Susan Senator

I was gazing at my Nat’s face in the previous blog post and I thought, “Beautiful. You would never know that he is someone that some jerk could call “retarded.” I was thinking about Tropic Thunder, and all the latest uproar over the use of the “R” word, uproar that I have participated in. I thought now that perhaps there should be a different kind of slogan campaign to raise awareness about the nastiness of using the word “retarded” as a substitute for “stupid,” or “confusing,” or whatever, but not the way we have been merely shutting down the word itself.

Here is an example of why I don’t think the censure is all that effective. The other day I was at the beach and two young women walked by. One said, “I know! I’m so retarded!” I looked up and I said, “Don’t use that word. Please.”
She stared at me and I waited for what would come next. I was ready for a fight, actually aching for it. I could take her, I thought…
Her friend said, “I know. I’m always telling her that.”
My breathing started up again. But I wondered if the young woman had actually learned anything, other than being shamed. Was shame enough? Would she stop using the word, but still think it is a terrible thing to be retarded? And isn’t that the point we really want to get across, that there is nothing wrong with being retarded, cognitively impaired, developmentally delayed, or mentally challenged, or whatever? Just like there is nothing wrong with being autistic! But we don’t make everyone say, “neurologically challenged.”

How much more meaning this little interaction would have had if she could have gotten just a bit of all the wonder that is Nat. Now, of course, that would be impossible, because she would never get to know him in the brief time we had. And I don’t know how he would have felt about getting to know her, since she had such limited judgment as to reduce her own actions to such a narrow level.

So I got to thinking some more about the whole “retarded” thing. And I have to admit that the PC aspect of it does challenge me a little bit, because it does not really address our concerns. It does not educate the offender in a meaningful way. It merely seeks to close mouths against the word. It is authoritarian, rather than informative. It closes the subject, rather than to open a discussion and truly educate. Do we learn by being told, or by being helped to understand and then come to a more accurate conclusion? I submit it is the latter, Your Honor.

And the fact is, there is nothing wrong with the word itself, nothing wrong with being retarded. Some (actually, only one) of my best sons are retarded! Or at least, that’s how he tests on those meaningless tests psychologists use (if you ask me, it is the psychologists and others who fail to interpret Nat’s very depth of character who are —– well, you know).

It’s that the context has come to mean a put-down. What is wrong with the use of the word is that it seeks to reduce a person to one thing. And that is wrong to do, especially if it is done with nasty intent. (For example, when my husband says, ‘you’re just a big pile of sugar,’ I don’t mind it in the least. We both know that I’m more than that, but he is saying it with love and admiration. But when someone says, “Sugar buns,” as someone un-Ned called me in college, it is insulting and demeaning, as well as inaccurate.) But when you ridicule someone who can’t really think the way typically developing people can, and only see this particular ability as defining them, then that is making fun of that, dehumanizing the person.

It is not the word, that bothers me, exactly. It is the use of the word, the intent. It is even the way people say it, with the emphasis on the first syllable: “RE-tard.” Or, here in Boston, “RE-tahd.” I thought about Nat’s loveliness, and completeness as I looked at his picture and then thought: “The face of a retard,” as in the way ad campaigns put a face on a concept: “The face of hunger,” with a starving child, etc. But of course that would probably seem to some as horrible, when what I want to do is get them to think about the limited, narrow way we view people with cognitive disabilities. They are so much more than a test score.

How much power there would be in taking back the night, in owning that word rather than running from it. Why don’t we consider taking the Eleanor Roosevelt view of the thing, and declare that we cannot be offended except by our own permission?

Retarded.
It’s not what you think.

or

Retarded.
It’s much more than you think.

or

Retarded.
Think again.

What do you think?