misfitS pOLITICS
We talk. We write. We entertain. Or so we think.
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Rebecca de Winter
The General Intellectual Ability (GIA) score of the Woodcock-Johnson-IV Tests of Cognitive Abilities is a measure of overall intellectual functioning. Jake’s score on this scale falls in the very low range of ability for his age (GIA=49). His score is in the <.1 percentile, meaning that when compared to 100 children his age, Jake scored equal to or higher than <.1% of them. The relative proficiency index (17/90) indicates that when average peers are having 90% success, Jake is likely to have 17% success.
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I was sitting in a conference room at a large table, surrounded by school administrators, educators, a speech therapist, a school psychologist, and my beloved 16-year-old son, Jake, who happens to have autism. While the adults in the room blandly discussed his most recent evaluation, he (wisely, in my estimation) tuned us out, hunched over his place at the table with his ever-present bag of Prismacolor pencils and sketch-pad.
As we slowly, methodically went through the 26-page report – which covered his cognitive functioning, pragmatic language ability, adaptive behavior and social skills, among other things – I found it hard to focus; my mind clicking like an old-fashioned slide projector from memory to memory to memory: Jake – 6 months old – round and rosy, chubby cheeks, fuzzy blonde hair and bright blue eyes, smiling, babbling, the sweetest baby on the block. Jake – Age 2 – curled in a corner in a fetal position, staring blankly, trance-like, at the ceiling fan – while I waved my hands frantically in front of his face. He looked right past me, never acknowledging me. I slumped down next to him and fell into a fit of anguish, sobbing, at the realization that my once happy, giggly, precious baby boy had retreated into another dimension. One that even I, who gave birth to him and nursed him and rocked and held him lovingly for so long, could not reach. Jake – Age 3 – using laminated pictures we had velcroed all over the house to communicate. “Snack.” “Sleep.” “Play outside.” “Potty.” “No.” Blood-curdling screams with no visible cause. Staying up half the night laughing maniacally at the walls, seeing what God can only ever know. Biting his hands bloody from some inner torment we could not guess and could not heal. Jake – Age 5 – finally verbal, using memorized lines from Winnie-the-Pooh, Thomas the Tank Engine, or snatches of conversation from family or school. “What do you want to eat?” we would ask. “Sirrrrr Topham Hatt” he would respond. But no more screaming. No more self-mutilation. PROGRESS. Jake – Age 10 – happy, happy, happy. Verbal, loving, affectionate, silly and sweet. Still sleeping with his raggedy, well-loved Winnie-the-Pooh. Reams of white paper, clipboard and pencil bag, drawing page after page of cartoons, trucks and trains. Jake – Age 16 – easily the most-loved student at his high school. Tall and handsome. Gorgeous blue eyes. Friendly, thoughtful, cheerful – a kind word for every single person he encounters. Gifted artist. Joyfully obsessed with trains and railroad crossing signals. Loves all kinds of music, and loves to dance. Enjoys video games, playing outside, and yes, he still adores Winnie-the-Pooh. He loves cats. Cats love him too; they are drawn to him – this fascinates me…. My mind snaps back to the present, we are on page four of the report, and I’m trying to focus. Something about “Pragmatic Judgment.” I sneak a glance at Jake – still drawing, sketching, coloring – smiling to himself. Good. My heart melts a bit. I relax into my seat. And then we get to the part of the report I’ve been dreading. The IQ test. I’ll never forget the day, when he was first tested years ago, being told that he was severely mentally retarded. They don’t call it that anymore – it’s not PC, so they say “intellectually disabled,” but we all know what it means. No matter how accepting we try to be, no matter how often we are inspired watching the Special Olympics or YouTube videos of a special needs child given a chance to make a touchdown, no one wants to hear this about their own child. He had already been diagnosed with autism. He had been making such progress. And then this. It was unbearable. Excruciating. Back to the present – I try to remain calm. I struggle to listen attentively as the diagnostician reads through the categories quickly: Oral Vocabulary – 49, Story Recall – 60….blah blah blah blah blah...and then the final judgment: General Intellectual Ability: 49 I am looking intently at the page in front of me, pretending to go along with the words being spoken. The voices start muting in my head, and the room around me fades like an opaque watercolor as one line jumps out at me in high relief. I read it over and over and over: indicates that when average peers are having 90% success, Jake is likely to have 17% success indicates that when average peers are having 90% success, Jake is likely to have 17% success indicates that when average peers are having 90% success, Jake is likely to have 17% success A wave of anger swells inside of me, forming in my solar plexus and cresting up and over my head. I can feel my face flush, and I hold back the tears beginning to well in my eyes with every ounce of will I can muster. I will not cry here. Not in front of Jake. Although he has tuned us out, one sign of distress from his mother and all bets are off. I hold it together. I have to. While I understand on a logical, rational level that these words and numbers are simply testing lingo, the mother in me struggles not to interpret it as a damning indictment of my son. Who are these “average peers” and just who in the hell determines that they have such an enormous advantage on “success” over him? Who in God’s name decides what success means anyway? I scan the notes quickly, looking for answers. “Comprehension-Knowledge includes the breadth and depth of a person’s acquired knowledge.” I know and love a lot of smart people. And by smart, I mean incredibly intelligent, highly-educated, with sky-high IQs. The breadth and depth of their acquired knowledge is enormous and impressive. But I would argue that Jake has a breadth and depth of innate happiness and love that is exceptionally rare. One that the average person – intelligent or not – would give almost anything to have. One that few ever reach. The slide projector clicks through my mind again: Jake -
By any measure, that’s what I would call success. The meeting finally wraps up, we all stand up and stretch, goodbyes all around. As we file out of the room, Jake shakes everyone’s hand and says “thank you!” We passed the school secretary on the way out. “I made this for you,” he said, grinning proudly, handing her the drawing he created while we were in the meeting. The smile on her face made my day. “Jake, thank you! You are just the best,” she said. “Yes, I am the best, and you are the best, too,” he replied matter-of-factly. About a year ago, Jake’s caseworker, Monique, who makes monthly visits to review his current services, packed up the files in her briefcase and we walked her to the door. Like we always do, we stepped out onto the front porch to wave goodbye. As she turned and waved back, Jake called out “thank you for the autism!” Monique and I burst out laughing – it was just so...so “Jake.” He was delighted at our laughter and joined in, jumping up and down with joy. It’s one of the funniest, most poignant memories I’ll ever have of him. And as we walked out the front doors of his school after the meeting, a surge of joy and love and pride coursed through me, and something inside of me said “Yes. Yes. Thank you for the autism.”
13 Comments
Mo
The Constitution is a mix of both substance and process. The substance—for instance, free speech, freedom of religion, the right to bear arms—is, without a doubt, critical to the functioning of our Republic. Equally critical, however, is the process—for instance, the Fifth and Sixth Amendments grant procedural rights to criminal defendants to ensure that they get a fair trial. The procedures in the Constitution are there to ensure that we are governed by the Rule of Law, not by the rule of any one person.
Progressives do not care one bit about process or the Rule of Law. They care only about outcomes, in particular, their desired outcomes. In fact, Obama’s stated criteria in selecting judges was not faithful adherence to the Constitution but with whom that judge would side:
We need somebody who’s got the heart, the empathy, to recognize what it’s like to be a young teenage mom, the empathy to understand what it’s like to be poor or African-American or gay or disabled or old – and that’s the criterion by which I’ll be selecting my judges.
Picking winners and losers, and obtaining the power to do it, is the entire progressive project over the past several decades.
In the latest installment of “We win/you lose,” the Left side of the aisle is making noises about the Electoral College, because Trump won it and the Presidency, while Clinton won the popular vote. Never mind that we had this same argument 16 years ago when Bush won the EC and Gore the popular vote. Never mind that the Left spent the ensuing 16 years doing nothing to go through the Constitutional process to change the electoral college rules. As usual, the Left wants to bypass the hard work to change the process and go straight to rigging the desired outcome. And they’re doing it in the most blatant way imaginable. They’re calling for electors who are pledged to Trump, to vote against him. Being the sophists they are, they’re arguing that we are a Republic and that Hamilton specifically authorized the faithless elector in Federalist Paper 68. In theory, there can be faithless electors and one can imagine a scenario in which they would have a duty to vote against their pledged candidate. But this is not one of those scenarios, notwithstanding the Left’s hysteria. Trump is a buffoon. He is not some sort of dangerous demagogue who is going to take down the country and turn it into a dictatorship. We have settled rules and expectations for how the Electoral College operates. Some of those rules are based on state laws and some are based on simple tradition and expectations. We shouldn’t cast all of this aside simply because some people didn’t like the outcome of the election. That is far, far more dangerous to our Republic than a Trump presidency will be. Once again, the Left has absolutely no respect for process and no respect for Constitutional order. They have no standing whatsoever to invoke the Federalist Papers to get their desired outcome.
Guest Contributor @Patriot_Musket
Just when you thought 2016 couldn’t get any weirder, it did. And then it very quickly went from weird to dangerous in those first few days after Donald Trump won the Electoral College and the presidency. Millions upon millions of liberals, completely stunned by Hillary’s loss, suddenly needed an outlet for their shock and frustration. Some, like Chris Matthews, notably leapt from the liberal bubble and pointedly blamed Hillary Clinton herself for the loss, noting that she had not been out campaigning against “stupid wars” and for not being willing to pay a political price by calling for an enforceable immigration plan that included clamping down on illegal immigration. Others, like liberal LGBT icon Miley Cyrus, made teary, pitiful webcam videos.
But then something changed. All of the shock and awe coming from the left turned into something more sinister and dangerous; it turned into calls for action. Katy Perry, with her 95 million Twitter followers, simply called for all of that shock and frustration to turn into one thing: REVOLUTION. Yes, THAT Katy Perry. Surrounded by armed security and armed with a whipped cream bra, a water pistol and a Twitter account, Perry called for a revolution. Nevertheless, to ignore the power of celebrities on social media would be the same as discounting Trump’s chances at winning the presidency. In other words, never deny the potential of a movement. Katy was joined by the typical hodgepodge of hysterical celebrities like Cher, Rosie and Debra Messing in their call to overtake this presidency before it could even take hold. But it wasn’t these rich, white, elitist celebrities that were taking to the streets. These “protests,” egged on by liberal elitists from behind their gated mansions, were being carried out largely by their poor, minority brethren in New York City, Philadelphia, Chicago, Portland and Los Angeles, to name a few. And boy did this movement deliver. To be fair, outside of blocking traffic and generally just being a nuisance to people who have to go to work every morning, these protests remained for the most part just that. This time. Starting with the protests in Ferguson, liberal elites came to see the power of a noisy movement, no matter how disjointed or aimless that protest may be. I’ve thought for some time now that the Democrat Party has essentially become one loosely organized collection of fringe movements, each with no more in common with each other than their collective goal of using anarchy in pursuit of their uncommon goals. And what we saw in the nights following Trump’s election was the collision of those strange alliances; a whole lot of people who were really angry, but they weren’t exactly sure why. And those angry people needed an outlet. And so the answer came from their leftist leaders, who were busily chartering buses and organizing marches on social media. The very same people who have been telling us for two years that the police’s sole objective is to murder black and minority people, were organizing to send as many people of color as possible into the streets to face off with….the police. So are the police actually targeting minorities or was that all a lie in order to bind together the hodgepodge of liberal alliances? Because if the former is the truth, then the left has shown that the minority voter is nothing more than that to them. A voter. The left is calling for accountability following the 2016 elections, which have left the Democrat Party at its lowest level of power since Reconstruction. Accountability for what remains unclear. What is clear, however, is that the state of hysteria that exists in this country today can be placed squarely at the feet of those who took to social media in those emotional hours after the election and called for action. They, of course, had a tour to prepare for or a script to read. It simply wasn’t possible for them to light a torch and protest against injustice in front of a wall of police. That’s what their poor, minority minions are for. Long live the Republic. |
MisfitsJust a gaggle of people from all over who have similar interests and loud opinions mixed with a dose of humor. We met on Twitter. Archives
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