a child. Most parenthood entails some struggle to change, educate and improve one's children; people with multiple severe disabilities may not become anything else, and there is a compelling purity in parental engagement not with what might or should or will be, but with, simply, what is.

Grazer and Cohn - two outsiders with learning disabilities-played a trick. They bluffed their way into professions that would have been closed to them. The man in the cab assumed that no one would be so audacious as to say he knew how to trade options if he didn't. And it never occurred to the people Brian Grazer called that when he said he was Brian Grazer from Warner Brothers, what he meant was that he was Brian Grazer who pushed the mail cart around at Warner Brothers. What they did is not "right," just as it is not "right" to send children against police dogs. But we need to remember that our definition of what right is, often as not, simply the way that people in positions of privilege close the door on those on the outside. David has nothing to lose, and because he has nothing to lose, he has the freedom to thumb his nose at the rules set by others. That's how people with brains a little bit different from the rest of ours get jobs as options traders and Hollywood producers-and a small band of protesters armed with nothing but their wits have a chance against the likes of Bull Connor

A brick could be used to show you how to live a richer, fuller, more satisfying life. Don’t you want to have fulfillment and meaning saturating your existence? I can show you how you can achieve this and so much more with just a simple brick. For just $99.99—not even an even hundred bucks, I’ll send you my exclusive life philosophy that’s built around a brick. Man’s used bricks to build houses for centuries. Now let one man, me, show you how a brick can be used to build your life up bigger and stronger than you ever imagined. But act now, because supplies are limited. This amazing offer won’t last forever. You don’t want to wake up in ten years to find yourself divorced, homeless, and missing your testicles because you waited even two hours too long to obtain this information. Become a hero today—save your life. Procrastination is only for the painful things in life. We prolong the boring, but why put off for tomorrow the exciting life you could be living today? If you’re not satisfied with the information I’m providing, I’m willing to offer you a no money back guarantee. That’s right, you read that wrong. If you are not 100% dissatisfied with my product, I’ll give you your money back. For $99.99 I’m offering 99.99%, but you’ve got to be willing to penny up that percentage to 100. Why delay? The life you really want is mine, and I’m willing to give it to you—for a price. That price is a one-time fee of $99.99, which of course everyone can afford—even if they can’t afford it. Homeless people can’t afford it, but they’re the people who need my product the most. Buy my product, or face the fact that in all probability you are going to end up homeless and sexless and unloved and filthy and stinky and probably even disabled, if not physically than certainly mentally. I don’t care if your testicles taste like peanut butter—if you don’t buy my product, even a dog won’t lick your balls you miserable cur. I curse you! God damn it, what are you, slow? Pay me my money so I can show you the path to true wealth. Don’t you want to be rich? Everything takes money—your marriage, your mortgage, and even prostitutes. I can show you the path to prostitution—and it starts by ignoring my pleas to help you. I’m not the bad guy here. I just want to help. You have some serious trust issues, my friend. I have the chance to earn your trust, and all it’s going to cost you is a measly $99.99. Would it help you to trust me if I told you that I trust you? Well, I do. Sure, I trust you. I trust you to make the smart decision for your life and order my product today. Don’t sleep on this decision, because you’ll only wake up in eight hours to find yourself living in a miserable future. And the future indeed looks bleak, my friend. War, famine, children forced to pimp out their parents just to feed the dog. Is this the kind of tomorrow you’d like to live in today? I can show you how to provide enough dog food to feed your grandpa for decades. In the future I’m offering you, your wife isn’t a whore that you sell for a knife swipe of peanut butter because you’re so hungry you actually considered eating your children. Become a hero—and save your kids’ lives. Your wife doesn’t want to spread her legs for strangers. Or maybe she does, and that was a bad example. Still, the principle stands. But you won’t be standing—in the future. Remember, you’ll be confined to a wheelchair. Mushrooms are for pizzas, not clouds, but without me, your life will atom bomb into oblivion. Nobody’s dropping a bomb while I’m around. The only thing I’m dropping is the price. Boom! I just lowered the price for you, just to show you that you are a valued customer. As a VIP, your new price on my product is just $99.96. That’s a savings of over two pennies (three, to be precise). And I’ll even throw in a jar of peanut butter for free. That’s a value of over $.99. But wait, there’s more! If you call within the next ten minutes, I’ll even throw in a blanket free of charge. . .

Are you calling me weak?' 'No.' Mira squeezes my hand. 'Just... fragile.' 'That's not any better.' Dragons don't bond fragile women. They incinerate them. 'So she's small.' Mom scans me up and down, taking in the generous fit of the cram belted tunic and pants I selected this morning for my potential execution. I snort. 'Are we just listing my faults now?' 'I never said it was a fault.' Mom turns to my sister. 'Mira, Violet deals with more pain before lunch than you do in an entire week. If any of my children is capable of surviving the Rider's Quadrant, it's her.

The idea of denominator neglect helps explain why different ways of communicating risks vary so much in their effects. You read that “a vaccine that protects children from a fatal disease carries a 0.001% risk of permanent disability.” The risk appears small. Now consider another description of the same risk: “One of 100,000 vaccinated children will be permanently disabled.” The second statement does something to your mind that the first does not: it calls up the image of an individual child who is permanently disabled by a vaccine; the 999,999 safely vaccinated children have faded into the background.

This was the church’s great achievement in Ireland. It had so successfully disabled a society’s capacity to think for itself about right and wrong that it was the parents of an abused child, not the bishop who enabled that abuse, who were ‘quite apologetic’. It had managed to create a flock who, in the face of an outrageous violation of trust, would be concerned as much about the abuser as about those he had abused and might abuse in the future. It had inserted its system of control and power so deeply into the minds of the faithful that they could scarcely even feel angry about the perpetration of disgusting crimes on their own children.

More often than not, the people around me weren’t simply deciding to give up. They were living in a culture of dependency that had been passed down from birth. My mother and grandmother gave in to the culture. And they expected me to figure out the best way to live on that same track, to game the system and not even try to escape. My friend Ben agrees. 'Most of the time, what you see in the housing projects are generations of families,' he says. 'People accustomed to this lifestyle. It becomes comfortable, so they don’t move away, and even their children stay and raise kids in the same environment.' In neighborhoods like the ones where Ben and I grew up, there is no perceived incentive to advance. After all, the checks for housing and the food stamps and assistance arrive every month. This is why the system must be reformed. Welfare should exist only for a certain period of time, unless you’re disabled and can’t physically work. It should not last for a generation or more. There are millions of jobs open, without enough people to fill them or, rather, without enough people who have the necessary skills and training. This is where the government should come in, providing incentives for real-world training and educating recipients about a life beyond government dependence.

Sometimes Christian good is hard to be around. It’s not of this world, and the juxtaposition jars. For example, Jean Vanier spent seven years in the British navy, starting in 1942. Later in life he noticed the way people with mental disabilities were mistreated and discarded by society into miserable asylums. He visited the asylums and noticed that nobody in them was crying. “When they realize that nobody cares, that nobody will answer them, children no longer cry. It takes too much energy. We cry out only when there is hope that someone may hear us.” He bought a little house near Paris and started a community for the mentally disabled. Before long there were 134 such communities in thirty-five countries. Vanier exemplifies a selflessness that is almost spooky. He thinks and cares so little of himself. He lives as almost pure gift. People who meet him report that this can have an unnerving effect. Vanier walked out of a society that celebrates the successful and the strong to devote his life purely to those who are weak. He did it because he understands his own weakness. “We human beings are all fundamentally the same,” he wrote. “We all belong to a common, broken humanity. We all have wounded, vulnerable hearts. Each one of us needs to feel appreciated and understood; we all need help.

At the “Capitol Crawl,” people using wheelchairs, leg braces, and canes made their way to the hundred steps in front of the U.S. Capitol building in Washington, D.C. Then they began to climb those stairs, leaving behind whatever gear couldn’t come with them, using their arms or whatever body parts they had available for mobility. Children as young as ten participated in what became a very public, strategic spectacle. That protest is considered by historians to have been the tipping point; the Americans with Disabilities Act was passed in 1990, guaranteeing curb cut changes at every city sidewalk corner and ramped entrances at all newly constructed buildings, among other new provisions.

In my own periods of darkness, in the underworld of the soul, I find myself frequently overcome and amazed by the ability of people to befriend each other, to love their intimate partners and parents and children, and to do what they must do to keep the machinery of the world running. I knew a man, injured and disabled by a car accident, who was employed by a local utility. For years after the crash he worked side by side with another man, who for his part suffered with a degenerative neurological disease. They cooperated while repairing the lines, each making up for the other’s inadequacy. This sort of everyday heroism is the rule, I believe, rather than the exception. Most individuals are dealing with one or more serious health problems while going productively and uncomplainingly about their business. If anyone is fortunate enough to be in a rare period of grace and health, personally, then he or she typically has at least one close family member in crisis. Yet people prevail and continue to do difficult and effortful tasks to hold themselves and their families and society together. To me this is miraculous—so much so that a dumbfounded gratitude is the only appropriate response. There are so many ways that things can fall apart, or fail to work altogether, and it is always wounded people who are holding it together. They deserve some genuine and heartfelt admiration for that. It’s an ongoing miracle of fortitude and perseverance

Ḥayā’, in Arabic, conveys the meaning of “shame,” though the root word of ḥayā’ is closely associated with “life” and “living.” The Prophet stated, “Every religion has a quality that is characteristic of that religion, and the characteristic of my religion is ḥayā’,” an internal sense of shame that includes bashfulness and modesty. As children, many of us had someone say to us at times, “Shame on you!” Unfortunately, shame has now come to be viewed as a negative word, as if it were a pejorative. Parents are now often advised to never cause a child to feel shame. The current wisdom largely suggests that adults should always make the child feel good, regardless of his or her behavior. However, doing so eventually disables naturally occurring deterrents to misbehavior.

On a Sunday this January, probably of whatever year it is when you read this (at least as long as I’m living), I will probably be preaching somewhere in a church on “Sanctity of Human Life Sunday.” Here’s a confession: I hate it. Don’t get me wrong. I love to preach the Bible. And I love to talk about the image of God and the protection of all human life. I hate this Sunday not because of what we have to say, but that we have to say it at all. The idea of aborting an unborn child or abusing a born child or starving an elderly person or torturing an enemy combatant or screaming at an immigrant family, these ought all to be so self-evidently wrong that a “Sanctity of Human Life Sunday” ought to be as unnecessary as a “Reality of Gravity Sunday.” We shouldn’t have to say that parents shouldn’t abort their children, or their fathers shouldn’t abandon the mothers of their babies, or that no human life is worthless regardless of age, skin color, disability, or economic status. Part of my thinking here is, I hope, a sign of God’s grace, a groaning by the Spirit at this world of abortion clinics and torture chambers (Rom. 8:22–23). But part of it is my own inability to see the spiritual combat zone that the world is, and has been from Eden onward. This dark present reality didn’t begin with the antebellum South or with the modern warfare state, and it certainly didn’t begin with the Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision. Human dignity is about the kingdom of God, and that means that in every place and every culture human dignity is contested.

Refined Added Sugar Refined added sugar causes astronomically more deaths and disability per year than COVID-19 and fentanyl overdoses combined. We need to see refined added sugar for what it is: an addictive, dangerous drug that has been included in 74 percent of foods in the U.S. food system and for which the body needs zero grams in a lifetime. Of all the levers most damaging our cells and preventing Good Energy, I believe the worst offender may be added sugar. This substance has become a mainstay of food that we and our children eat regularly. As Dr. Robert Lustig has noted, sugar shows up on labels in fifty-six different names and sneaks in everywhere. While dozens of types of refined sugar are added to foods, chief among the offenders is high-fructose corn syrup,

The evil stepmother is a fixture in European fairy tales because the stepmother was very much a fixture in early European society–mortality in childbirth was very high, and it wasn’t unusual for a father to suddenly find himself alone with multiple mouths to feed. So he remarried and brought another woman into the house, and eventually they had yet more children, thus changing the power dynamics of inheritance in the household in a way that had very little to do with inherent, archetypal evil and everything to do with social expectation and pressure. What was a woman to do when she remarried into a family and had to act as mother to her husband’s children as well as her own, in a time when economic prosperity was a magical dream for most? Would she think of killing her husband’s children so that her own children might therefore inherit and thrive? [...] Perhaps. Perhaps not. But the fear that stepmothers (or stepfathers) might do this kind of thing was very real, and it was that fear–fed by the socioeconomic pressures felt by the growing urban class–that fed the stories. We see this also with the stories passed around in France–fairies who swoop in to save the day when women themselves can’t do so; romantic tales of young girls who marry beasts as a balm to those young ladies facing arranged marriages to older, distant dukes. We see this with the removal of fairies and insertion of religion into the German tales. Fairy tales, in short, are not created in a vacuum. As with all stories, they change and bend both with and in response to culture.

It is better for all the world,’ wrote famed liberal Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr, ‘if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind’... Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger approved wholeheartedly of this philosophy… her utopia would have no place for the ‘mentally defective,’ which, in her writings, included the poor, the disabled, essentially all African Americans, and most other people of color. She argued that preventing ‘defectives’ from being born was the height of compassion… “Sadly, many people today still hold eugenic ideals without even realizing it. For example, children with disabilities are routinely killed before birth because they are deemed unfit.

There are, in fact, some people who do not appear to have a built-in preference for their own race. They suffer from something called Williams Syndrome, and lack the usual fear of strangers and the unknown. Researchers at the Central Institute of Mental health in Mannheim, Germany, found that normal white children, aged five to seven, matched good characteristics with photographs of people of their own race and negative characteristics with people of other races. Twenty children with Williams Syndrome did not, matching characteristics without regard to race. The syndrome appears to change the way the amygdalae communicate with the pre-frontal cortex, and it eliminates social inhibition. People with Williams Syndrome are “hypersocial,” and do not see danger in the faces of people who may be threats. They also tend to be mildly retarded and to suffer from other physical complications.

The whole South was a military camp. The occupation of the colored people was to furnish supplies for the army. Conscription was resorted to early, and embraced every male from the age of eighteen to forty-five, excluding only those physically unfit to serve in the field, and the necessary number of civil officers of State and intended National government. The old and physically disabled furnished a good portion of these. The slaves, the non-combatants, one-third of the whole, were required to work in the field without regard to sex, and almost without regard to age. Children from the age of eight years could and did handle the hoe; they were not much older when they began to hold the plough. The four million of colored non-combatants were equal to more than three times their number in the North, age for age and sex for sex, in supplying food from the soil to support armies. Women did not work

Predominantly inattentive type Perhaps the majority of girls with AD/HD fall into the primarily inattentive type, and are most likely to go undiagnosed. Generally, these girls are more compliant than disruptive and get by rather passively in the academic arena. They may be hypoactive or lethargic. In the extreme, they may even seem narcoleptic. Because they do not appear to stray from cultural norms, they will rarely come to the attention of their teacher. Early report cards of an inattentive type girl may read, "She is such a sweet little girl. She must try harder to speak up in class." She is often a shy daydreamer who avoids drawing attention to herself. Fearful of expressing herself in class, she is concerned that she will be ridiculed or wrong. She often feels awkward, and may nervously twirl the ends of her hair. Her preferred seating position is in the rear of the classroom. She may appear to be listening to the teacher, even when she has drifted off and her thoughts are far away. These girls avoid challenges, are easily discouraged, and tend to give up quickly. Their lack of confidence in themselves is reflected in their failure excuses, such as, "I can't," "It's too hard," or "I used to know it, but I can't remember it now." The inattentive girl is likely to be disorganized, forgetful, and often anxious about her school work. Teachers may be frustrated because she does not finish class work on time. She may mistakenly be judged as less bright than she really is. These girls are reluctant to volunteer for a project orjoin a group of peers at recess. They worry that other children will humiliate them if they make a mistake, which they are sure they will. Indeed, one of their greatest fears is being called on in class; they may stare down at their book to avoid eye contact with the teacher, hoping that the teacher will forget they exist for the moment. Because interactions with the teacher are often anxiety-ridden, these girls may have trouble expressing themselves, even when they know the answer. Sometimes, it is concluded that they have problems with central auditory processing or expressive language skills. More likely, their anxiety interferes with their concentration, temporarily reducing their capacity to both speak and listen. Generally, these girls don't experience this problem around family or close friends, where they are more relaxed. Inattentive type girls with a high IQ and no learning disabilities will be diagnosed with AD/HD very late, if ever. These bright girls have the ability and the resources to compensate for their cognitive challenges, but it's a mixed blessing. Their psychological distress is internalized, making it less obvious, but no less damaging. Some of these girls will go unnoticed until college or beyond, and many are never diagnosed they are left to live with chronic stress that may develop into anxiety and depression as their exhausting, hidden efforts to succeed take their toll. Issues

As you read these words, somewhere on the planet, a parent is explaining to their child that people hate them for being different and that they must remember this knowledge to remain safe. That child could be White or a person of color. They could be of any religion or no religion at all. They could be able-bodied or have a disability. They could be neurotypical or neurodiverse. They could be straight or queer. They could be cisgender or gender nonconforming. They could be poor or financially secure. They could be privileged or marginalized. In the end, the details do not matter, aside from them being the target of bigotry for being different. I think of that child trying to process this new information in a mind that, up to that point, had only been concerned with what we all hope children are concerned with—dreams, joys, and simple delights. I think of the parents watching, perhaps not the light fade from their child’s eyes completely, but watching that light dim a bit. I think of how bigotry ends so many childhoods, and I am filled with sadness, outrage, and familiarity.

Dawn’s afternoons at the Baker Institute for physically disabled kids sounded fascinating. She rode to Stamford in a specially equipped van with four children from Stoneybrook who went to Baker for physical therapy, classes in the arts, and a chance to make new friends. The bus driver was a woman who was going to college to learn to be a physical therapist. She drove the bus to earn some extra money, but the kids were more than just a job to her. She really enjoyed being with them. “Candace is so funny,” Dawn told me. “She jokes around with the kids, and they love her. She treats all of them the way you’d treat kids who aren’t in wheelchairs or wearing braces. She’ll say to them, ‘Hurry up! I haven’t got all day,’ and the kids just giggle. Most people tiptoe around the kids like they’re going to break. And never mention their braces or anything. But if a friend of yours got new clothes, you’d make a comment, right? So if a kid gets on the bus with decorations all over the back of his wheelchair, Candace will say, ‘Your chair looks great today! I think you should go into business as a decorator.

traditional tales are neither so simplistic nor so predictable. They give generous space to the subaltern voice: to the powerless, to the poor, to girls and wives, even to animals, all those creatures who need to find ways not only to survive in this difficult world, but to live well in it, despite the dark forces ranged against them. These stories compel, seizing our attention with their strangeness while at the same time speaking clearly to shared themes of human existence. They explore huge questions: of love and loss, and of the conditions under which we do our everyday work and how we might thrive in it. They patrol the shadowy borderlands between life and death and they tease out our hopes and fears for our children. They demand we consider issues such as migration, asking who belongs here, who can make a home here, who can find the strength to begin all over again in a strange new land – and who might have been here for much longer than you think. Folktales pick fights about disability and aging, about women and men, and, crucially, they hold out to us the environments in which we live – our much-loved British countryside – and show how it might slip through our fingers.

Science fiction writers construct an imaginary future; historians attempt to reconstruct the past. Ultimately, both are seeking to understand the present. In this essay, we blend the two genres to imagine a future historian looking back on a past that is our present and (possible) future. The occasion is the tercentenary of the end of Western culture (1540–2093); the dilemma being addressed is how we—the children of the Enlightenment—failed to act on robust information about climate change and knowledge of the damaging events that were about to unfold. Our historian concludes that a second Dark Age had fallen on Western civilization, in which denial and self-deception, rooted in an ideological fixation on “free” markets, disabled the world’s powerful nations in the face of tragedy. Moreover, the scientists who best understood the problem were hamstrung by their own cultural practices, which demanded an excessively stringent standard for accepting claims of any kind—even those involving imminent threats. Here, our future historian, living in the Second People’s Republic of China, recounts the events of the Period of the Penumbra (1988–2093) that led to the Great Collapse and Mass Migration (2073–2093).

Each of the three recognized categories—care, service, and education—would encompass a wide range of activities, with different levels of compensation for full- and part-time participation. Care work could include parenting of young children, attending to an aging parent, assisting a friend or family member dealing with illness, or helping someone with mental or physical disabilities live life to the fullest. This category would create a veritable army of people—loved ones, friends, or even strangers—who could assist those in need, offering them what my entrepreneur friend’s touchscreen device for the elderly never could: human warmth. Service work would be similarly broadly defined, encompassing much of the current work of nonprofit groups as well as the kinds of volunteers I saw in Taiwan. Tasks could include performing environmental remediation, leading afterschool programs, guiding tours at national parks, or collecting oral histories from elders in our communities. Participants in these programs would register with an established group and commit to a certain number of hours of service work to meet the requirements of the stipend. Finally, education could range from professional training for the jobs of the AI age to taking classes that could transform a hobby into a career. Some recipients of the stipend will use that financial freedom to pursue a degree in machine learning and use it to find a high-paying job.

Thanks to the popular policies of our Party and the Government of our Republic, all our people are provided by the state and society with all the practical conditions they need for adequate food, clothing and housing and enjoy an equally happy life. They are supplied by the state with provisions virtually free of charge and receive the benefits of free education, free medical care and all the conditions they need for adequate food, clothing and housing. Moreover, as a result of the abolition of taxation, this word has disappeared from their vocabulary. In our country the state takes responsible care of the old and disabled people and children who have no means of support. In our country preferential, social treatment is accorded to merited people, including veterans who have been disabled in the fight for the noble cause of the fatherland and the people, and the Party and the state take warm care of them. Our people receive many benefits from the Party and the state. The popular policies of our Party and the Government of the Republic are eloquent proof of the advantages of our socialist system which is centred upon the popular masses. The “welfare policies” pursued in capitalist countries are fundamentally different from the popular policies of a socialist society. They are aimed at disguising the class contradictions in that society and at pacifying the resistance of the working masses. Even if the “welfare policies” are enforced, this is done only in name and cannot improve the life of the working people.

While the overall systems of heterosexism and ableism are still with us, they have adapted in limited ways. These adaptations are held up as reassurance to those who fought long and hard for a particular change that equality has now been achieved. These milestones—such as the recognition of same-sex marriage, the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act, Title 9, the election of Barack Obama—are, of course, significant and worthy of celebration. But systems of oppression are deeply rooted and not overcome with the simple passage of legislation. Advances are also tenuous, as we can see in recent challenges to the rights of LGBTQI (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer or questioning, and intersex) people. Systems of oppression are not completely inflexible. But they are far less flexible than popular ideology would acknowledge, and the collective impact of the inequitable distribution of resources continues across history. COLOR-BLIND RACISM What is termed color-blind racism is an example of racism’s ability to adapt to cultural changes.3 According to this ideology, if we pretend not to notice race, then there can be no racism. The idea is based on a line from the famous “I Have a Dream” speech given by Dr. Martin Luther King in 1963 during the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. At the time of King’s speech, it was much more socially acceptable for white people to admit to their racial prejudices and belief in white racial superiority. But many white people had never witnessed the kind of violence to which blacks were subjected. Because the struggle for civil rights was televised, whites across the nation watched in horror as black men, women, and children were attacked by police dogs and fire hoses during peaceful protests and beaten and dragged away from lunch counters.

As a country, as a people, have we changed? On the surface we might appear to have done so, but underneath I think we are still the same. Our change is measurable, but not significant. We remain bent on destroying ourselves. We still kill each other with alarming frequency and for foolish reasons, and we begin the killing at a younger age. We have much to celebrate, but we live in fear and doubt. We are pessimistic about our own lives and the lives of our children. We trust almost no one. “It is the same everywhere. We are a people under siege, walled away from each other and the world, trying to find a safe path through the debris of hate and rage that collects around us. We drive our cars as if they were weapons. We use our children and our friends as if their love and trust were expendable and meaningless. We think of ourselves first and others second. We lie and cheat and steal in little ways, thinking it unimportant, justifying it by telling ourselves that others do it, so it doesn’t matter if we do it, too. We have no patience with the mistakes of others. We have no empathy for their despair. We have no compassion for their misery. Those who roam the streets are not our concern; they are examples of failure and an embarrassment to us. It is best to ignore them. If they are homeless, it is their own fault. They give us nothing but trouble. If they die, at least they will provide us with more space to breathe.” His smile was bitter. “Our war continues, the war we fight with one another, the war we wage against ourselves. It has its champions, good and bad, and sometimes one or the other has the stronger hand. Our place in this war is often defined for us. It is defined for many because they are powerless to choose. They are homeless or destitute. They are a minority of sex or race or religion. They are poor or disenfranchised. They are abused or disabled, physically or mentally, and they have forgotten or never learned how to stand up for themselves.

First, to map out the boundaries within which all discussion must go on, I take it for certain that the physical satisfaction of homo-sexual desires is sin. This leaves the homo, no worse off than any normal person who is, for whatever reason, prevented from marrying. Second, our speculations on the cause of the abnormality are not what matters and we must be content with ignorance. The disciples were not told why (in terms of efficient cause) the man was born blind (Jn. IX 1-3): only the final cause, that the works of God shd. be made manifest in him. This suggests that in homosexuality, as in every other tribulation, those works can be made manifest: i.e. that every disability conceals a vocation, if only we can find it, wh. will ‘turn the necessity to glorious gain.’ Of course, the first step must be to accept any privations wh., if so disabled, we can’t lawfully get. The homo, has to accept sexual abstinence just as the poor man has to forego otherwise lawful pleasures because he wd. be unjust to his wife and children if he took them. That is merely a negative condition. What shd. the positive life of the homo, be? I wish I had a letter wh. a pious male homo., now dead, once wrote to me—but of course it was the sort of letter one takes care to destroy. He believed that his necessity could be turned to spiritual gain: that there were certain kinds of sympathy and understanding, a certain social role which mere men and mere women could not give. But it is all horribly vague— too long ago. Perhaps any homo, who humbly accepts his cross and puts himself under Divine guidance will, however, be shown the way. I am sure that any attempt to evade it (e.g. by mock-or quasi-marriage with a member of one’s own sex even if this does not lead to any carnal act) is the wrong way. Jealousy (this another homo, admitted to me) is far more rampant and deadly among them than among us. And I don’t think little concessions like wearing the clothes of the other sex in private is the right line either. It is the duties, the burdens, the characteristic virtues of the other sex, I expect, which the patient must try to cultivate. I have mentioned humility because male homos. (I don’t know about women) are rather apt, the moment they find you don’t treat them with horror and contempt, to rush to the opposite pole and start implying that they are somehow superior to the normal type. I wish I could be more definite. All I have really said is that, like all other tribulations, it must be offered to God and His guidance how to use it must be sought.

When I hung up the phone that night I had a wet face and a broken heart. The lack of compassion I witnessed every day had finally exhausted me. I looked around my crowded office, at the stacks of records and papers, each pile filled with tragic stories, and I suddenly didn’t want to be surrounded by all this anguish and misery. As I sat there, I thought myself a fool for having tried to fix situations that were so fatally broken. It’s time to stop. I can’t do this anymore. For the first time I realized my life was just full of brokenness. I worked in a broken system of justice. My clients were broken by mental illness, poverty, and racism. They were torn apart by disease, drugs and alcohol, pride, fear, and anger. I thought of Joe Sullivan and of Trina, Antonio, Ian, and dozens of other broken children we worked with, struggling to survive in prison. I thought of people broken by war, like Herbert Richardson; people broken by poverty, like Marsha Colbey; people broken by disability, like Avery Jenkins. In their broken state, they were judged and condemned by people whose commitment to fairness had been broken by cynicism, hopelessness, and prejudice. I looked at my computer and at the calendar on the wall. I looked again around my office at the stacks of files. I saw the list of our staff, which had grown to nearly forty people. And before I knew it, I was talking to myself aloud: “I can just leave. Why am I doing this?” It took me a while to sort it out, but I realized something sitting there while Jimmy Dill was being killed at Holman prison. After working for more than twenty-five years, I understood that I don’t do what I do because it’s required or necessary or important. I don’t do it because I have no choice. I do what I do because I’m broken, too. My years of struggling against inequality, abusive power, poverty, oppression, and injustice had finally revealed something to me about myself. Being close to suffering, death, executions, and cruel punishments didn’t just illuminate the brokenness of others; in a moment of anguish and heartbreak, it also exposed my own brokenness. You can’t effectively fight abusive power, poverty, inequality, illness, oppression, or injustice and not be broken by it. We are all broken by something. We have all hurt someone and have been hurt. We all share the condition of brokenness even if our brokenness is not equivalent. I desperately wanted mercy for Jimmy Dill and would have done anything to create justice for him, but I couldn’t pretend that his struggle was disconnected from my own. The ways in which I have been hurt––and have hurt others––are different from the ways Jimmy Dill suffered and caused suffering. But our shared brokenness connected us. Paul Farmer, the renowned physician who has spent his life trying to cure the world’s sickest and poorest people, once quoted me something that the writer Thomas Merton said: We are bodies of broken bones. I guess I’d always known but never fully considered that being broken is what makes us human. We all have our reasons. Sometimes we’re fractured by the choices we make; sometimes we’re shattered by things we would never have chosen. But our brokenness is also the source of our common humanity, the basis for our shared search for comfort, meaning, and healing. Our shared vulnerability and imperfection nurtures and sustains our capacity for compassion. We have a choice. We can embrace our humanness, which means embracing our broken natures and the compassion that remains our best hope for healing. Or we can deny our brokenness, forswear compassion, and, as a result, deny our own humanity.

No one is talking about this invisible epidemic. Yet it’s the leading cause of disability, affects 1.1 billion people worldwide1—one in six children, one in two elderly—and will cripple one in four people during their lifetime.2 I am talking about the epidemic of broken brains. We refer to our “broken brains” by many names—depression, anxiety, memory loss, brain fog, attention deficit disorder or ADD, autism, and dementia to name a few.

As illustrated by Woman on the Edge of Time, and as manifested in the furor surrounding McCullough and Duchesneau's reproductive choices, disability is often seen as a difference that has no place in the future. Disability is a problem that must be eliminated, a hindrance to one's future opportunities, a drag on one's quality of life. Speaking directly about the Duchesneau and McCullough case, bioethicist Alta Charo argues, “The question is whether the parents have violated the sacred duty of parenthood, which is to maximize to some reasonable degree the advantages available to their children. I'm loath to say it, but I think it's a shame to set limits on a child's potential.” Similar claims are made in opposition to same-sex parenting; critics argue that children raised in queer households will have a lower quality of life than children raised in heterosexual ones. However, in both of these situations, it is assumed not only that disability and queerness inherently and irreversibly lower one's quality of life but also that there is only one possible understanding of “quality of life” and that everyone knows what “it” is without discussion or elaboration.

A protected group or protected class is a group of people qualified for special protection by a law, policy, or similar authority. In the United States, the term is frequently used in connection with employees and employment. U.S. federal law protects individuals from discrimination or harassment based on the following nine protected classes: sex, race, age, disability, color, creed, national origin, religion, or genetic information (added in 2008). Many state laws also give certain protected groups special protection against harassment and discrimination, as do many employer policies. Although it is not required by federal law, state law and employer policies may also protect employees from harassment or discrimination based on marital status or sexual orientation. The following characteristics are "protected" by United States federal anti-discrimination law: Race – Civil Rights Act of 1964 Religion – Civil Rights Act of 1964 National origin – Civil Rights Act of 1964 Age (40 and over) – Age Discrimination in Employment Act of 1967 Sex – Equal Pay Act of 1963 and Civil Rights Act of 1964 Sexual orientation and gender identity as of Bostock v. Clayton County – Civil Rights Act of 1964 Pregnancy – Pregnancy Discrimination Act Familial status – Civil Rights Act of 1968 Title VIII: Prohibits discrimination for having or not having children Disability status – Rehabilitation Act of 1973 and Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 Veteran status – Vietnam Era Veterans' Readjustment Assistance Act of 1974 and Uniformed Services Employment and Reemployment Rights Act Genetic information – Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act Individual states can and do create other classes for protection under state law.

We have an almost equal mix of children with and without disabilities. Thorin wouldn’t be the only child with Down syndrome.” Ward asked, “How’d you create that ratio? Why would parents when’d their children here if they didn’t have a disability?” Louise smiled. “Some parents believe diversity of all kinds is important to their children’s development. Also we have numerous siblings here. Parents want their children at the same school.

Indiana had already put some of these ideas into law. For sixteen years, the state tried to keep those who were demonstrably stupid, sickly, disabled, or prone to criminality, vice, or drink from ever having children of their own. Starting in 1907, with passage of the world’s first eugenic sterilization law, Indiana attempted to cull undesirables from inside its borders—“bad seeds.” The preamble of the law stated: “Whereas heredity plays a most important part in the transmission of crime, idiocy and imbecility . . .

If we have all the career success in the world but our children resent us or, worse, are disabled by our insensitivity or lack of empathy toward their needs when they are young and become depressed, anxious, or cannot form and sustain deep emotional connections with others, are we truly satisfied as mothers?

That is why the enforcement of the status quo is only ever a secondary method of preventing change – a mopping-up operation. The primary method is always – and can only be – to disable the source of new ideas, namely human creativity. So static societies always have traditions of bringing up children in ways that disable their creativity and critical faculties. That ensures that most of the new ideas that would have been capable of changing the society are never thought of in the first place.

I believe much of our surprise and denial relate to our ingrained fear of disability. On an existential level, we all fear the loss of our physical and mental capacities, in almost the same way we fear our eventual death. So, we console ourselves with the belief that disability is someone else’s problem. It’s rare, esoteric, not likely to personally impact us or our children.

What to Do Tonight Spend private time with your child, ideally without electronics. Take turns with each child if you have more than one, so that the ratio is one-on-one. It is remarkably healing for kids and will help you to enjoy them. It also makes them feel like they are your number one priority. If you’re highly anxious, do something about it. Treating anxiety is one of the best things you can do for yourself and your family. Consider participating in cognitive behavioral therapy: you can learn very effective strategies for identifying and “talking back to” the distorted and unproductive thoughts that contribute to high anxiety. Learn to meditate. Take a yoga class. Be very regular in your exercise routine. Spend time in nature. Get more sleep. Socialize more with friends if it helps you feel calm. Avoid making decisions for your child based on fear. If you find yourself thinking, “I’m afraid if I don’t do this now, then—” stop. Do what you feel is right now, not what you feel you have to because of what you’re afraid will happen if you don’t. If your child is struggling, schedule a short time every day for you to worry about his or her problems. Literally write it into your planner. This will let your brain know that it is safe not to worry all day long. Remember who’s responsible for what. It cannot be your responsibility to see that everything goes well for your children at all times. If you are very worried about your teenager and have talked through the issues together many times, write your child a short letter summarizing your concerns and offering any help the child might need. Then promise that you will not bring the issue up again for a month. When you break your promise (because you will) apologize and recommit to it. Get out a piece of paper and draw a vertical line in the middle. In the left-hand column, write statements such as the following: “It’s okay for Jeremy to have a learning disability,” “It’s okay that Sarah doesn’t have any friends right now,” “It’s okay for Ben to be depressed right now.” In the right-hand column, write down the automatic thoughts that come to your mind in response (likely rebuttal) to these statements. Then question these automatic thoughts. Ask questions such as, “Can I be absolutely sure that this thought is true?” “Who would I be if I didn’t believe this?” This kind of self-questioning exercise, developed by author and speaker Byron Katie and others, can serve as a useful tool for discovering the thoughts that trap you into negative judgments.18 Create a stress-reduction plan for yourself. Can you get more exercise? More sleep? What calms you down and how can you do more of it? Don’t make yourself available to your kids at the expense of your own well-being. Wall off some “me” time. Model self-acceptance and tell your kids what you’re doing.

It didn’t take us long to see how it all worked out. Any man who tried to play straight, had to refuse himself everything. He lost his taste for any pleasure, he hated to smoke a nickel’s worth of tobacco or chew a stick of gum, worrying whether somebody had more need for that nickel. He felt ashamed of every mouthful of food he swallowed, wondering whose weary night of overtime had paid for it, knowing that his food was not his by right, miserably wishing to be cheated rather than to cheat, to be a sucker, but not a blood-sucker. He wouldn’t marry, he wouldn’t help his folks back home, he wouldn’t put an extra burden on ‘the family.’ Besides, if he still had some sort of sense of responsibility, he couldn’t marry or bring children into the world, when he could plan nothing, promise nothing, count on nothing. But the shiftless and the irresponsible had a field day of it. They bred babies, they got girls into trouble, they dragged in every worthless relative they had from all over the country, every unmarried pregnant sister, for an extra ‘disability allowance, ’ they got more sicknesses than any doctor could disprove, they ruined their clothing, their furniture, their homes—what the hell, ‘the family’ was paying for it! They found more ways of getting in ‘need’ than the rest of us could ever imagine—they developed a special skill for it, which was the only ability they showed.

Why do Southerners eat Black Eyed Peas on New Year’s Day? The story of the Southern tradition of eating black-eyed peas as the first meal on New Year's Day is generally believed to date back to the winter of 1864 - 1865. When Union General William T. Sherman led his invading troops on their destructive march through Georgia, the fields of black-eyed peas were largely left untouched because they were deemed fit only for animals. The Union foragers took everything, plundered the land, and left what they could not take, burning or in shambles. But two things did remain, the lowly peas and good Ol’ Southern salted pork. As a result, the humble yet nourishing black-eyed peas saved surviving Southerners - mainly women, children, elderly and the disabled veterans of the Confederate army - from mass starvation and were thereafter regarded as a symbol of good luck. The peas are said to represent good fortune. Certainly the starving Southern families and soldiers were fortunate to have those meager supplies. According to the tradition and folklore, the peas are served with several other dishes that symbolically represent good fortune, health, wealth, and prosperity in the coming year. Some folks still traditionally cook the black-eyed peas with a silver dime in the pot as a symbol of good fortune. Greens represent wealth and paper money. Any greens will do, but in the South the most popular are collards, mustard greens, turnip greens, and cabbage. Cornbread - a regular staple among Southerners in the absence of wheat - symbolizes gold and is very good for soaking up the juice from the greens on the plate. You should always have some cornbread on hand in your kitchen anyway. Good for dinner and in the morning with syrup. Pork symbolizes bountiful prosperity, and then progressing into the year ahead. Ham and hog jowls are typical with the New Year meal, though sometimes bacon will be used, too. Pigs root forward, so it’s the symbolic moving forward for the New Year. Tomatoes are often eaten with this meal as well. They represent health and wealth. So reflect on those stories when you sit down at your family table and enjoy this humble, uniquely Southern meal every New Year’s Day. Be thankful for what this year did give you in spite of the bad, and hope and pray for better days that are coming ahead for you.

the huge variation across people in terms of attention span, inhibitory control, and reward sensitivity is strongly related to genes, yet such differences were not terribly salient or impairing until society decided that all children needed to sit still in classrooms.

Left-Handedness The 10 percent of human beings who are left-handed have long been considered unlucky, deceptive, or even evil in cultures the world over. During the Spanish Inquisition the Catholic Church condemned those who used their left hand. Zulu tribesmen of the 1800s placed the left hands of children into holes filled with boiling water to discourage their use. The nineteenth-century criminologist and white supremacist Cesare Lombroso lent dangerous authority to the long-standing social stigma, claiming a scientific connection between left-handedness, moral degeneracy, and the “savage races.” No wonder schoolteachers continued discouraging it in students, often through physical abuse. J. W. Conway’s 1935 On Curing the Disability and Disease of Left-Handedness argued that being a lefty was a handicap in a world that was industrializing and standardizing. Handicap? Turns out being a southpaw is a fast lane to the West Wing. Seven of our last fifteen presidents—that’s a whopping 47 percent—have been left-handed. I’m not sure what that means but I’m sure a CNN panel will eventually sort it out.

Institutionalization and ‘special housing' At the time of the passage of the ADA, states still had laws on the books requiring people with mental disabilities to be institutionalized. Not even slaves had been so restricted. "Spurred by the eugenics movement," write legal historians Morton Horwitz, Martha Field and Martha Minow, "every state in the country passed laws that singled out people with mental or physical disabilities for institutionalization." The laws made it clear that the state's purpose was not to benefit disabled people but to segregate them from "normal" society. Thus, statutes noted that the disabled were segregated and institutionalized for being a "menace to society" [and] so that "society [might be] relieved from the heavy economic and moral losses arising from the existence at large of these unfortunate persons." "The state of Washington made it a crime for a parent to refuse state-ordered institutionalization," they wrote; "once children were institutionalized, many state laws required parents to waive all custody rights." Justice Thurgood Marshall wrote in the 1985 Cleburne Supreme Court decision (the decision saying that people with mental retardation did not constitute a "discrete and insular" minority) that this "regime of state-mandated segregation and degradation [had] in its virulence and bigotry rivaled, and indeed paralleled, the worst excesses of Jim Crow. Massive custodial institutions were built to warehouse the retarded for life." Yet they continue today. In 1999, the Supreme Court in its Olmstead decision acknowledged that the ADA did in fact require states to provide services to people with disabilities in the "most integrated setting"; but institutionalization continued, because federal funds  -- Medicaid, mostly  -- had a built-in "institutional bias," the result of savvy lobbying over the years by owners of institutions like nursing homes: In no state could one be denied a "bed" in a nursing home, but in only a few states could one use those same Medicaid dollars to get services in one's home that were usually much less expensive. Ongoing battles were waged to close down the institutions, to allow the people in them to live on their own or in small group settings. But parents often fought to keep them open. When they did close, other special facilities cropped up.

Dr. Christian Guilleminault, a sleep researcher at Stanford, found that children who experienced no apnea events at all—only heavy breathing and light snoring, or “increased respiratory effort”—could suffer from mood disorders, blood pressure derangements, learning disabilities, and more.

If the plan succeeded, it would be a step to bring about the kind of golden age envisioned by Confucius millennia ago: “And then men would care for all elders as if they were their own parents, love all children as if they were their own children. The aged would grow old and die in security; the youthful would have opportunities to contribute and prosper; and children would grow up under the guidance and protection of all. Widows, orphans, the disabled, the diseased—everyone would be cared for and loved.

Paternalism often must transform its subjects into children or people with childlike qualities. This is the most salient aspect of paternalism as it concerns disability. Paternalism is experienced as the bystander grabs the arm of a blind person and, without asking, “helps” the person across the street. This happens for wheelchair users as well. It is the experience of the waiter asking a companion of a person with a disability, “What does she want to eat?” It is the institutionalization of people against their wishes. It is the child taught only handicrafts, or the charity pleading for money to help cute crippled kids. It is these and a thousand other examples of everyday life. It is most of all, however, the assumption that people with disabilities are intrinsically inferior and unable to take responsibility for their own lives.

If genius springs from genetics, a meritocracy is hardly more just than the divine right of kings; it, too, mythologizes inherent superiority. If genius results from labor, then brilliant people deserve the kudos and wealth they reap. The communist perspective is that everyone can be a genius if he will only work at it; the fascist perspective is that born geniuses are a different species from the rest of humanity. Many people fall short of their potential through lack of discipline, but a visit to a coal mine will amply demonstrate that hard work on its own neither constitutes genius nor guarantees riches. The history of high intelligence is no less political than the history of intellectual disability or of mental illness.

In 1973, Dr. Stanley Plotkin penned a letter to the New England Journal of Medicine in which he justified his experiments on vulnerable intellectually disabled children, saying they “are humans in form but not in social potential.

Because children of color are much more likely to be exposed to lead at a young age, it is devastating to think about what will happen to an entire generation of Flint children. What promises can you make to a child about the world of possibility ahead of them when the state has poisoned their bloodstreams and bones such that their behavioral self-control and language comprehension are impaired? How many graves has the government of Michigan set aside for the casualties of the water crisis that will end with a gunshot in fifteen years' time? We all know how cops respond to kids of color with intellectual disabilities or mental illness.

Control is the product of your disabled will. It is an attempt to will what cannot be willed. You cannot change another person. You cannot fix your parents, spouse, lover or children. You cannot control their lives or their pain.

Disability isn’t a choice, but neurodevelopmental disabilities are often treated as though they are.

for Falasteen the boy i adored at sixteen gifted me his keffiyeh feeling guilty for living when others were killed simply for existing i haven’t seen him in sixteen years but think of him often these days his grandmother’s purse still carrying keys to their home believing they’d return in weeks can it even be called a key if what it unlocked is no longer there? we’d sneak onto mall rooftops & pretend shooting only happened with stars! 'we have a duty of memory,' he said, 'so they’ll kill us all until only the soil is witness' how could i reply? i sat in my liquid silence today there are nurseries of martyrs they bomb babies for they fear enemies hiding between pacifiers & tiny wrists bomb hospitals because enemies hide in ICU bedpans bomb schools because enemies hide in children’s bags bomb the oldest mosques & churches because enemies hide in rosary beads & votive candles they bomb journalists because enemies are hiding under their PRESS vests & helmets bomb poets because enemies hide in pages of peace poems the elderly are bombed because enemies hide under their canes the disabled are bombed because they harbour enemies in their artificial limbs they raze & burn all the ancient trees because enemies make bombs from olives they bomb water treatment plants because enemies are now water & so it goes: justification provided exoneration granted business as usual & the boy I adored has green-grey eyes the colour of fig leaves we don’t speak but i wish to tell him 'i’m sorry the world is a blade i’m sorry home is blood & bones i’m sorry music is sirens & wails i’m sorry night is infinite' but the boy I adored has grey-green eyes the colour of forgotten ash

As Bagnall and Eyal contend, the difference in the perception of the two forms of deinstitutionalization was due to different framings of social worth, in which those labeled with I/DD were seen as “forever children” and in need of guardianship, protection, and education, while those with labels of mental illness were constructed as “autonomous citizens.”71 Because mental illness was perceived as an illness and postwar sentiments believed in cure, people with psych labels were seen as self-reliant individuals who were only temporarily in need of assistance.

Humans are much the same.20 Children whose gifts or disabilities make them seem bizarre, for example, manage to find each other and to congregate.21 Among our kind it’s called validation. Without others on our wavelength the strangeness of our emotions can make us feel we’re losing our minds.

This is a shift from the seemingly axiomatic statement about “overrepresentation,” of children of color in special education or of people of color in prisons, to understanding this debilitation and forces of what I call racial criminal pathologization as a core of institutions that uphold settler racial “democracies.” Puar shows that disability under capitalism and empire is not overrepresented, as if this is an unfortunate side effect of these regimes. Rather, it is the core function of the system as is—to incapacitate, punish, contain.

Until a child that has issues with learning is diagnosed by "an expert" as having a learning disability, nothing is wrong with that child except that his motivation and feelings about the said "learning" is inadequate.

Being neurodivergent doesn’t mean a person is broken or needs to be fixed. They need support to access the world around them. The solution to helping someone who needs a wheelchair get up steps isn’t to teach them to walk; it is to build a ramp. The solution for someone who has a disability based on their neurological wiring isn’t to tell them to try harder; it is to build (and help them build for themselves) accommodations that allow them to thrive.

Recognizing a disability requires us to become comfortable with vulnerability. Self-advocacy begins with recognizing disability without shame. When we give our children permission to recognize their difficulties, we liberate them to ask for accommodations. We empower them to look beyond the status quo and find the solutions that work for them, instead of trying to use the solutions that work for other people. And we provide a framework for self-understanding and self-acceptance that is the key for neurodivergent people of all ages.

Dr. Sundari Mase, offers extensive experience as Team Lead for CDC's Travel Epidemiology and Risk Mitigation Team in the Division of Global Migration Health. With a background in neurobiology and internal medicine, she previously served as a Teaching Assistant and worked with disabled children before transitioning to public health. Her significant contributions have garnered recognition, including honors like the North Bay Women in Business Award and the Global Citizen Award.

Dyslexia in Children: Causes and Symptoms Each child learns and develops at his own pace and reading is no different from any other skill. According to Dr Monika Chhajed, MBBS, Fellowship Paediatric Neurology and Epilepsy, DCH, DNB, Consultant- Paediatric Neurologist, it is common for children to find reading challenging at some point or another. If, however, learning to read becomes a struggle, they may have a learning disorder or dyslexia. If you notice that your child is finding it difficult to read, consult the best paediatric neurologist in Chandigarh at the earliest. What is Dyslexia? Dyslexia is associated with trouble learning to read. It affects the child’s ability to recognize and manipulate the sounds in language. Dr Monika Chhajed tells us that children with dyslexia go through a difficult time decoding new works or even breaking them into chunks to sound out. This leads to difficulty with reading, writing, and spelling. A lot of people believe that dyslexia reflects a child’s intelligence. It is, however, not true. Dyslexia can be thought of as a gap between a student’s ability and achievement. Some children with dyslexia even cope with their peers. Their strength, however, begins to reduce after the third grade or so. What Causes Dyslexia? Dyslexia is caused by individual differences in the parts of the brain that enable reading. It often runs in families. Dyslexia is also linked to certain genes that affect how the brain processes reading and language. If you have a family history of dyslexia or learning disabilities, visit the best paediatric neurologist in Chandigarh for consultation.

Discussion Questions 1. An institution for people with disabilities, the Willowbrook State School opened in 1947 on Staten Island, New York, and remained in operation until 1987. Despite having a maximum capacity of 4,000 people, by 1965 it housed over 6,000 intellectually and physically disabled children and adults, becoming the largest state-run mental institution of its kind in the United States. Due to staff and money shortages, there was only one nurse per ward, one or two attendants per 35 to 125 residents, and more than 200 residents living in houses built for fewer than 100. An estimated 12,000 residents died at Willowbrook from 1950 to 1980, approximately 400 a year, due to neglect, violence, lack of nutrition, and medical mismanagement or experimentation. What was your awareness of Willowbrook State School before reading The Lost Girls of

We are men! We are strong and fierce and independent! But God means to teach us that we are not as strong as we might think. In fact, we are so weak that we desperately need the help of others. We need to be strengthened by the elderly, we need to be taught by the disabled, we need to be encouraged by the children, we need to be stirred by the unloved, we need to be humbled by the feeble. It is in the local church that we learn to run well.

The “dumb kid myth” is the belief that a child with ADHD has an IQ lower than other children and will never be able to think or learn well. The reality is that no scientific research has ever shown that the IQ of children with ADHD is lower than other children, including those without any learning disability or disorder. Children who have ADHD have the same intellectual potential as any other child. They

The current Bishop Prelate of Opus Dei caused a huge outcry in 1997, when he asserted that 90% of disabled children, according to 'scientific research', were born to couples who had 'not entered into marriage in a pure state', and were thus paying for the sinfulness of their parents.

We believe in God, Creator of the world; and in Jesus Christ, the Redeemer of creation. We believe in the Holy Spirit, through whom we acknowledge God’s gifts, and we repent of our sin in misusing these gifts to idolatrous ends. We affirm the natural world as God’s handiwork and dedicate ourselves to its preservation, enhancement, and faithful use by humankind. We joyfully receive for ourselves and others the blessings of community, sexuality, marriage, and the family. We commit ourselves to the rights of men, women, children, youth, young adults, the aging, and people with disabilities; to improvement of the quality of life; and to the rights and dignity of all persons. We believe in the right and duty of persons to work for the glory of God and the good of themselves and others and in the protection of their welfare in so doing; in the rights to property as a trust from God, collective bargaining, and responsible consumption; and in the elimination of economic and social distress. We dedicate ourselves to peace throughout the world, to the rule of justice and law among nations, and to individual freedom for all people of the world. We believe in the present and final triumph of God’s Word in human affairs and gladly accept our commission to manifest the life of the gospel in the world. Amen.

Some parents manufacture an affirmative construction of their child's disability to disguise their despair, while others have a deep and genuine experience of joy in caring for disabled children, and that sometimes the first stance can generate the second.

In typical circumstances, to have children who won't care for you in your dotage is to be King Lear. Disability changes the reciprocity equation.

Those, disabled people, however, may be angered by the prospect of interventions that would make them function more like non-disabled people without mitigating the hard reality of their disabling condition. Some may even curse the contraptions that keep them going.

dyslexic children who’d fought to overcome their disability in order to read Harry and by doing so realized they could overcome dyslexia almost entirely.

Lots of women who have children work. Being a mother isn’t a disability. You're an educated man, you know I'm right.

Born on March 20, 1971, she celebrated her 100th birthday this past March. During the war she toured the battle zones, where British forces were fighting by giving concerts for the troops. The songs most remembered from that era are We'll Meet Again, The White Cliffs of Dover, A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square and There'll Always Be an England. During the Second World War she earned the title of “the Allied Forces Sweetheart.” And in 1945 she was awarded the British War Medal and the Burma Star for her untiring devotion to the Crown and the men in uniform. As a songwriter and actress, her recordings and performances were enormously popular. This popularity remained solid after the war with recording of Auf Wiedersehen Sweetheart, My Son, My Son and I Love This Land, which was released to mark the end of the Falklands War. In 2009, at age 92, she became the oldest living artist to top the UK Albums Chart, with We'll Meet Again, The Very Best of Vera Lynn. Commemorating her 100th birthday she released the album Vera Lynn 100, in 2017, which number 3 on the charts, making her the oldest recording artist in the world and the first centenarian performer to have an album in the charts. Vera Lynn devoted much time working with wounded ex-servicemen, disabled children, and breast cancer. She is held in great affection by veterans of the Second World War and in 2000 was named the Briton who best exemplified the spirit of the 20th century.

Intuitively we all know that it is better to feel than to not feel. Our emotions are not a luxury but an essential aspect of our makeup. We have them not just for the pleasure of feeling but because they have crucial survival value. They orient us, interpret the world for us, give us vital information without which we cannot thrive. They tell us what is dangerous and what is benign, what threatens our existence and what will nurture our growth. Imagine how disabled we would be if we could not see or hear or taste or sense heat or cold or physical pain. To shut down emotions is to lose an indispensable part of our sensory apparatus and, beyond that, an indispensable part of who we are. Emotions are what make life worthwhile, exciting, challenging, and meaningful. They drive our explorations of the world, motivate our discoveries, and fuel our growth. Down to the very cellular level, human beings are either in defensive mode or in growth mode, but they cannot be in both at the same time. When children become invulnerable, they cease to relate to life as infinite possibility, to themselves as boundless potential, and to the world as a welcoming and nurturing arena for their self-expression. The invulnerability imposed by peer orientation imprisons children in their limitations and fears. No wonder so many of them these days are being treated for depression, anxiety, and other disorders. The love, attention, and security only adults can offer liberates children from the need to make themselves invulnerable and restores to them that potential for life and adventure that can never come from risky activities, extreme sports, or drugs. Without that safety our children are forced to sacrifice their capacity to grow and mature psychologically, to enter into meaningful relationships, and to pursue their deepest and most powerful urges for self-expression. In the final analysis, the flight from vulnerability is a flight from the self. If we do not hold our children close to us, the ultimate cost is the loss of their ability to hold on to their own truest selves.

Vision Our vision is that all children receive the developmental services they need to live their best life. Mission Our mission is to enable infants, children, and adults with disabilities to achieve their maximum independence, and to provide support for the families who love and care for them.

Developing a business depends on many factors. But you should basically understand the exchange between value. In other words, you must provide value to receive equal value. If you look at single people, you can see that they can’t provide any value – they don’t smile, dress, talk or behave in a way that makes others want to spend time, much less a life, with them. Relationships and Business are not much different. In a business, people know that appearance and the way you talk to a costumer is as important as the value of your product, and that’s why brands sell, even when their products have no quality. For example, in shopping malls you can see shops packed with people buying clothes that have no value and will be ruined or out of fashion very soon, because the brand is selling an image, not quality anymore. China, on the other hand, managed to compete in the world markets by reducing price over quality, and is now paying the price of a very bad reputation, as most people don’t trust Chinese brands anymore. This is already impacting the economy, so I don’t know what will happen in the next years. It’s all in the hands of the politicians and the internationalization of the companies. Actually, that’s why this Chinese government sends its companies to other countries. And yet, I just said this to explain the relation between value and product. But here’s another. I tried to share what I know about Learning with Teachers, Parents and Psychologists, and nobody cared. Besides, what I earned in helping children with learning disabilities was a very low payment, and I had to quit that as I couldn’t afford to pay an apartment and daily expenses with such job. However, there are people making thousands of dollars with drugs that have no effect, toilets for cats and pet-rocks. In other words, is never about what the world needs but what the world wants.

Some patients who are profoundly multiply disabled are incontinent, smear faeces, cut themselves, dribble, smell, spit, bite, eat mucous, pull their hair, poke their eyes and are hard to understand. Shock at feeling a primitive response of disgust can make the therapist unable to think properly. (...) Sexually abused children and adults who display eroticised behaviour in the therapy room—stripping, exposing themselves, masturbating—can also cause stress for the therapist, especially on the first such occasion.

The British Association of Art Therapists defines art therapy as: ...a form of psychotherapy that uses art media as its primary mode of communication. It is practised by qualified, registered Art Therapists who work with children, young people, adults and the elderly.[4] Clients who can use art therapy may have a wide range of difficulties, disabilities or diagnoses. These include, for example, emotional, behavioral or mental health problems, learning or physical disabilities, life-limiting conditions, brain-injury or neurological conditions and physical illness.

Beloved children split in two. A child-with: part child, part autism. A part to love and a part to hate. A part to cultivate and a part to eliminate.. Such cultural orientation did not force [Karen] McCarron's .. hand in killing her child, but it nonetheless provides the necessary conditions .. to make this kind of violence possible and even—for those of us monitoring the headlines—normal.

Consider the power of love. I remember a mother I met once as I made a professional house call. This woman was confined in an iron lung. The ravages of polio had effectively destroyed all the breathing muscles so that her life was completely dependent upon the large metal tank and the electrical motor that powered its noisy bellows. While there, I watched her three children as they related to their mother. The oldest interrupted our work to ask permission to go to a friend's house for an hour. Later the second child asked her mother for help with arithmetic. Finally the youngest child, so small that she couldn't see her mother's face directly, looked up at the mother's image in a mirror that had been placed over her head and asked, "Mommy, may I have a cookie?" I've never forgotten that lesson on the power of love. This woman, virtually disabled and certainly incapable of any degree of physical enforcement of parental authority, sweetly influenced that home solely with the power to love.

At that time the Roman Catholic Church routinely refused the sacraments of Holy Communion and Confirmation to intellectually disabled children, especially those with Down syndrome. Even today some local churches still refuse the sacrament to those with intellectual impairments, in spite of a directive from the church during the latter part of the twentieth century that clergy should offer the sacraments to them.

Children are especially dependent on their parents and caregivers to provide the stability and unconditional love that will help them establish a core of resiliency and a sense of self-efficacy to draw upon when faced with adversity later in life. Childhood events that can lead to PTSD and serious difficulties in regulating emotions, and are often linked in research to cutting, certainly include the most abject forms of abuse—physical, sexual, and emotional. But a child's emotional response system—which is controlled by the still developing brain, the sympathetic nervous system, and stress hormones—can be thrown off-kilter by a wide range of painful experiences, whether they are the result of intentionally abusive acts or purely accidental circumstances. Confusing and overwhelming feelings experienced as a result of adoption or abandonment, natural disasters (such as hurricanes or earthquakes,) deaths in the family, serious illness or disability, or witnessing or being the victim of an accident or violent crime can result in symptoms of posttraumatic stress. These kinds of taxing and traumatic events, as well as other societal stressors—from school bullying to identity struggles to perfectionism to body-image issues and the eating disorders often associated with them—have been linked to cutting in various populations.

Since we are all on a continuum of performance, how can we identify one specific point that determines a "disability?" Why not instead just provide children with the additional assistance they need and forgo applying a questionable label?

a basic income is arguably more justified by the need for economic security than by a desire to eradicate poverty. Martin Luther King captured several aspects of this rather well in his 1967 book, Where Do We Go from Here? [A] host of positive psychological changes inevitably will result from widespread economic security. The dignity of the individual will flourish when the decisions concerning his life are in his own hands, when he has the assurance that his income is stable and certain, and when he knows that he has the means to seek self-improvement. Personal conflicts between husband, wife and children will diminish when the unjust measurement of human worth on a scale of dollars is eliminated.15 Twentieth-century welfare states tried to reduce certain risks of insecurity with contributory insurance schemes. In an industrial economy, the probability of so-called ‘contingency risks’, such as illness, workplace accidents, unemployment and disability, could be estimated actuarially. A system of social insurance could be constructed that worked reasonably well for the majority. In a predominantly ‘tertiary’ economy, in which more people are in and out of temporary, part-time and casual jobs and are doing a lot of unpaid job-related work outside fixed hours and workplaces, this route to providing basic security has broken down. The

Have you ever noticed that autistic adults who apply on their own for disability benefits from the government –no matter where they live- are almost always turned down on the first try? Yet it seems that for kids, when funding is applied for by schools on their behalf, the dollars fly into school coffers. Have you ever stopped to wonder why that is? How does that happen? Children get funded because schools fill out the necessary application forms in a way that demonstrates a child is grossly developmentally challenged, and has special needs that are so expensive as to be unaffordable by the school district. An ADHD diagnosis used to get schools much of the funding they needed for a child. Now it’s an autism diagnosis. But

While grief is a natural part of any special needs parent's journey, it may be processed somewhat differently for the family affected by a diagnosis with a wide range of outcomes, such as autism. Every child with or without a disability is unique. And no special-needs diagnosis affects any two children the same way.

As church leaders, our opinions on these topics aren't necessary to effectively love and support families who have children with disabilities. Encourage ministry team members and volunteers to remember the calling of the church: to enable families to develop a growing relationship with Jesus Christ.

In churches that care about special needs inclusion I have found that the single biggest determinant for a child's success is the strength of the relationship between the church and the child's parents. When church leaders and parents are in general agreement regarding a child's abilities and needs, problems tend to get solved with greater speed and ingenuity. But when parents view their child's special needs as nonexistent or insignificant, it creates extra work (and stress!) for everyone serving that child. This is the reason that it is sometimes easier for churches to successfully include children with complex needs that are obvious than it is for churches to successfully include high-functioning children whose disabilities are less obvious. When parents dismiss a child's legitimate need for even occasional assistance it makes it really hard for the child and the volunteers serving them to experience success.

We help all children learn healthy ways of relating when we create environments that reflect real life. In contrast, we re doing the child with disability as well as the typically developing peer a disservice if we aren't looking for opportunities to facilitate their interaction. And as Christians, I would add that the church is naturally set up to adopt an inclusion mindset, because we follow Jesus and know He modeled love and value for all children.

Showing participants in a positive light may be the first time some parents have had their child celebrated at all, let alone publicly. The church cannot underestimate the meaningful way this affects a family of a child with special needs. Using the public venue of a worship service will shape the entire church's view of disability, reminding them of God's value for everyone.

The U.S. state system continually keeps its vulnerable populations squeezed in a kind of two-fold pincer’s movement. In the first movement, anything like a “safety net” for the economically vulnerable is slashed. Then, in the second movement, government initiatives offer mainly the “dragnet,” ramped-up policing that swells prison populations and increases carceral violence. Across decades of social service cutbacks, such as the 1996 welfare reform bill that cast 6.1 million off of welfare (315,000 of them poor children with disabilities[63]) there arose, concurrently, omnibus crime bills that mandated long-term sentences.

Do you know what one school supplier suggests that “special-education teachers” do for students who struggle with dyslexia, ADD, or other learning disabilities? They want the teachers to hypnotize the child to help them reach the higher levels of potential within themselves. They actually say in the catalog that spirit guides will assist the child, and the teacher should help the child get to know his or her guide. Of course, the teachers don’t inform the parents that their children will be exposed to demonic forces. The parents naively assume their children are receiving advanced reading lessons.

Developing a business depends on many factors. But you should basically understand the exchange between value. In other words, you must provide value to receive equal value. If you look at single people, you can see that they can’t provide any value – they don’t smile, dress, talk or behave in a way that makes others want to spend time, much less a life, with them. Relationships and Business are not much different. In a business, people know that appearance and the way you talk to a costumer is as important as the value of your product, and that’s why brands sell, even when their products have no quality. For example, in shopping malls you can see shops packed with people buying clothes that have no value and will be ruined or out of fashion very soon, because the brand is selling an image, not quality anymore. China, on the other hand, managed to compete in the world markets by reducing price over quality, and is now paying the price of a very bad reputation, as most people don’t trust Chinese brands anymore. This is already impacting the economy, so I don’t know what will happen in the next years. It’s all in the hands of the politicians and the internationalization of the companies. And yet, I just said this to explain the relation between value and product. But here’s another example. I tried to share what I know about Learning with Teachers, Parents and Psychologists, and nobody cared. Besides, what I earned in helping children with learning disabilities was a very low payment, and I had to quit that as I couldn’t afford to pay an apartment and daily expenses with such job. However, there are people making thousands of dollars with drugs that have no effect, toilets for cats and pet-rocks. In other words, is never about what the world needs but what the world wants.

Developing a business depends on many factors. But you should basically understand the exchange between value. In other words, you must provide value to receive equal value. If you look at most singles, you can see that they can’t provide any value – they often don’t smile, dress, talk or behave in a way that makes others want to spend time, much less a lifetime, with them. Relationships and businesses are not much different. In a business, people know that appearance and the way you talk to a costumer is as important as the value of your product, and that’s why brands sell, even when their products have no quality. For example, in shopping malls you can see shops packed with people buying clothes that have no value and will be ruined or out of fashion very soon, because the brand is selling an image, not quality anymore. China, on the other hand, managed to compete in the world market by reducing price over quality, and is now paying the cost of a very bad reputation, as most people don’t trust Chinese brands anymore. This is already impacting the economy, so I don’t know what will happen in the next years. It is all in the hands of the politicians and the internationalization of the companies. And yet, I just said this to explain the relation between value and product. But here’s another example: I tried to share what I know about learning with teachers, parents and psychologists, and nobody cared. Besides, what I earned in helping children with learning disabilities was a very low payment, and I had to quit that as I couldn’t afford to pay an apartment and daily expenses with such job. However, there are people making thousands of dollars with drugs that have no effect, toilets for cats and pet-rocks. In other words, it is never about what the world needs but what the world wants.

Around the same time that index was released, Nicholas Kristof (again, a hero to many liberals), wrote a column that addressed the dependency on government programs.5 He focused on Kentucky’s Appalachian area, where people have yanked their kids out of literacy classes because if those kids learn to read, the parents will be less likely to qualify for a monthly SSI check for having kids with intellectual disabilities. We are not even making this up. Apparently, many of these people receive nearly $700 each month from Supplemental Security Income for those “disabled” children, and they receive those payments until their kids turn eighteen. And when the kids do turn eighteen, they are illiterate and unproductive because of their parents, and they collect SSI income as adults, many of them never holding a job in their entire lives. This is how our entitlement programs “help.” Nice, huh? Kristof wrote, “This is painful for a liberal to admit, but conservatives have a point when they suggest that America’s safety net can sometimes entangle people in a soul-crushing dependency. Our poverty programs do rescue many people, but other times they backfire.

This also entails an unconditional recognition of those others who cannot so easily pretend to justify their existence through their achievements—children, the elderly, the disabled, and those at the fringes of society. Human dignity consists in the irrevocable priority of person over works.

I come to oil country with a book about radicals who wish for the end of pipelines. But that's not what it's about. It's the friction point of prosperity and concern, ability and disability, the loss of bodily presence and the gain of ghost messages. It's misplaced outrage and well-placed courage. It's banjo song and smoke in your eye. Stories hinge there, swinging this way and that.

And I would just plead in passing—children, young people, and adults—see people with disabilities. And I don’t mean see them like the priest and the Levite on the Jericho Road, passing by on the other side. This is our natural reflex—see and avoid. But we are not natural people. We are followers of Jesus. We have the Spirit of Jesus in our hearts. We have been seen and touched in all our brokenness by an attentive, merciful Savior.

Mimetic theory explains the presence of disabilities and infirmities in a great many mythical stories. When there is no ground for making a victim of someone—because he isn't guilty of anything—people act as children do and make a scapegoat of someone who is physically unattractive, or who is an outsider. The number of outsiders in myths is quite extraordinary. And why are so many victims lame? My work is scientific because it tries to solve the puzzle constituted by these clues, to explain why outsiders, many of them handicapped, are made into victims and forcibly expelled from a community. The burden falls on anyone who doubts my theory to supply a better explanation, or else to adopt mine for want of a more satisfactory one.

Shriver brothers Robert and Mark have also found ways to support the family commitment to the disabled. With the musician Bono, Robert helped found DATA (Debt, AIDS, Trade in Africa), which advocates for the eradication of poverty through education, debt reduction, development assistance, and campaigning for access to treatment for AIDS and malaria in Africa; and Mark serves as senior vice president of U.S. programs for Save the Children. Eunice’s only daughter, Maria Shriver, sits on the boards of Special Olympics and Best Buddies, and

Ted helped pass major social and civil rights legislation. His efforts include the Education for All Handicapped Children Act (1975), the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) and the Child Care Act (both passed in 1990), and the Ryan White AIDS Care Act of 1990; he increased funding for the National Institutes of Health and many more educational, housing, medical, and support-services programs. The ADA specifically prohibited discrimination on the basis of disability, forcing the inclusion of millions of people with disabilities in education, housing, employment, sports, and more. Hatch said that even though he and Kennedy differed much on policy and philosophy, he “never doubted for a minute [Ted’s] commitment to help the elderly, the ill, and those Americans who have been on the outside looking in for far too long.

ADA, he said, “Many of us have been touched by others with disabilities. My sister Rosemary is retarded; my son lost his leg to cancer. And others who support the legislation believe in it for similar special reasons. I cannot be unmindful of the extraordinary contributions of those who have been lucky enough to have members of their families or children who are facing the same challenges and know what this legislation means.

God chooses to be among the people who ordinarily are overlooked. He pays special attention to shepherds and teenagers and fishermen and single moms and small children. Jesus shows special care to lepers, blind persons, those with physical disabilities, crooks, liars, hookers, and worse. That’s who God has decided to be with.

It was all about release, about letting go of the unknowns. I was having a disabled child and that was that. There were no hidden truths to discover. I would not know anything about her birth, her survivability odds, all her ailments, until her life actually unfolded.

Disability is not predictive of the happiness of either the parent or the child, which reflects the larger puzzle that people who have won the lottery are, in the long run and on average, only marginally happier than amputees—people in each category having adjusted rather quickly to their new normal.

Today, with tears in my eyes, I telephoned the mother of one of our children (aged thirteen) who had spoken for the first time since the age of three...

Our world is broken and disability is part of that brokenness. But God is working to make it unbroken. He has a plan for each of us and that plan doesn’t exclude our children with disabilities, or even the disability itself. God created each of us uniquely in His own image. Disability might appear to mar that image like a reflection in a shattered mirror; but in fact, God is shining His light on the broken pieces to reveal more of Himself to us and to the world. A lot more light reflects off a broken mirror than a whole one.

How Much Money Can We Afford To Give To Charity? Knowing how much money you can safely give to charity is challenging for everyone. Who doesn’t want to give more to make the world a better place? On the other hand, no one wants to become a charity case as a result of giving too much to charity. On average, Americans who itemize their deductions donate about three or four percent of their income to charity. About 20% give more than 10% of their income to charity. Here are some tips to help you find the right level of donations for your family: You can probably give more than you think. Focus on one, two or maybe three causes rather than scattering money here and there. Volunteer your time toward your cause, too. The money you give shouldn’t be the money you’d save for college or retirement. You can organize your personal finances to empower you to give more. Eliminating debt will enable you to give much more. The interest you may be paying is eating into every good and noble thing you’d like to do. You can cut expenses significantly over time by driving your cars for a longer period of time; buying cars—the transaction itself—is expensive. Stay in your home longer. By staying in your home for a very long time, your mortgage payment will slowly shrink (in economic terms)with inflation, allowing you more flexibility over time to donate to charity. Make your donations a priority. If you only give what is left, you won’t be giving much. Make your donations first, then contribute to savings and, finally, spend what is left. Set a goal for contributing to charity, perhaps as a percentage of your income. Measure your financial progress in all areas, including giving to charity. Leverage your contributions by motivating others to give. Get the whole family involved in your cause. Let the kids donate their time and money, too. Get your extended family involved. Get the neighbors involved. You will have setbacks. Don’t be discouraged by setbacks. Think long term. Everything counts. One can of soup donated to a food bank may feed a hungry family. Little things add up. One can of soup every week for years will feed many hungry families. Don’t be ashamed to give a little. Everyone can do something. When you can’t give money, give time. Be patient. You are making a difference. Don’t give up on feeding hungry people because there will always be hungry people; the ones you feed will be glad you didn’t give up. Set your ego aside. You can do more when you’re not worried about who gets the credit. Giving money to charity is a deeply personal thing that brings joy both to the families who give and to the families who receive. Everyone has a chance to do both in life. There Are Opportunities To Volunteer Everywhere If you and your family would like to find ways to volunteer but aren’t sure where and how, the answer is just a Google search away. There may be no better family activity than serving others together. When you can’t volunteer as a team, remember you set an example for your children whenever you serve. Leverage your skills, talents and training to do the most good. Here are some ideas to get you started either as a family or individually: Teach seniors, the disabled, or children about your favorite family hobbies.

An important revision of the traditional image of the spaceship was made in Anne McCaffrey’s Helva stories, beginning in 1961 with The Ship Who Sang. This series is set in a future when severely disabled children are given the chance to become starships by becoming enclosed in a metal shell connected directly to their brain. This is an enabling procedure involving ‘schooling’ (not programming) and complex neural and sensory connections being constructed through the titanium shell. In this respect, the ‘shell-people’ represent an early form of cyborg, and McCaffrey’s narrative replaces central technological control with the individual investigations and self-modifications by Helva herself in devising a means of singing.

I’m sorry if my words hurt you earlier. I thought I’d been pretty clear about my not wanting kids.” Alex winced, but tried to cover it by tucking her hair behind her right ear. “You were. I remember you saying it the first night. But we clicked on everything else and I guess I thought you might possibly start to rethink your position.” He could understand why she would think that. They had clicked on everything. She’d fit into his house as if she’d always been here. Hell, she fit into his life as if she’d always been there. All of the worries he’d had about her youth had faded. She was more mature for her age than most of the men he knew, and that was the truth. “I don’t want this,” he motioned between them, “to end because of just this one thing.” She frowned. “I hope you didn’t mean that the way it sounded, because that one thing is very important to me. I’m almost thirty-two. As trite as it is to say, my childbearing time is ticking away.” Duncan growled, pissed that he couldn’t articulate his feelings the way he needed to. He was losing her, he could see it in her eyes. “I don’t want the responsibility of children, but I don’t want our physical or emotional relationship to end. I enjoy having you in my life.” She gave him a narrow-eyed look. “It’s convenient, right? Having a woman in your house and bed, falling in love with you? I can’t just be ‘enjoyed’ Duncan, I need more that that. I felt like we had a deeper connection than that.” Scowling, he turned to look at the cold fireplace. Then her words slowly sank in. She’d said she was falling in love with him. Fuck… Alex muttered a curse under her breath and pushed to her feet to pace. Duncan watched her move, thoughts swirling in his mind. She thought she loved him, but she’d only been here a couple of days. Yes, they’d been together the entire time since she’d been here, but surely she didn’t think she loved him. Maybe she was less mature than he thought. No one could decide to tie themselves to a man that quickly, let alone a disabled veteran destined to have long-term emotional and medical issues. She paused in her pacing, as if coming to a decision. “I think I’m going to go home.” The words fell into the silence and he lost his breath. But he couldn’t blame her. She wanted more than he could give her. Once again, like with Melanie, he was being tossed over for another man, this one just so far unnamed. “If you make your reservations, I can drive you whenever you need me to.” She blinked at him, a strange expression on her face, then she shook her head as if she couldn’t believe it was ending. He couldn’t either. “All right. Goodnight.” Duncan

While some siblings accept, and even embrace, their destiny as members of the 'team,' others are (mostly privately) outraged, having experienced the obverse of the soothing stereotype in their own families. A graphic designer whose autistic brother tried to strangle her when they were children, and who struggled for years to get her parents to recognize the danger he presented, is acutely aware of the discrepancy between the illusion and the reality of damaged families: I'm trying to eradicate the Hallmark Hall of Fame Special myth - 'how I learned the meaning of life by having a disabled sibling.' The cover of Newsweek on autism had a beautiful blond good boy. People just want to look at the pretty kids on Jerry Lewis, the sanitized version, not the ugly cases like my brother. The severely disabled aren't telegenic.

Having got rid of Jefferson—at least in name—Turing next addresses a whole class of objections that he calls “Arguments from Various Disabilities,” and which he defines as taking the form “I grant you that you can make machines do all the things you have mentioned but you will never be able to make one to do X.” He then offers a rather tongue-in-cheek “selection”: Be kind, resourceful, beautiful, friendly; have initiative, have a sense of humour, tell right from wrong, make mistakes; fall in love, enjoy strawberries and cream; make some one fall in love with it, learn from experience; use words properly, be the subject of its own thought; have as much diversity of behaviour as a man, do something really new. As Turing notes, “no support is usually offered for these statements,” most of which are founded on the principle of scientific induction. . . . The works and customs of mankind do not seem to be very suitable material to which to apply scientific induction. A very large part of space-time must be investigated, if reliable results are to be obtained. Otherwise we may (as most English children do) decide that everybody speaks English, and that it is silly to learn French. Turing’s repudiation of scientific induction, however, is more than just a dig at the insularity and closed-mindedness of England. His purpose is actually much larger: to call attention to the infinite regress into which we are likely to fall if we attempt to use disabilities (such as, say, the inability, on the part of a man, to feel attraction to a woman) as determining factors in defining intelligence. Nor is the question of homosexuality far from Turing’s mind, as the refinement that he offers in the next paragraph attests: There are, however, special remarks to be made about many of the disabilities that have been mentioned. The inability to enjoy strawberries and cream may have struck the reader as frivolous. Possibly a machine might be made to enjoy this delicious dish, but any attempt to make one do so would be idiotic. What is important about this disability is that it contributes to some of the other disabilities, e.g. to the difficulty of the same kind of friendliness occurring between man and machine as between white man and white man, or between black man and black man. To the brew of gender and sexuality, then, race is added, as “strawberries and cream” (earlier bookended between the ability to fall in love and the ability to make someone fall in love) becomes a code word for tastes that Turing prefers not to name.

But early in the twenty-first century it became clear that the planet was incapable of sustaining everyone alive at Western levels, and at that point the richest pulled away into their fortress mansions, bought the governments or disabled them from action against them, and bolted their doors to wait it out until some poorly theorized better time, which really came down to just the remainder of their lives, and perhaps the lives of their children if they were feeling optimistic—beyond that, après moi le déluge.

While every abortion is an unjust act of lethal violence against the unborn child, regardless of the mother’s reasons, there is something startling about the reality that some women choose abortion precisely because of a specific unwanted characteristic of their unborn child. Yet many of the loudest progressive voices who decry sex discrimination and disability discrimination when it comes to adults remain silent when it comes to discrimination against unborn children based on their sex or disability—or worse, they actively support these types of abortions.