Handicapped People Quotes

Maybe the truly handicapped people are the ones that don't need God as much.

But today’s society is characterized by achievement orientation, and consequently it adores people who are successful and happy and, in particular, it adores the young. It virtually ignores the value of all those who are otherwise, and in so doing blurs the decisive difference between being valuable in the sense of dignity and being valuable in the sense of usefulness. If one is not cognizant of this difference and holds that an individual’s value stems only from his present usefulness, then, believe me, one owes it only to personal inconsistency not to plead for euthanasia along the lines of Hitler’s program, that is to say, ‘mercy’ killing of all those who have lost their social usefulness, be it because of old age, incurable illness, mental deterioration, or whatever handicap they may suffer. Confounding the dignity of man with mere usefulness arises from conceptual confusion that in turn may be traced back to the contemporary nihilism transmitted on many an academic campus and many an analytical couch.

People can be teachers and idiots; they can be philosophers and idiots; they can be politicians and idiots... in fact I think they have to be... a genius can be an idiot. The world is largely run for and by idiots; it is no great handicap in life and in certain areas is actually a distinct advantage and even a prerequisite for advancement.

As you walk, hop, hobble, or wheel Meeting people of different kinds, Remember that being handicapped Is only a state of mind

My interest is to point out to you that you can walk, and please throw away all those crutches. If you are really handicapped, I wouldn’t advise you to do any such thing. But you are made to feel by other people that you are handicapped so that they could sell you those crutches. Throw them away and you can walk. That’s all that I can say. ‘If I fall....’ - that is your fear. Put the crutches away, and you are not going to fall.

People with disabilities are sometimes very humble and approachable, if you want a seasoned reputation, then behave like one of the handicaps.

This way of settling differences is not just. This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation's homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into the veins of peoples normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice, and love.

The only thing they have to look forward to is hope. And you have to give them hope. Hope for a better world, hope for a better tomorrow, hope for a better place to come to if the pressures at home are too great. Hope that all will be all right. Without hope, not only gays, but the blacks, the seniors, the handicapped, the us'es, the us'es will give up. And if you help elect to the central committee and other offices, more gay people, that gives a green light to all who feel disenfranchised, a green light to move forward. It means hope to a nation that has given up, because if a gay person makes it, the doors are open to everyone. So if there is a message I have to give, it is that if I've found one overriding thing about my personal election, it's the fact that if a gay person can be elected, it's a green light. And you and you and you, you have to give people hope....

Does it make sense to boycott ourselves? Does it hold water to boycott the fluid course of our life? Is it consistent to commit self-sabotage by destroying wittingly our corporeal and mental structure? Those are the questions thousands of people may ask as they are confronted with the schizophrenic dilemma on the point of smoking, boozing, doping, sexual transgressing or environmental polluting. Many seem to be aware of their problem. Many have decided to stop from tomorrow on. But when tomorrow and after tomorrow come many tend to let slip their vow and their self-sabotage goes on to rule their life. Their dissonant behavior transforms them into social losers or hopeless patsies and depresses them into the class of forlorn pariahs. They realize, as such, that self-handicapping makes no sense, but are not able to protect themselves from themselves since they haven’t got the muscle to live down the spell of addiction. Thousands of people may feel having set the bar too high and recognize they are are failing to find the right angle and are missing sufficient insight to steer their life. If, however, they decide to give it a try they should be aware that the road may be very bumpy and that they have to be prepared for disappointments and regressions, that they might have to deal with very slowly crescent improvements, that they shouldn’t take themselves for a ride and that they could only possibly succeed by focusing painfully on the path to breaking free from the hornet's nest they have got themselves into.

Atheists are the most honest of the human race. These people are unable to live a double life; they are unable to lie to themselves. Of course it's an evolutionary handicap, and if that handicap was widespread, our species would run the risk of extinction

People can be teachers and idiots; they can be philosophers and idiots; they can be politicians and idiots ... in fact I think they have to be ... a genius can be an idiot. The world is largely run for and by idiots; it is no great handicap in life and in certain areas is actually a distinct advantage and even a prerequisite for advancement.

This metropolitan world, then, is a world where flesh and blood is less real than paper and ink and celluloid. It is a world where the great masses of people, unable to have direct contact with more satisfying means of living, take life vicariously, as readers, spectators, passive observers: a world where people watch shadow-heroes and heroines in order to forget their own clumsiness or coldness in love, where they behold brutal men crushing out life in a strike riot, a wrestling ring or a military assault, while they lack the nerve even to resist the petty tyranny of their immediate boss: where they hysterically cheer the flag of their political state, and in their neighborhood, their trades union, their church, fail to perform the most elementary duties of citizenship. Living thus, year in and year out, at second hand, remote from the nature that is outside them and no less remote from the nature within, handicapped as lovers and as parents by the routine of the metropolis and by the constant specter of insecurity and death that hovers over its bold towers and shadowed streets - living thus the mass of inhabitants remain in a state bordering on the pathological. They become victims of phantasms, fears, obsessions, which bind them to ancestral patterns of behavior.

Some disabled people spend a significant amount of their energy on trying to come across as abled or as not that disabled.

In life, the question is not if you will have problems, but how you are going to deal with your problems. If the possibility of failure were erased, what would you attempt to achieve? The essence of man is imperfection. Know that you're going to make mistakes. The fellow who never makes a mistake takes his orders from one who does. Wake up and realize this: Failure is simply a price we pay to achieve success. Achievers are given multiple reasons to believe they are failures. But in spite of that, they persevere. The average for entrepreneurs is 3.8 failures before they finally make it in business. When achievers fail, they see it as a momentary event, not a lifelong epidemic. Procrastination is too high a price to pay for fear of failure. To conquer fear, you have to feel the fear and take action anyway. Forget motivation. Just do it. Act your way into feeling, not wait for positive emotions to carry you forward. Recognize that you will spend much of your life making mistakes. If you can take action and keep making mistakes, you gain experience. Life is playing a poor hand well. The greatest battle you wage against failure occurs on the inside, not the outside. Why worry about things you can't control when you can keep yourself busy controlling the things that depend on you? Handicaps can only disable us if we let them. If you are continually experiencing trouble or facing obstacles, then you should check to make sure that you are not the problem. Be more concerned with what you can give rather than what you can get because giving truly is the highest level of living. Embrace adversity and make failure a regular part of your life. If you're not failing, you're probably not really moving forward. Everything in life brings risk. It's true that you risk failure if you try something bold because you might miss it. But you also risk failure if you stand still and don't try anything new. The less you venture out, the greater your risk of failure. Ironically the more you risk failure — and actually fail — the greater your chances of success. If you are succeeding in everything you do, then you're probably not pushing yourself hard enough. And that means you're not taking enough risks. You risk because you have something of value you want to achieve. The more you do, the more you fail. The more you fail, the more you learn. The more you learn, the better you get. Determining what went wrong in a situation has value. But taking that analysis another step and figuring out how to use it to your benefit is the real difference maker when it comes to failing forward. Don't let your learning lead to knowledge; let your learning lead to action. The last time you failed, did you stop trying because you failed, or did you fail because you stopped trying? Commitment makes you capable of failing forward until you reach your goals. Cutting corners is really a sign of impatience and poor self-discipline. Successful people have learned to do what does not come naturally. Nothing worth achieving comes easily. The only way to fail forward and achieve your dreams is to cultivate tenacity and persistence. Never say die. Never be satisfied. Be stubborn. Be persistent. Integrity is a must. Anything worth having is worth striving for with all your might. If we look long enough for what we want in life we are almost sure to find it. Success is in the journey, the continual process. And no matter how hard you work, you will not create the perfect plan or execute it without error. You will never get to the point that you no longer make mistakes, that you no longer fail. The next time you find yourself envying what successful people have achieved, recognize that they have probably gone through many negative experiences that you cannot see on the surface. Fail early, fail often, but always fail forward.

There were always blind, deaf, or handicapped people hanging around the brothers, and I figured it was evidence that they either had a soft, compassionate side or were running some kind of mysterious scam.

As the war progresses, and as population increases to an even more intolerable level stretching resources to impossible lengths, the strong will begin fighting for their very survival. That’s what we’re seeing right now. Society will become more and more stratified into the people who aren’t buying the bullshit in society and those who blindly follow where they are led. Satanists, freethinkers, are a burgeoning minority cause. We have an illness that needs to be recognized just like alcoholism, handicaps, addictive behaviors and AIDS. We suffer from a disease called independence — a pathological aversion to regimentation and institutionalism — which prevents us from getting ‘regular’ jobs and living a ‘normal’ life.

I have learned that some people who look fine are more crippled than I am, by fears they can’t explain. Other people are held back by shyness, or anger. In making friends, I see the way some people handicap themselves. I believe there are choices each of us make every single day. We can dwell on our limitations or we can push ourselves past them.

You know how Burger King often employs mentally handicapped people to wipe down tables at their restaurants? What those people are to Burger King, paralegals are to lawyers. It's the lowest job you can possibly get and still technically be considered in the legal profession

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.

A cancer growing in someone's body will go on growing in spite of denial. And a complex combination of genes that work together to make you intelligent as well as hierarchical will still handicap you whether you acknowledge it or not.

And they lived happily ever after” is one of the most tragic sentences in literature. It is tragic because it tells a falsehood about life and has led countless generations of people to expect something from human existence which is not possible on this fragile, imperfect earth. The “happy ending” obsession of Western culture is both a romantic illusions and a psychological handicap. It can never be literally true that love and marriage are unblemished perfections, for any worthwhile life has its trials, its disappointments, and its burning heartaches. Yet who can compare the numbers of people who have unconsciously absorbed this “and they lived happily ever after” illusion in their childhood and have thereafter been disappointed when life has not come up to their expectations and who secretly suffer from the jealous conviction that other married people know a kind of bliss that is denied them..Life is not paradise. It is pain, hardship, and temptation shot through with radiant gleams of light, friendship and love.

People with developmental disabilities and mental illness are only handicapped by how much we underestimate them.

Just because a person is attractive/beautiful, this does not mean it is okay to villainize them. We always say that we cannot judge a person from the outside (doesn't matter if they have a handicap, are ugly, have a deformity, etc.). But this must go both ways. It also does not matter if someone is beautiful, attractive and happy. That also does not make it okay to judge them, to villainize them. There is a double standard when it comes to whom people choose to be good to, and this double standard is wrong. The outward appearance, both the grotesque and the beautiful, must not be basis for kindness and for cruelty.

The moral test of government is how it treats people in the dawn of life, the children, in the twilight of life, the aged, and in the shadows of life, the sick, the needy, and the handicapped

This is just one version of how the world of successful people actually works. But social capital is all around us. Those who tap into it and use it prosper. Those who don’t are running life’s race with a major handicap. This is a serious problem for kids like me.

A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth. With righteous indignation, it will look at thousands of working people displaced from their jobs with reduced incomes as a result of automation while the profits of the employers remain intact, and say: “This is not just.” It will look across the oceans and see individual capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries, and say: “This is not just.” It will look at our alliance with the landed gentry of Latin America and say: “This is not just.” The Western arrogance of feeling that it has everything to teach others and nothing to learn from them is not just. A true revolution of values will lay hands on the world order and say of war: “This way of settling differences is not just.” This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation’s homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into the veins of peoples normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice and love. A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death. America, the richest and most powerful nation in the world, can well lead the way in this revolution of values. There is nothing to prevent us from paying adequate wages to schoolteachers, social workers and other servants of the public to insure that we have the best available personnel in these positions which are charged with the responsibility of guiding our future generations. There is nothing but a lack of social vision to prevent us from paying an adequate wage to every American citizen whether he be a hospital worker, laundry worker, maid or day laborer. There is nothing except shortsightedness to prevent us from guaranteeing an annual minimum—and livable—income for every American family. There is nothing, except a tragic death wish, to prevent us from reordering our priorities, so that the pursuit of peace will take precedence over the pursuit of war. There is nothing to keep us from remolding a recalcitrant status quo with bruised hands until we have fashioned it into a brotherhood.

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.

they began to kill the innocents in their mother’s womb because these babies are hindering them from achieving what they believe is their self-realization through pleasures, a false freedom, and worldly success. Then they eliminate sick people; then the handicapped, for instance those with Down syndrome, and so on. This is the path of the new dictatorship, patterned after the Nazi dictatorship in Germany and the Communist dictatorship in the Soviet Union. This is a process which leads ultimately to an exasperated egoism, to a cruel and inhuman society.

INSUFFICIENT EDUCATION. This is a handicap that may be overcome with comparative ease. Experience has proven that the best-educated people are often those who are known as ‘self-made’ or self-educated. It takes more than a university degree to make one a person of education. Any person who is educated has learned to get whatever they want in life without violating the rights of others. Education consists not so much of knowledge, but of knowledge effectively and persistently applied. People are paid not merely for what they know, but more particularly for what they do with what they know.

People who self-handicap purposely shoot themselves in the foot in order to protect themselves from having to confront their possible shortcomings. Many self-handicapping behaviors are those small, subtle bad habits like being late, gossiping, micromanaging, behaving passive-aggressively, or being a perfectionist. We may not recognize these self-defeating--and self-handicapping--traits for what they are. Or we may even wrongly perceive them as strengths. But in truth, they often get in the way of us blooming.

People will often tell me that they have a terrible memory. Hearing that kind of attitude, I believe them. Older adults shown a list of negative words about aging, such as: decrepit, senile, handicapped, feeble. perform worse on memory and physical tests than do same-age subjects shown a list of positive words about aging, such as: wise, elder, vibrant, experienced. Like people, your memory will function better if it has high self-esteem. Speak nicely to and of your memory, and it will remember more and forget less.

Did you have to understand life to plunge in? Even kindness, when he encountered it, was a riddle half the time. If you walked into a door and bloodied your nose, it was one thing, but empathy for handicaps had never been his thing when he himself had none. Empathy had been for people of good cheer.

The word “autistic” is accurate. But so are other words that we no longer use to describe people: spinster (unmarried woman), hobo (migrant worker), cripple (person with a physical handicap), and so on. The fact that a person is unmarried or has sustained a mobility-reducing injury or birth defect certainly figures into their life experiences, but it does not define their character—unless they or we let it.

Do people actually do that--go back and thank their teachers years later, when they're no longer handicapped by youth and ignorance, when they figure out just how much their teachers actually did for them?

He exaggerates his golf scores and his handicap for the same reason he exaggerates everything. He has to. He exhibits all the traits of a narcissistic personality disorder. People with his disorder have no conscience about it. He has no sense of morality about things. He lacks empathy towards others. He’s a very ill man. He doesn’t get that other people have rights and feelings. Other people just don’t matter to him.

When you gonna come over and watch the Penguins with me again?” “I dunno,” I said. “I get tired of watching handicapped people play hockey after a while. Now if you got interested in a good team, like the Flyers—

The higher position one has, the more they should embrace the divine rules; for the true king is not almighty, but handicapped by his responsibilities and duties. The true ruler's first thoughts are his people and the laws of the elders, for if he carelessly breaks them and harms his people, he is no more a true king, but a worthless man with a glittering crown which has lost its primal purpose and thus its inner brilliance.

If a child’s development is impeded because of incomplete mourning of a loss, that child will be handicapped in acquiring the mutuality necessary for building an integrated identity and maintaining strong emotional ties,

We have paid a price for our inclusiveness, but but we have bought ourselves a more humane society, with greater opportunity for racial minorities, women, gay people, the handicapped, and others - that is, for most people. And even if some people think the price was too steep, we can't go back, either to a pre-consumer society or to ethnically homogeneous enclaves. All we can do is search for ways that we might reduce our anomie without excluding large classes of people.

What happened to me separates me from the normal world in a negative way. Like a handicap or disfiguring deformity, it's too horrible for some people to deal with, and it makes them uncomfortable whenever they're around me. ~Leigh Byrne, Call Me Tuesday

For hundreds of years, people have categorized others as less so they could feel like more. Color, gender, class, religion, physical handicaps, sexual orientation, and pedigree are just a few ways in which one group is divided from another. For every person who stands superior, another must be inferior. But what does it say of us as a human race when we push others down for our own needs?

Outside of school, though, we were often defined by our disabilities. We were “handicapped”—a bit like a species. Often when people have a disability, it’s the disability that other people see rather than all the other abilities that coexist with their particular difficulty. It’s why we talk about people being “disabled” rather than “having a disability.” One of the reasons that people are branded by their disability is that the dominant conception of ability is so narrow. But the limitations of this conception affect everyone in education, not just those with “special needs.” These days, anyone whose real strengths lie outside the restricted field of academic work can find being at school a dispiriting experience and emerge from it wondering if they have any significant aptitudes at all.

The man behind the counter seemed to have stopped listening to him. He slid a room key across the fake-wood-grain counter and returned to his scribbled lorem ipsums. Neethan could have gone on for hours with this guy, chatting him up about music made by mentally handicapped people and the myriad challenges of international aid organizations, but this was a person programmed to hand out room keys and swipe credit cards and engage in only the amount of conversation needed to keep such transactions rolling along smoothly. If that meant asking about a guest's gigantic celestial head, then that's just what good customer service was all about.

Speaking of these attitudes turned Temple’s mind to a parallel: “I find a very high correlation,” she said, “between the way animals are treated and the handicapped.… Georgia is a snake pit—they treat [handicapped people] worse than animals.… Capital-punishment states are the worst animal states and the worst for the handicapped.

Some people never go crazy. What truly horrible lives they must lead. My ambition is handicapped by laziness.

Its job was to arrange the painless deaths of handicapped people who could not survive without costly care. It had done splendid work in the last couple of years, disposing of tens of thousands of useless people. The problem was that German public opinion was not yet sophisticated enough to understand the need for such deaths, so the program had to be kept quiet.

As long as there are poor people in the world, as long as there are people who are deprived and handicapped in the world, if we are sensitive, we will not load ourselves with unnecessary adornment.

The unfortunate are not as miserable as the world imagines. That urchins, the handicapped, orphans, prisoners and others are much happier than people think. And that language is a trap, that a dark evolutionary force has created languages to limit human thought. That writers are overrated fools. That all religions come from ancient comic writers. And the ultimate goal of comics is same as the purpose of humanity – to break free from language.

I’m not saying that they had to be handicapped to share their gifts with us, but if they hadn’t been handicapped, maybe they would have gone on to be other people and not become the inspirations or creative people they came to be.

You see what I am driving at. The mentally handicapped do not have a consciousness of power. Because of this perhaps their capacity for love is more immediate, lively and developed than that of other men. They cannot be men of ambition and action in society and so develop a capacity for friendship rather than for efficiency. They are indeed weak and easily influenced, because they confidently give themselves to others; they are simple certainly, but often with a very attractive simplicity. Their first reaction is often one of welcome and not of rejection or criticism. Full of trust, they commit themselves deeply. Who amongst us has not been moved when met by the warm welcome of our boys and girls, by their smiles, their confidence and their outstretched arms. Free from the bonds of conventional society, and of ambition, they are free, not with the ambitious freedom of reason, but with an interior freedom, that of friendship. Who has not been struck by the rightness of their judgments upon the goodness or evil of men, by their profound intuition on certain human truths, by the truth and simplicity of their nature which seeks not so much to appear to be, as to be. Living in a society where simplicity has been submerged by criticism and sometimes by hypocrisy, is it not comforting to find people who can be aware, who can marvel? Their open natures are made for communion and love.

History shows us we need labels to help define our place. For hundreds of years, people have categorized others as less so they could feel like more. Color, gender, class, religion, physical handicaps, sexual orientation, and pedigree are

Maybe today some people see opposition between, on the one hand, a seemingly barren, old, institutional church, cut off from the world, looking after buildings, and worried about membership and attendance, and on the other hand, new communities, filled with life, enthusiasm, risk, openness and welcome, concerned about the big issues of the world - injustice, torture, peace, disarmament, ecology, a better distribution of wealth, the liberation of women, drug addiction, AIDS, people with handicaps, etc. . . . But we know that every community, with time, risks closing in on itself and becoming an empty institution governed by laws. The new communities of today can become the closed up, barren institutions of tomorrow.

Parents do overindulge their children, giving them a profusion of material things . . . without the stabilizing effects of earning one’s way, of making decisions, of sweating hard to attain some kind of goal, young people are grievously handicapped.

Always lost, always striking out in the wrong direction, always going around in circles. You have suffered from a life-long inability to orient yourself in space, and even in New York, the easiest of cities to negotiate, the city where you have spent the better part of your adulthood, you often run into trouble. Whenever you take the subway from Brooklyn to Manhattan (assuming you have boarded the correct train and are not traveling deeper into Brooklyn), you make a special point to stop for a moment to get your bearings once you have climbed the stairs to the street, and still you will head north instead of south, go east instead of west, and even when you try to outsmart yourself, knowing that your handicap will set you going the wrong way and therefore, to rectify the error, you do the opposite of what you were intending to do, go left instead of right, go right instead of left, and still you find yourself moving in the wrong direction, no matter how many adjustments you have made. Forget tramping alone in the woods. You are hopelessly lost within minutes, and even indoors, whenever you find yourself in an unfamiliar building, you will walk down the wrong corridor or take the wrong elevator, not to speak of smaller enclosed spaces such as restaurants, for whenever you go to the men’s room in a restaurant that has more than one dining area, you will inevitably make a wrong turn on your way back and wind up spending several minutes searching for your table. Most other people, your wife included, with her unerring inner compass, seem to be able to get around without difficulty. They know where they are, where they have been, and where they are going, but you know nothing, you are forever lost in the moment, in the void of each successive moment that engulfs you, with no idea where true north is, since the four cardinal points do not exist for you, have never existed for you. A minor infirmity until now, with no dramatic consequences to speak of, but that doesn’t mean a day won’t come when you accidentally walk off the edge of a cliff.

Every act of love, gratitude, and kindness; every work of art or music inspired by the love of God and delight in the beauty of his creation; every minute spent teaching a severely handicapped child to read or to walk; every act of care and nurture, of comfort and support, for one’s fellow human beings and for that matter one’s fellow nonhuman creatures; and of course every prayer, all Spirit-led teaching, every deed that spreads the gospel, builds up the church, embraces and embodies holiness rather than corruption, and makes the name of Jesus honored in the world—all of this will find its way, through the resurrecting power of God, into the new creation that God will one day make. That is the logic of the mission of God. God’s recreation of his wonderful world, which began with the resurrection of Jesus and continues mysteriously as God’s people live in the risen Christ and in the power of his Spirit, means that what we do in Christ and by the Spirit in the present is not wasted. It will last all the way into God’s new world. In fact, it will be enhanced there.

Just then, in that instant, I saw His eyes. I recognised them. They were the eyes of that trembling father in a smoke-filled room on the ninety-third floor of Tower One, dialing his little girls for the last time. Those were the eyes behind that calming voice singing 'Amazing Grace' in a crowded and slippery stairwell, trapped outside a roof door when the ceilings began to cave. The eyes of the people who stayed behind with the handicapped victims waiting for police officers who never made it up the stairs. Those were the eyes of firemen who pushed me to safety, the doctor who cared for me for more than a year free of charge, the therapist who visited my home regularly so that I could sleep a little, the children who loved me, the brother who prayed nonstop, and the pastor who became my friend. Those were the eyes of God.

A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our past and present policies. On the one hand we are called to play the good Samaritan on life’s roadside; but that will be only an initial act. One day we must come to see that the whole Jericho road must be transformed so that men and women will not be constantly beaten and robbed as they make their journey on life’s highway. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it is not haphazard and superficial. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring. A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth. With righteous indignation, it will look across the seas and see individual capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries, and say: “This is not just.” It will look at our alliance with the landed gentry of Latin America and say: “This is not just.” The Western arrogance of feeling that it has everything to teach others and nothing to learn from them is not just. A true revolution of values will lay hands on the world order and say of war: “This way of settling differences is not just.” This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation’s homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into veins of people normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice and love. A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.

What's he so damn arrogant about? Just because he made that fortune himself? Does he have to be such a damn snob just because he came from Hell's Kitchen? It isn't other people's fault if they weren't lucky enough to be born in Hell's Kitchen to rise out of! Nobody understands what a terrible handicap it is to be born rich. Because people just take for granted that because you were born that way you'd just be no good if you weren't. What I mean is if I'd had Gail Wynand's breaks, I'd be twice as rich as he is by now and three times as famous. But he's so conceited he doesn't realize this at all!

History can never be objective or unbiased because, no matter how hard the storytellers may try, the perception of reality prejudices all stories. The academic field of history is dominated by white men handicapped by the inability to see whiteness’s impact on America’s biography. The best historians try to approximate the truth by unbending the collection of funhouse mirrors through which the past has been viewed, but it isn’t simply a counterfeit version of history, it is a fable that erases the reflection of an entire people to ensure that the mythology of the heroes lives happily ever after.

The six basic fears become translated into a state of worry, through indecision. Relieve yourself, forever of the fear of death, by reaching a decision to accept death as an inescapable event. Whip the fear of poverty by reaching a decision to get along with whatever wealth you can accumulate WITHOUT WORRY. Put your foot upon the neck of the fear of criticism by reaching a decision NOT TO WORRY about what other people think, do, or say. Eliminate the fear of old age by reaching a decision to accept it, not as a handicap, but as a great blessing which carries with it wisdom, self-control, and understanding not known to youth.

In view of the possibility of finding meaning in suffering, life's meaning is an unconditional one, at least potentially. That unconditional meaning, however, is paralleled by the unconditional value of each and every person. It is that which warrants the indelible quality of the dignity of man. Just as life remains potentially meaningful under any conditions, even those which are most miserable, so too does the value of each and every person stay with him or her, and it does so because it is based on the values that he or she has realized in the past, and is not contingent on the usefulness that he or she may or may not retain in the present. More specifically, this usefulness is usually defined in terms of functioning for the benefit of society. But today's society is characterized by achievement orientation, and consequently it adores people who are successful and happy and, in particular, it adores the young. It virtually ignores the value of those who are otherwise, and in so doing blurs the decisive difference between being valuable in the sense of dignity and being valuable in the sense of usefulness. If one is not cognizant of this difference and holds that na individual's value stems only from his present usefulness, then, believe me, one owes it only to personal inconsistency not to plead for euthanasia along the lines of Hitler's program, that is to say, "mercy" killing of all those who have lost their social usefulness, be it because of old age, incurable illness, mental deterioration, or whatever handicap they may suffer. Confounding the dignity of man with mere usefulness arises from a conceptual confusion that in turn may be traced back to the contemporary nihilism transmitted on many an academic campus and many an analytical couch. Even in the setting of training analyses such an indoctrination may take place. Nihilism does not contend that there is nothing, but it states that everything is meaningless. And George A. Sargent was right when he promulgated the concept of "learned meaninglessness." He himself remembered a therapist who said, "George, you must realize that the world is a joke. There is no justice, everything is random. Only when you realize this will you understand how silly it is to take yourself seriously. There is no grand purpose in the universe. It just is. There's no particular meaning in what decision you make today about how to act." One must generalize such a criticism. In principle, training is indispensable, but if so, therapists should see their task in immunizing the trainee against nihilism rather than inoculating him with the cynicism that is a defense mechanism against their own nihilism.

HISTORY AND THE TRIPLET OF OPACITY History is opaque. You see what comes out, not the script that produces events, the generator of history. There is a fundamental incompleteness in your grasp of such events, since you do not see what's inside the box, how the mechanisms work. What I call the generator of historical events is different from the events themselves, much as the minds of the gods cannot be read just by witnessing their deeds. You are very likely to be fooled about their intentions. This disconnect is similar to the difference between the food you see on the table at the restaurant and the process you can observe in the kitchen. (The last time I brunched at a certain Chinese restaurant on Canal Street in downtown Manhattan, I saw a rat coming out of the kitchen.) The human mind suffers from three ailments as it comes into contact with history, what I call the triplet of opacity. They are: a. the illusion of understanding, or how everyone thinks he knows what is going on in a world that is more complicated (or random) than they realize; b. the retrospective distortion, or how we can assess matters only after the fact, as if they were in a rearview mirror (history seems clearer and more organized in history books than in empirical reality); and c. the overvaluation of factual information and the handicap of authoritative and learned people, particularly when they create categories—when they "Platonify.

If you are influenced by the opinions of others, you will have no desire of your own. Close friends and relatives, while not meaning to do so, often handicap one through "opinions" and sometimes through ridicule, which is meant to be humorous. Thousands of men and women carry inferiority complexes with them all through life, because some well-meaning, but ignorant person destroyed their confidence through "opinions" or ridicule. You have a brain and mind of your own. Use it, and reach your own decisions. If you need facts or information from other people, to enable you to reach decisions, as you probably will in many instances; acquire these facts or secure the information you need quietly, without disclosing your purpose.

Kate busied herself in washing the dishes, wondering how her mother managed to hold everything together. Besides coping with David and the moodiness that accompanied his permanent handicap, she was forced to deal with Daed’s constant irritability as well. While Kate knew that God gave people what they could handle, she often prayed that He’d give her mother just a little less once in a while.

I remember seeing a Nazi poster,” she went on. It was this memory that had triggered her dreadful thought. “There was a picture of a male nurse and a mentally handicapped man. The text said something like: ‘Sixty thousand reichsmarks is what this person suffering from hereditary defects costs the people’s community during his lifetime. Comrade, that is your money too!’ It was an advertisement for a magazine, I think.

We pulled into the Wal-Mart parking lot, and she pointed to a handicapped spot right near the front. Like I wouldn't see it. We had just gotten out when someone walking by stopped to give us a disapproving look. "You know that spot is for handicapped people," he said. He was a little pip-squeak, someone who should have had something better to do than heckle two ladies. "Oh, you're just who I need," Donnie said in a sweet voice. "Can you come over here and help me with something?" She pointed to the inside of the van. He softened, maybe remembering his Southern manners. "Well, sure," he said. "I can help you." *Oh boy,* I thought. He ambled over as she leaned on the side of the van. When he went to look in the window, she took off her right leg in one fell swoop and started beating him with it. "*This* is why I park in the handicapped," she said, hopping on her good leg.

History shows us we need labels to help define our place. For hundreds of years, people have categorized others as less so they could feel like more. Color, gender, class, religion, physical handicaps, sexual orientation, and pedigree are just a few ways in which one group is divided from another. For every person who stands superior, another must be inferior. But what does it say of us as a human race when we push others down for our own needs?

More specifically, this usefulness is usually defined in terms of functioning for the benefit of society. But today's society is characterized by achievement orientation, and consequently it adores people who are successful and happy and, in particular, it adores the young. It virtually ignores the value of all those who are otherwise, and in so doing blurs the decisive difference between being valuable in the sense of dignity and being valuable in the sense of usefulness. If one is not cognizant of this difference and holds that an individual's value stems only from his present usefulness, then, believe me, one owes it only to personal inconsistency not to plead for euthanasia along the lines of Hitler's program, that is to say, "mercy" killing of all those who have lost their social usefulness, be it because of old age, incurable illness, mental deterioration, or whatever handicap they may suffer.

In history and in evolution, progress is always a futile, Sisyphean struggle to stay in the same relative place by getting ever better at things. Cars move through the congested streets of London no faster than horse-drawn carriages did a century ago. Computers have no effect on productivity because people learn to complicate and repeat tasks that have been made easier.13 This concept, that all progress is relative, has come to be known in biology by the name of the Red Queen, after a chess piece that Alice meets in Through the Looking-Glass, who perpetually runs without getting very far because the landscape moves with her. It is an increasingly influential idea in evolutionary theory, and one that will recur throughout the book. The faster you run, the more the world moves with you and the less you make progress. Life is a chess tournament in which if you win a game, you start the next game with the handicap of a missing pawn.

All I want is to cultivate curiosity. Yes, my old friend remains undiminished even now: the simple yearning to know. If these students cannot tell a xylem from a phloem, it will not unduly handicap their college hopes or impede their careers. But their lives will depend entirely on whether they possess wonder, an eye for beauty. For many people, the unknown is something to fear. Instead I want to give my students the humility to believe that anything they do not understand therefore possesses an elegant magic.

History shows us we need labels to help define our place. For hundreds of years, people have categorized others as less so they could feel like more. Color, gender, class, religion, physical handicaps, sexual orientation, and pedigree are just a few ways in which one group is divided from another. For every person who stands superior, another must be inferior. But what does it say of us as a human race when we push others down for our own needs? Does it accomplish the intended goal or simply give rise to a pattern of behavior that can never be broken?

If you cannot drop a wrong problem, then the first time you meet one you will be stuck with it for the rest of your career. Einstein was tremendously creative in his early years, but once he began, in midlife, the search for a unified theory, he spent the rest of his life on it and had about nothing to show for all the effort. I have seen this many times while watching how science is done. It is most likely to happen to the very creative people; their previous successes convince them they can solve any problem, but there are other reasons besides overconfidence why, in many fields, sterility sets in with advancing age. Managing a creative career is not an easy task, or else it would often be done. In mathematics, theoretical physics, and astrophysics, age seems to be a handicap (all characterized by high, raw creativity), while in music composition, literature, and statesmanship, age and experience seem to be an asset. As valued by Bell Telephone Laboratories in the late 1970s, the first 15 years of my career included all they listed, and for my second 15 years they listed nothing I was very closely associated with! Yes, in my areas the really great things are generally done while the person is young, much as in athletics, and in old age you can turn to coaching (teaching), as I have done. Of course, I do not know your field of expertise to say what effect age will have, but I suspect really great things will be realized fairly young, though it may take years to get them into practice. My advice is if you want to do significant things, now is the time to start thinking (if you have not already done so) and not wait until it is the proper moment—which may never arrive!

There are people who know where they want to be, and also have a roadmap in their mind, about how to get there. But something stops them! They either keep waiting for better circumstances, or simply lack the courage to give up the comfort of a secure life. For them, the pursuit of their purpose is a risky proposition. Often, those are the same people that die with the weight of regrets. Those are the people who feel unfulfilled or unworthy at the end of their journey. They bury their dreams for the sake of a safe life, without ever venturing into the world of possibilities. But the truth is that if you risk nothing for the pursuit of your passion, you risk more. An even deeper reality is that there’s never a perfect time; the most ideal and opportune time is the time when YOU choose to begin your journey. Find courage to take the first step today. Your age, your pace, or your handicap doesn’t matter. Nothing is insurmountable if you have passion and persistence – your heart knows this. You simply have to convince your mind to play along. Find your moments of courage – the times when you feel strong, able, and energized. Tap those moments to launch yourself; the world beckons!

Regarding this quality, which she possessed, as more precious than others which she did not possess, she was not likely to sympathise much either with Anna’s plan for making people happy, or with those who were willing to be made happy in such a way. A sensible woman, she thought, will always find work, and need not look far for a home. She herself had been handicapped in the search by her unfortunate title, yet with patience even she had found a haven. Only the lazy and lackadaisical, the morally worthless, that is, would, she was convinced, accept such an offer as Anna’s. It was not, however, her business.

The human mind suffers from three ailments as it comes into contact with history, what I call the triplet of opacity. They are: the illusion of understanding, or how everyone thinks he knows what is going on in a world that is more complicated (or random) than they realize; the retrospective distortion, or how we can assess matters only after the fact, as if they were in a rearview mirror (history seems clearer and more organized in history books than in empirical reality); and the overvaluation of factual information and the handicap of authoritative and learned people, particularly when they create categories—when they “Platonify.

This is just one version of how the world of successful people actually works. But social capital is all around us. Those who tap into it and use it prosper. Those who don’t are running life’s race with a major handicap. This is a serious problem for kids like me. Here’s a non-exhaustive list of things I didn’t know when I got to Yale Law School: That you needed to wear a suit to a job interview. That wearing a suit large enough to fit a silverback gorilla was inappropriate. That a butter knife wasn’t just decorative (after all, anything that requires a butter knife can be done better with a spoon or an index finger). That pleather and leather were different substances. That your shoes and belt should match. That certain cities and states had better job prospects. That going to a nicer college brought benefits outside of bragging rights. That finance was an industry that people worked in. Mamaw always resented the hillbilly stereotype—the idea that our people were a bunch of slobbering morons. But the fact is that I was remarkably ignorant of how to get ahead. Not knowing things that many others do often has serious economic consequences. It cost me a job in college (apparently Marine Corps combat boots and khaki pants aren’t proper interview attire) and could have cost me a lot more in law school if I hadn’t had a few people helping me every step of the way.

Disability justice, when it’s really happening, is too messy and wild to really fit into traditional movement and nonprofit industrial complex structures, because our bodies and minds are too wild to fit into those structures. Which is no surprise, because nonprofits, while created in the ’60s to manage dissent, in many ways overlap with “charities”—the network of well-meaning institutions designed on purpose to lock up, institutionalize, and “help the handicapped.” Foundations have rarely ever given disabled people money to run our own shit. Nonprofits need us as clients and get nervous about us running the show. Disability justice means the show has to change—or get out of the way.

Live long enough,' I say, 'and you'll eventually see all sorts of things taken away from you, Kid. Toys, sandwiches, money, people, and eventually time. And the longer you go in life, the more you worry about something being taken away and you worry about going back to not having enough. We're all afraid of being poor, being injured, helpless, handicapped, all of the things that make us look at other people and say, "how bad. Somebody should do something to help them." The thing we're most afraid of is being the "them" in that equation.' I shake my head to push home the horror of what I'm saying to the Kid. I can't tell if he's understanding me or not. I can't tell if any of this is really getting through or if I just sound like another cynical heel. But this is the truth I know.

African red rice is a sacred plant to many of the people who still grow it. It is intimately associated with the ancestors; it was even used to start a revolution in colonial Senegal. According to my friend Senegalese chef Pierre Thiam, “a young, handicapped Jola woman named Aline Sitoe Diatta” had a vision during a drought from the Jola Supreme Being to return to the ancient rituals of their ancestors, and to abandon the broken Asian rice given to them by the French colonial authorities during World War II. It was not enough to grow and cultivate the rice; the Jola were to return to traditional forms of land management and respect for sacred woodlands. Aline Sitoe Diatta met her end in exile in Timbuktu, ultimately dying of starvation. Rice has a long history with culinary justice.

today’s society is characterized by achievement orientation, and consequently it adores people who are successful and happy and, in particular, it adores the young. It virtually ignores the value of all those who are otherwise, and in so doing blurs the decisive difference between being valuable in the sense of dignity and being valuable in the sense of usefulness. If one is not cognizant of this difference and holds that an individual’s value stems only from his present usefulness, then, believe me, one owes it only to personal inconsistency not to plead for euthanasia along the lines of Hitler’s program, that is to say, “mercy” killing of all those who have lost their social usefulness, be it because of old age, incurable illness, mental deterioration, or whatever handicap they may suffer.

Many depressed people have been hurt and rejected by others. They feel as though basic relational needs have not been met, and they will be stuck in depression until they are. Rejection from parents, spouses, or friends has left a profound emptiness that feels like an emotional handicap. What does this have to do with the heart? Consider first the example of Jesus. He is God, but he was truly human. If anything is clear from his life, he didn’t get love from people, he never prayed that he would know the love of other people, and he didn’t seem emotionally undone by rejection and misunderstanding. Rather, his deepest needs, as noted in his prayers, were for the glory of his Father to be revealed and for his spiritual children to be protected from the evil one and united in love (John 17). The

Racism” as a blanket explanation of intergroup differences is not simply an over-rated explanation. It is itself a positive hindrance to a focus on the acquisition of the human capital or cultural capital needed to rise economically and socially. If there is any central theme that emerges from the histories examined in these three volumes, it is that the cultural capital of a people is crucial to their economic and social advancement, whether that people is a racial minority, a nationstate, or a whole civilization. In some cases, the factors inhibiting the development of this human capital have been geographical or historical. But they need not include self-inflicted ideologies or ideologies congenial to sympathetic outsiders, whose sympathies may prove to be more of a handicap than the hostility of others.

In the late twentieth century democracies usually outperformed dictatorships because democracies were better at data-processing. Democracy diffuses the power to process information and make decisions among many people and institutions, whereas dictatorship concentrates information and power in one place. Given twentieth-century technology, it was inefficient to concentrate too much information and power in one place. Nobody had the ability to process all the information fast enough and make the right decisions. This is part of the reason why the Soviet Union made far worse decisions than the United States, and why the Soviet economy lagged far behind the American economy. However, soon AI might swing the pendulum in the opposite direction. AI makes it possible to process enormous amounts of information centrally. Indeed, AI might make centralised systems far more efficient than diffused systems, because machine learning works better the more information it can analyse. If you concentrate all the information relating to a billion people in one database, disregarding all privacy concerns, you can train much better algorithms than if you respect individual privacy and have in your database only partial information on a million people. For example, if an authoritarian government orders all its citizens to have their DNA scanned and to share all their medical data with some central authority, it would gain an immense advantage in genetics and medical research over societies in which medical data is strictly private. The main handicap of authoritarian regimes in the twentieth century – the attempt to concentrate all information in one place – might become their decisive advantage in the twenty-first century.

In the late twentieth century democracies usually outperformed dictatorships because democracies were better at data-processing. Democracy diffuses the power to process information and make decisions among many people and institutions, whereas dictatorship concentrates information and power in one place. Given twentieth-century technology, it was inefficient to concentrate too much information and power in one place. Nobody had the ability to process all the information fast enough and make the right decisions. This is part of the reason why the Soviet Union made far worse decisions than the United States, and why the Soviet economy lagged far behind the American economy. “However, soon AI might swing the pendulum in the opposite direction. AI makes it possible to process enormous amounts of information centrally. Indeed, AI might make centralised systems far more efficient than diffused systems, because machine learning works better the more information it can analyse. If you concentrate all the information relating to a billion people in one database, disregarding all privacy concerns, you can train much better algorithms than if you respect individual privacy and have in your database only partial information on a million people. For example, if an authoritarian government orders all its citizens to have their DNA scanned and to share all their medical data with some central authority, it would gain an immense advantage in genetics and medical research over societies in which medical data is strictly private. The main handicap of authoritarian regimes in the twentieth century – the attempt to concentrate all information in one place – might become their decisive advantage in the twenty-first century.

His worries in the old days had been chiefly about people. The prospect of going to a dance had more than once sent him into a sweat; he had never been a good mixer; no one had asked him to join a fraternity. In the old days, such things were a handicap to a man. Now, he realized, they were actually a great advantage. Because he had sat on the edge of so many social gatherings, not quite able to mingle in the conversation, listening, watching objectively, now he could endure not being able to talk, and again could sit and watch, noting what happened. His weakness had become strength. It was as if there had been a blind man in a world suddenly bereft of light. In that world, those with seeing eyes could only blunder about, but the blind man would be at home, and now instead of being the one who was guided by others, he might be the one to whom the others clung for guidance.

More specifically, this usefulness is usually defined in terms of functioning for the benefit of society. But today’s society is characterized by achievement orientation, and consequently it adores people who are successful and happy and, in particular, it adores the young. It virtually ignores the value of all those who are otherwise, and in so doing blurs the decisive difference between being valuable in the sense of dignity and being valuable in the sense of usefulness. If one is not cognizant of this difference and holds that an individual’s value stems only from his present usefulness, then, believe me, one owes it only to personal inconsistency not to plead for euthanasia along the lines of Hitler’s program, that is to say, “mercy” killing of all those who have lost their social usefulness, be it because of old age, incurable illness, mental deterioration, or whatever handicap they may suffer.

Today’s society is characterized by achievement orientation, and consequently it adores people who are successful and happy and, in particular, it adores the young. It virtually ignores the value of all those who are otherwise, and in so doing blurs the decisive difference between being valuable in the sense of dignity and being valuable in the sense of usefulness. If one is not cognizant of this difference and holds that an individual’s value stems only from his present usefulness, then, believe me, one owes it only to personal inconsistency not to plead for euthanasia along the lines of Hitler’s program, that is to say, ‘mercy’ killing of all those who have lost their social usefulness, be it because of old age, incurable illness, mental deterioration, or whatever handicap they may suffer. Confounding the dignity of man with mere usefulness arises from conceptual confusion that in turn may be traced back to the contemporary nihilism transmitted on many an academic campus and many an analytical couch.

I can hardly believe that our nation’s policy is to seek peace by going to war. It seems that President Donald J. Trump has done everything in his power to divert our attention away from the fact that the FBI is investigating his association with Russia during his campaign for office. For several weeks now he has been sabre rattling and taking an extremely controversial stance, first with Syria and Afghanistan and now with North Korea. The rhetoric has been the same, accusing others for our failed policy and threatening to take autonomous military action to attain peace in our time. This gunboat diplomacy is wrong. There is no doubt that Secretaries Kelly, Mattis, and other retired military personnel in the Trump Administration are personally tough. However, most people who have served in the military are not eager to send our young men and women to fight, if it is not necessary. Despite what may have been said to the contrary, our military leaders, active or retired, are most often the ones most respectful of international law. Although the military is the tip of the spear for our country, and the forces of civilization, it should not be the first tool to be used. Bloodshed should only be considered as a last resort and definitely never used as the first option. As the leader of the free world, we should stand our ground but be prepared to seek peace through restraint. This is not the time to exercise false pride! Unfortunately the Trump administration informed four top State Department management officials that their services were no longer needed as part of an effort to "clean house." Patrick Kennedy, served for nine years as the “Undersecretary for Management,” “Assistant Secretaries for Administration and Consular Affairs” Joyce Anne Barr and Michele Bond, as well as “Ambassador” Gentry Smith, director of the Office for Foreign Missions. Most of the United States Ambassadors to foreign countries have also been dismissed, including the ones to South Korea and Japan. This leaves the United States without the means of exercising diplomacy rapidly, when needed. These positions are political appointments, and require the President’s nomination and the Senate’s confirmation. This has not happened! Moreover, diplomatically our country is severely handicapped at a time when tensions are as hot as any time since the Cold War. Without following expert advice or consent and the necessary input from the Unites States Congress, the decisions are all being made by a man who claims to know more than the generals do, yet he has only the military experience of a cadet at “New York Military Academy.” A private school he attended as a high school student, from 1959 to 1964. At that time, he received educational and medical deferments from the Vietnam War draft. Trump said that the school provided him with “more training than a lot of the guys that go into the military.” His counterpart the unhinged Kim Jong-un has played with what he considers his country’s military toys, since April 11th of 2012. To think that these are the two world leaders, protecting the planet from a nuclear holocaust….

Faith is all about trusting God even when you don’t understand His plan. God could have healed David just like He restored my sister Lisa. But God is sovereign. I don’t claim to understand it all, but I do know this: God is good. He has a great plan for your life, a destiny for you to fulfill. No matter how many disadvantages or setbacks you must deal with, if you shake off the self-pity, stop blaming, and keep pressing forward, nothing will be able to keep you from becoming all that God created you to be. Stop making excuses. Quit dwelling on disappointments, on the unfairness and hurt inflicted upon you. Know that God has something great coming your way. The worst handicaps are those you place on yourself. Too many people are waiting for God to make them perfect before they pursue their dreams and destinies. Go after yours right now. Honor God with what you have. He wants to take your liabilities and turn them into assets. First, though, you have to accept that God may not remove your challenge, but He will use it to your advantage.

Finally, I ask our managers to weigh one other critical factor as they handicap the prospect. Do they believe the candidate has the capacity to become one of the top three performers on our team in his or her job category? If people cannot ever develop into one of our top three cooks, servers, managers, or maître d’s, why would we hire them? How will they help us improve and become champions? It’s pretty easy to spot an overwhelmingly strong candidate or even an underwhelmingly weak candidate. It’s the “whelming” candidate you must avoid at all costs, because that’s the one who can and will do your organization the most long-lasting harm. Overwhelmers earn you raves. Underwhelmers either leave on their own or are terminated. Whelmers, sadly, are like a stubborn stain you can’t get out of the carpet. They infuse an organization and its staff with mediocrity; they’re comfortable, and so they never leave; and, frustratingly, they never do anything that rises to the level of getting them promoted or sinks to the level of getting them fired. And

History shows us we need labels to help define our place. For hundreds of years, people have categorized others as less so they could feel like more. Color, gender, class, religion, physical handicaps, sexual orientation, and pedigree are just a few ways in which one group is divided from another. For every person who stands superior, another must be inferior. But what does it say of us as a human race when we push others down for our own needs? Does it accomplish the intended goal or simply give rise to a pattern of behavior that can never be broken? What if we all stood equal in one another’s eyes and felt pride at our reflection? I speak of utopia and chance being ridiculed, but sitting in a village thousands of miles from everything, I will roll the dice. For one day only, maybe we could put aside our differences and come together in our sameness. For one day, we could see that past all the variations, we are all the same with similar hopes, dreams, fears, strengths, and weaknesses. For one day, we could stand together, not apart, and treat others as we would hope to be treated.

Atonement, expiation, laundering, prophylaxis, promotion and rehabilitation -- it is difficult to put a name to all the various nuances of this general commiseration which is the product of a profound indifference and is accompanied by a fierce strategy of blackmail, of the political takeover of all these negative passions. It is the `politically correct' in all its effects -- an enterprise of laundering and mental prophylaxis, beginning with the prophylactic treatment of language. Black people, the handicapped, the blind and prostitutes become `people of colour', `the disabled', `the visually impaired', and `sex workers': they have to be laundered like dirty money. Every negative destiny has to be cleaned up by a doctoring even more obscene than what it is trying to hide. Euphemistic language, the struggle against sexual harassment -- all this protective and protectionist masquerade is of the same order as the use of the condom. Its mental use, of course -- that is, the prophylactic use of ideas and concepts. Soon we shall think only when we are sheathed in latex. And the data suit of Virtual Reality already slips on like a condom.

looking for people to design the graphical interface for Apple’s new operating system, Jobs got an email from a young man and invited him in. The applicant was nervous, and the meeting did not go well. Later that day Jobs bumped into him, dejected, sitting in the lobby. The guy asked if he could just show him one of his ideas, so Jobs looked over his shoulder and saw a little demo, using Adobe Director, of a way to fit more icons in the dock at the bottom of a screen. When the guy moved the cursor over the icons crammed into the dock, the cursor mimicked a magnifying glass and made each icon balloon bigger. “I said, ‘My God,’ and hired him on the spot,” Jobs recalled. The feature became a lovable part of Mac OSX, and the designer went on to design such things as inertial scrolling for multi-touch screens (the delightful feature that makes the screen keep gliding for a moment after you’ve finished swiping). Jobs’s experiences at NeXT had matured him, but they had not mellowed him much. He still had no license plate on his Mercedes, and he still parked in the handicapped spaces next to the front door, sometimes straddling two slots. It became a running

We cannot possibly expect, and should not desire, that the great bulk of the populace embark on a mental and spiritual voyage for which very few people are equipped and which even fewer have survived. They have, after all, their indispensable work to do, even as you and I. What we are distressed about, and should be, when we speak of the state of mass culture in this country, is the overwhelming torpor and bewilderment of the people. The people who run the mass media are not all villains and they are not all cowards—though I agree, I must say, with Dwight Macdonald’s forceful suggestion that many of them are not very bright. (Why should they be? They, too, have risen from the streets to a high level of cultural attainment. They, too, are positively afflicted by the world’s highest standard of living and what is probably the world’s most bewilderingly empty way of life.) But even those who are bright are handicapped by their audience: I am less appalled by the fact that Gunsmoke is produced than I am by the fact that so many people want to see it. In the same way, I must add, that a thrill of terror runs through me when I hear that the favorite author of our President is Zane Grey.

There once was a female snake that roamed around a small village in the countryside of Egypt. She was commonly seen by villagers with her small baby as they grazed around the trees. One day, several men noticed the mother snake was searching back and forth throughout the village in a frenzy — without her young. Apparently, her baby had slithered off on its own to play while she was out looking for food. Yet the mother snake went on looking for her baby for days because it still hadn't returned back to her. So one day, one of the elder women in the village caught sight of the big snake climbing on top of their water supply — an open clay jug harvesting all the village's water. The snake latched its teeth on the big jug's opening and sprayed its venom into it. The woman who witnessed the event was mentally handicapped, so when she went to warn the other villagers, nobody really understood what she was saying. And when she approached the jug to try to knock it over, she was reprimanded by her two brothers and they locked her away in her room. Then early the next day, the mother snake returned to the village after a long evening searching for her baby. The children villagers quickly surrounded her while clapping and singing because she had finally found her baby. And as the mother snake watched the children rejoice in the reunion with her child, she suddenly took off straight for the water supply — leaving behind her baby with the villagers' children. Before an old man could gather some water to make some tea, she hissed in his direction, forcing him to step back as she immediately wrapped herself around the jug and squeezed it super hard. When the jug broke burst into a hundred fragments, she slithered away to gather her child and return to the safety of her hole. Many people reading this true story may not understand that the same feelings we are capable of having, snakes have too. Thinking the villagers killed her baby, the mother snake sought out revenge by poisoning the water to destroy those she thought had hurt her child. But when she found her baby and saw the villagers' children, her guilt and protective instincts urged her to save them before other mothers would be forced to experience the pain and grief of losing a child. Animals have hearts and minds too. They are capable of love, hatred, jealousy, revenge, hunger, fear, joy, and caring for their own and others. We look at animals as if they are inferior because they are savage and not civilized, but in truth, we are the ones who are not being civil by drawing a thick line between us and them — us and nature. A wild animal's life is very straightforward. They spend their time searching and gathering food, mating, building homes, and meditating and playing with their loved ones. They enjoy the simplicity of life without any of our technological gadgetry, materialism, mass consumption, wastefulness, superficiality, mindless wars, excessive greed and hatred. While we get excited by the vibrations coming from our TV sets, headphones and car stereos, they get stimulated by the vibrations of nature. So, just because animals may lack the sophisticated minds to create the technology we do or make brick homes and highways like us, does not mean their connections to the etheric world isn't more sophisticated than anything we could ever imagine. That means they are more spiritual, reflective, cosmic, and tuned into alternate universes beyond what our eyes can see. So in other words, animals are more advanced than us. They have the simple beauty we lack and the spiritual contentment we may never achieve.

those who advocate politically correct speech think the proper way to deal with some insults is to punish the insulter. What most concerns them are insults directed at the “disadvantaged,” including members of minority groups and people with physical, mental, social, or economic handicaps. Disadvantaged individuals, they argue, are psychologically vulnerable, and if we let people insult them, they will suffer grievous psychological harm. Advocates of politically correct speech therefore petition the authorities—government officials, employers, and school administrators—to punish anyone who insults a disadvantaged individual. Epictetus would reject this manner of dealing with insults as being woefully counterproductive. He would point out, to begin with, that the political correctness movement has some untoward side effects. One is that the process of protecting disadvantaged individuals from insults will tend to make them hypersensitive to insults: They will, as a result, feel the sting not only of direct insults but of implied insults as well. Another is that disadvantaged individuals will come to believe that they are powerless to deal with insults on their own—that unless the authorities intercede on their behalf, they are defenseless.

Most of them seem to be at it in the roof-garden. Want to go and watch,get some pressure up for later?” “I think these cigarettes are horrible. Made my throat so sore. And my guts are all sour and nasty. Did people really use twenty in a day?” “They call it streamlining, of course, but what it comes down to is they’re undermining my responsibility in the firm and I’m going to fight tooth and claw to hang on to what I’ve got. If I have to play it dirty that’ll be their fault, not mine.” “It makes genuine three-dimensional poetry possible for the first time in history. Right now he’s experimenting with motion added, and some of the things he’s turned out are hair-raising.” “You hold the knife this way, see?” “Refuse to teach their children to read and write, say it handicaps them for the post-Gutenberg era.” “Not many people have spotted it but there’s a loophole in the Maryland eugenics law.” “A polyformer for water-sculpture, quite new.” “Of course I don’t love Henry the way I love you but the shrinker did tell me I ought to occasionally.” “I’m just cutting jets for a prayer or two but I’ll be back—don’t get involved with anyone else.” “That makes seventeen different mixtures I’ve tried, and I’d better have some antalc, right away.” “I think it was bitchy not to tell Miriam it was pig-meat.

O that today you would hearken to his voice! —Psalm 95:7 (RSV) MARIA, INSPIRATION BEHIND HOLY ANGELS HOME Maria was nine in 1965 when I first wrote about her, a bright, little girl with an impish smile. Born hydrocephalic, without legs, a “vegetable” who could not survive, she’d dumbfounded experts and become the inspiration behind a home for infants with multiple handicaps. Now I was back at Holy Angels in North Carolina to celebrate Maria’s fiftieth birthday. I had to trot to keep up with Maria’s motorized wheelchair through a maze of new buildings, home now for adults as well as infants. At each stop, Maria introduced me to staff and volunteers who simply exuded joy. And yet the people they were caring for had such cruel limitations! How could everyone seem so happy, I asked, working day after day with people who’ll never speak, never hold a spoon, never sit up alone? “None of us would be happy,” Maria said, “if we looked way off into the future like that.” Here, she explained, they looked for what God was doing in each life, just that one day. “That’s where God is for all of us, you know. Just in what’s happening right now.” How intently one would learn to look, I thought, to spot the little victories. In my life too…. What if I memorized just the first stanza of Millay’s “Renascence”? What if I understood just one more function on my iPhone? What if just one morning I didn’t comment about my husband’s snoring? “Thank you, Maria,” I said as we hugged good-bye, “for showing me the God of the little victories.” Through what small victory, Father, will You show me Yourself today? —Elizabeth Sherrill Digging Deeper: Ps 118:24; Mt 6:34

One of the greatest difficulties we human beings seem to have is to relinquish long-held ideas. Many of us are addicted to being right, even if facts do not support us. One fixed image we cling to, as iconic in today’s culture as the devil was in previous ages, is that of the addict as an unsavoury and shadowy character, given to criminal activity. What we don’t see is how we’ve contributed to making him a criminal. There is nothing more intrinsically criminal in the average drug user than in the average cigarette smoker or alcohol addict. The drugs they inject or inhale do not themselves induce criminal activity by their pharmacological effect, except perhaps in the way that alcohol can also fuel a person’s pent-up aggression and remove the mental inhibitions that thwart violence. Stimulant drugs may have that effect on some users, but narcotics like heroin do not; on the contrary, they tend to calm people down. It is withdrawal from opiates that makes people physically ill, irritable and more likely to act violently — mostly out of desperation to replenish their supply. The criminality associated with addiction follows directly from the need to raise money to purchase drugs at prices that are artificially inflated owing to their illegality. The addict shoplifts, steals and robs because it’s the only way she can obtain the funds to pay the dealer. History has demonstrated many times over that people will transgress laws and resist coercion when it comes to struggling for their basic needs — or what they perceive as such. Sam Sullivan, Vancouver’s quadriplegic mayor, told a conference on drug addiction once that if wheelchairs were illegal, he would do anything to get one, no matter what laws he had to break. It was an apt comparison: the hardcore addict feels equally handicapped without his substances. As we have seen, many addicts who deal in drugs do so exclusively to finance their habit. There is no profit in it for them.

Tom carried with him a glass full of wine, which clearly hadn’t been his first of the evening. He swaggered and swayed as he started to speak, and his eyes, while not quite at half mast, were certainly well on their way. “In my mind,” Tom began, “this is what love is all about.” Sounded good. A little slurred, but it was nice and simple. “And…and…and in my mind,” Tom continued, “in my mind, I know this is all about…this is all love here.” Oh dear. Oh no. “And all I can say is that in my mind,” he went on, “it’s just so great to know that true love is possible right now in this time.” Crickets. Tap-tap. Is this thing on? “I’ve known this guy for a long, long time,” he resumed, pointing to Marlboro Man, who was sitting and listening respectfully. “And…in my mind, all I have to say is that’s a long…long time.” Tom was dead serious. This was not a joke toast. This was not a ribbing toast. This was what was “in his mind.” He made that clear over and over. “I just want to finish by saying…that in my mind, love is…love is…everything,” he continued. People around the room began to snicker. At the large table where Marlboro Man and I sat with our friends, people began to crack up. Everyone except Marlboro Man. Instead of snickering and laughing at his friend--whom he’d known since they were boys and who, he knew, had recently gone through a rough couple of years--Marlboro Man quietly motioned to everyone at our table with a tactful “Shhhh,” followed by a quietly whispered “Don’t laugh at him.” Then Marlboro Man did what I should have known he’d do. He stood up, walked up to his friend, who was rapidly entering into embarrassing territory…and gave him a friendly handshake, patting him on the shoulder. And the dinner crowd, rather than bursting into the uproarious laughter that had been imminent moments before, clapped instead. I watched the man I was about to marry, who’d always demonstrated a tenderness and compassion for people--whether in movies or in real life--who were subject to being teased or ridiculed. He’d never shown a spot of discomfort in front of my handicapped brother Mike, for all the times Mike had sat on his lap or begged him for rides to the mall. He’d never mocked or ridiculed another person as long as I’d known him. And while his good friend Tom wasn’t exactly developmentally disabled, he’d just gotten perilously close to being voted Class Clown by a room full of people at our rehearsal dinner. But Marlboro Man had swept in and ensured that didn’t happen. My heart swelled with emotion.