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Listen to thisSince the days when my mother wouldn’t let my older brother go out to play stickball if I wasn’t with him, there’s been a lot of progress in attitudes toward those we now call developmentally or intellectually challenged. There’s mainstreaming them into public schools, the Special Olympics, TV shows like “Speechless,” Down syndrome children in clothing ads. There are group homes, not warehousing. There’s awareness that words can wound. I flinched when someone yelled “retard” at my brother, Jimmy. For some comedians, it was a laugh line. You don’t hear it much anymore.
And now a barbaric attack in Chicago on an intellectually disabled teenager is rightly being treated as a hate crime. Authorities cited the virulent racial epithets shouted by the four African-American attackers at their white victim, but also noted that they hurled insults about his developmental limitations as well.
His being different may be the main reason they chose him. The developmentally challenged so crave kindness they make inviting prey. The victim, who knew one of his attackers, was taken to an apartment where he was tied up, punched and kicked. His mouth was taped shut, his scalp sliced open with a knife. For added humiliation, the assailants forced his head into a toilet and ordered him to drink.
The heightened penalties for a hate crime may be some comfort to the
victim’s family, but if they are like mine, not much. His relatives look
defeated as they describe their horror at what happened. His grandmother
won’t watch the video the four perpetrators proudly recorded for
Facebook.
All the progress that has been made saves parents today
some of the sorrow my parents endured when they could get only so much
help in the 1960s. Because there wasn’t much institutional support and
Jimmy didn’t fit easily into the wider world, my parents created an
inner one that brought the outside in. We were the only family on our
block in Camp Hill, Pa., to churn our own ice cream and grow our own
watermelons, so the neighborhood children loved coming over. My parents
didn’t trust babysitters, so parish dinners, poker games and Knights of
Columbus meetings came to us. Bread was always setting, pie crust rolled
out, jigsaw puzzles on the card table.
I didn’t love it, and could have done with less “Little House on the Prairie” and more alone time. But it was better than my navigating Jimmy’s world on my own. What can’t be programmed or legislated away – and requires constant “if you see something, say something” – is the hate in hate crime, the base instinct of some to pick on the weak, often because they’re weak themselves. There will always be those grasping the chance to feel superior – witness all the abuse of old people in nursing homes and gay shaming.
I saw cruelty firsthand – and was guilty myself – as a child. Despite my protection, Jimmy was the last to be picked for a team, although he could swing a bat as badly as just about any other 6-year-old. The pack would say they were running one way and go another. Hitting another kid was punishable, but sidling up to Jimmy and subtly pinching him was not. We’d wonder where he got the bruises. But he knew enough to fear the brat pack more than my parents, so he never tattled. One kid loved bending the training wheels on his bike. I sometimes in with the crowd. I’d hear the whispers about pretending to go home so that Jimmy would. Later, I’d sneak back out hiding my Wiffle ball from my mother.
That’s not luring a vulnerable man to an empty apartment to be tortured, but it shows how much vigilance is needed. Tim Shriver, who runs the Special Olympics, said that there had been many advances but that “taunting and bullying remain an epidemic for children with intellectual disabilities” and that violence against them “is usually based on misunderstanding and ignorance and is all too often hidden.”
The older the child, the more hidden and difficult to prevent. The 18-year-old victim in Chicago thought one of his tormentors was his friend, and his parents dropped him off to meet him at McDonald’s. They reported him missing when he didn’t come home, but not soon enough to keep him from being tortured for five hours.
I became my brother’s guardian in 1991. He took some time before he learned to cling to me the way he had to our parents. I couldn’t be home with him all the time, so he came many places with me. My friends became his friends. But he was hurt when I least expected it. He didn’t know elevator etiquette and made eye contact with people getting on. As he was stepping off one time, a lawyer who worked in my building turned and called him a “weirdo.” I tracked him down, as I did the kid who stole my brother’s spanking-new Mickey Mantle baseball glove many years ago, and confronted him. He pleaded ignorance. The description fit.
I thought I knew my parents’ heartache but didn’t have a glimmer. It’s called politically correct and squishy liberal or nannyish to protect the weak among us – transgender children, minorities, the homeless, old people – but it’s really just human. And as Chicago showed us, oh so necessary.
By Margaret Carlson
6 January 2017
