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Labels that cripple

We stick labels on people to keep our images of them sorted out in our minds. There are highbrows and lunkheads, dreamboats and loudmouths, good guys and awful bores.

Some labels are unfair and they get stuck on too tight. If a bus lettered "School for the Retarded" picks up a child every day, that label will hang on his neck like a millstone for years.

It will haunt him and trip him up when he goes to get a job he has trained for. The class dummy might have overcome his reading disability, or have outgrown his handicap, but his community is not made up of people who give much of a damn. And those who do the hiring don't take risks.

Many professionals urge people to "face this honestly." But that does not insure that the rest of the world will be honest, much less sympathetic, about anyone else's handicap.

One reason for that is that everybody is handicapped in some way. Is there any person without physical, emotional, psychic or social limitations? I say no.

Inferiority loves company. There is nothing a human being loves better than discovering others' troubles. It is a sneaky form of bliss, to learn how someone else got fired, or to survey the screwup on the next guy's ma-chine, or to hear how the lady next door burnt the roast.

To send a youngster out wearing the label "crippled," "retarded," "spastic," "handicapped" or the like is to put a curse on him that most of society will not let him scrape off.

Most of society wants him to wear his stereotype label. Not everybody. Some citizens like to sentimentalize or religionize over the lame, the halt and the blind.

Some earnestly want to help them and do, actually without expecting payment here or in heaven. There really are a few saints still around.

Todd

Simon

Another label that inflicts pain is whatever is the current term for

persons of danced maturity — to

use a disgusting euphemism. "The old," "golden agers," "senior citizens," "the aging," "people in their sunset years.

"

Whatever term you pick, it will feel uncomfortable on those who wear it. It sets them apart from others with whom they feel equal. It tells them they are over the hill, disqualified, out of it.

A judge told me a story of a man in prison for armed robbery, unable to make it with the parole board even after 11 years behind the bars.

Why? Labels. Assaulted when he had hardly got into the penitentiary, he fought off his attackers. That earned him the label "troublemaker."

When he quit fighting back to avoid that label, and submitted, he was. labeled "homosexual." Those labels were like a ball and chain. They made. parole impossible. It took some judicial guts to free him so he could live down his shame.

People used to tie cruel nicknames on each other. I knew a man with a lame arm called "Gimpy," and a mixed-up kid they called "Nutsy," a boy with a big nose called "Jewy,” and a polio victim called "Limpy.”

Labels like those show the mean streak in those who used them. A touch of compassion should have blotted them out of their minds. And a bit of empathy should teach anyone what such epithets feel like when the one they are hung on is you.

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