you were warned

When I was in grade school I had one good friend, T. She was the only normal kid of a family of four daughters...morbidly obese, allergic to sunlight youngest, ear tubes, rat teeth and hives at the drop of a hat middle sister and profound Downs' Syndrome oldest sister.
Now I was a member of the inagural class year when the 'mainstreaming' movement was all the rage in the public school system. That means that all the 'special' classes were dumped out and everyone got all heaped together in a big pile of brotherly love and understanding.

Ahem.

Anyway, C, the older sister, wasn't a revelation to me. In her own goofy way she was charming, in fact, but I did my best to avoid her. And this reaction is key, here...I was a pretty nice kid. I didn't get rotten until Jr. High. And I am proud to say that I was not one of those weasels who tormented other kids, ever. But C aroused a type of contempt and ire in me, just by her presence, that seemed to be waiting there fully formed for a chance to deploy. I spent a lot of time crying about that. It felt ugly. It didn't make me like her any more, though, or make her my best buddy or include her in my games. I wanted her the fuck off me.

I had plenty of opportunity to see this same reaction played out as a member of the class of 1978. The hippy dippy motives of the mainstreaming movement failed to take into account that 1. children are primitive little beasts who are not fully formed socially or morally, and that 2. children are ferociously heirarchal, and very brutal about establishing that heirarchy, also 3. the teachers already had more than enough on their plates.

So here all these utterly disadvantaged children were, dumped into the dog pit, and they never had a fucking chance. The most unpopular of the unpopular normals now had an underclass to feel superior to at whim. It was beyond brutal, and it went on daily, AND THE TEACHERS SAW NOTHING, NOTHING, NOTHING. The beatings, the mocking, all the cruelties that kids can heap on each other were heaped doubly on these kids, at whim, universally, and the teachers did nothing. They saw it. It happened right in front of them. I remember this clearly.

Now what kind of a chance does a special ed kid have anyway, dumped into a world that they are not and never will be equipped to participate in? Realistically? None at all. And I stand by that. What kind of a chance does this same kid have when the parents wont even throw them in the bathtub occasionally? Or when they dress them in whatever crap comes to hand because 'they're retarded anyway so they don't care?' And that last really burned me up. It revealed a lot about these parents state of mind when they denied their kids even that amount of humanity. Not to mention camoflage.

Eveyone was going about in this fog of idealism and it ended up being horrific. On the level of Bosch, horrific. Every single day. I don't know whose wonderful idea this was but I'd like to find them and introduce them to the crowbar I carry in my truck.

This is why, when I was pregnant, I gladly submitted to amnioscentesis. And if the result had been positive, I would have terminated.

I wonder how many of the children I went to school with even remember those mainstream kids? Or if they ever think about the shit they did to them? One kid was almost blinded by a huge crowd of boys who took lime off the playing field lines and rubbed it into his eyes. The teachers watched. The playground attendants watched. After the kids were done and had left this boy there on the ground, did they come haul him off to the nurse. Nobody got in trouble for it. I still remember the perpetrators names to this day. But of course they were only kids, right? And they probably have kids of their own now.

When my daughter was still in high school, another special ed kid was ratpacked and nearly choked to death up in Ferndale, near here. These were Jr. High age kids. I asked a girl who witnessed it and she told me calmly that everyone wanted to; so they all waited until after school when everyone was getting off the bus near a secluded area and lured this kid down into it like a dog, with treats. That everyone had hated this girl anyway, because she was gross and inappropriate.

Then there were the daily indignities and torment these kids suffered. I challenge a normal person to put up with that kind of treatment and not come away worse for the experience. But to put someone who never had a chance into that circus? No. They could not keep up in class and so every assignment they were given they failed. They couldn't fathom social things so they had no friends. They never got a joke, never knew the answer, always got the worst playground equipment-if any, and always got ridiculed and physically abused behind closed doors at every opportunity. It was as though the normal kids were in the grip of an uncontrollable compulsion.
I honestly think that they were.

I say that the adults involved felt the same revulsion as the kids did. I say they took a secret schoolyard satisfaction in seeing the gross retard get the shit kicked out of him. There is a part of human nature at work here that needs to be addressed a lot more openly than it has been. Humans shouldn't act like chickens attacking a speck of blood, like pirrahna, like sharks. I say you carry this impulse too far and institutionalize it, and what you end up with is Columbine.