March 19, 2009
My Cousin Participates in the Special Olympics
My cousin is mentally retarded. He is 43 years old, four years younger than I am, and closest to me in age of all my cousins. He cannot make change from a dollar to save his life, but he can quote professional sports stats so quickly and accurately that John Madden would weep with envy, and he knows exactly what he wants off the menu at the steakhouse (any steakhouse; he loves steak). He works for the City of Hope, stuffing envelopes and labeling boxes. He goes to dances. When he comes over for dinner, he watches the clock obsessively to be sure he takes his pills on time.
When he was small, he was as obnoxious and annoying as any other small child. His motor skills have always been shaky at best; when he was about four, he knocked out his front teeth on the rim of the bathtub when he tripped and pitched forward, and didn’t have the coordination to put his hands up to break his fall.
He has beautiful dark eyes, with thick eyelashes I would kill to have myself. He doesn’t tell jokes, and you wouldn’t think he has any sense of irony at all, until he laughs out loud when I tease him about being prematurely bald, and blows me off when I tell him he should grow back the goatee he used to wear. He reminds me, every time he sees me (and repeatedly throughout our visit) how old he is, and how old I am, and how old we are both getting. He’s tall, very tall.
His was reportedly a “normal” birth, right up until delivery, when the umbilical cord, wrapped around his neck, cut off his oxygen and caused permanent brain damage. He lives in a group home in a suburb about 10 miles from us, where they treat him with the dignity he deserves — and to which he has had to direct me when driving him home, because my sense of direction is horrible.
He came to my wedding, and he understands that Buffy is my wife, and he has never questioned the nature of our relationship. To him, what is, is.
My cousin will never be able to live on his own. He will never drive, or cook for himself, or hold down a regular job, or get married, or have children. He will never read a book, much less write one, and he will never make any greater mark on this world other than that which he will leave on whatever family members may survive him.
He is my cousin, and there is nothing I would not do for him — especially as there are many, many people who would, deliberately or unwittingly, take advantage of his trusting nature and complete inability to defend himself against those better armed for battle in this very cruel world.
You do not disparage your own lack of skill at a particular task by comparing yourself to my cousin, by holding up my cousin as a thing of ridicule, by making my cousin an example of something defective. You do not do that.
You can say what you like about me — call me evil, call me a sinner, call me a cancer on society — but you do not mock my cousin, who is possessed of more kindness, more compassion, more gentleness, and more simple human dignity than most people with IQs three times his.
You do not do that, even if you are the President of the United States.
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Filed Under: Barack Obama
