Slithy is not entirely off base here. Yeah, it is a simplification to say that the uncomplicated life of a well-adjusted mentally retarded person seems qualitatively superior. People with Downs Syndrome, by the way, are both the most common, and generally the happiest of mentally retarded people. So many of them are also kind, and gentle folks.
But the mildly retarded guy happily bagging my groceries every week down at the Safeway is not the end of the story. I know a whole lot of mentally retarded people, and I actually know a few I don’t like at all. I know one, personally who is a murderer, and one who is a sexual predator. But then, I know a couple of thousand mentally retarded people, and most of them are pretty nice.
When you can’t feed yourself, or get yourself a drink of water without assistance, you have a lot of incentive to please other people. When nothing happens in your life until someone else makes it happen, you get a warped view of how things work. If you live somewhere where you are treated decently, and with respect, and protected from the harsher consequences of your own inability, you tend to think of life in fairly kind terms. When you get shut up in a closet, and left for days at a time without food or human contact, and then get beaten and called names, you have a different view of humanity.
Michaelangelo? Hammurabi? I don’t know any normal people who are much like them, either. I know a mentally retarded man who sings like an angel, though, and a woman who played piano, extempore. (Beautiful, haunting melodies, at times, and sometimes harsh and angry tunes, filled with atonality and disharmony.) Humans do some pretty incredible things.
I don’t have the work or family related experience with the mentally retarded that some of the posters here do. But, without exception, the mildly retarded people I do know wish that they did not have such a disability.
Because most of them have been somewhat sheltered, I think that their attitude is more one of acceptance than most “normal” people have. Obese people, with few exceptions, can lose at least some of their weight. Most unattractive people can use either cosmetics or surgery to improve their appearance. Even “woman in man’s body” types have the possibility of a sex change operation, or at least transvestitism (is that a word??). My point (and I do have one) is that “normal” people usually have at least the possibility to change their condition. A retarded person will always be retarded. There is absolutely no way to not be retarded. All they can do is learn to function as well as possible with their condition. Both adult and children retarded people that I have met seem to understand that and accept it.
Still, everyone that I have talked to wishes that he or she was “normal”
Side note: Does anyone know why it is that mentally disabled people tend to enjoy and be very good at what one would call menial, repetitive tasks?
Abe asks, “Does anyone know why it is that mentally disabled people tend to enjoy and be very good at what one would call menial, repetitive tasks?” I always assumed that it was because they did not get bored with such tasks, or perhaps just took way longer to get bored then would a more intelligent person.
My theory: In general, for any simple, repetitive job, the ideal person is one who is just barely intelligent enough to master that job. For that person, the job will remain interesting and challenging for a long time. Someone who isn’t smart enough to master the job is plainly a poor choice – but so is someone who has substantially more intelligence then the job requires. The latter person is apt to get bored with the job fairly quickly, and either quit, or get sloppy and careless.
Oh puh-leze!! The mentally retarded lack guile? Give me a break. I spent 6 years working on the behavior dorm at a state institution for the mentally retarded, and I have seen them attack people with a viciousness that you wouldn’t believe. I have seen them make up lies to get staff fired, and brag about it after the fact. I have seen them target weaker clients for sexual assaults, to steal their belongings, and beat them to a pulp. I have seen them go out and throw rocks at the car of a staff that they did not like. In other words, I have seen the mentally retarded act just like any other rotten asshole out there, with full knowledge of the difference between right and wrong. Am I saying that all MR people are like this? Of course not. But let’s not pretend for a minute that just because you are MR, you are in some “state of grace.”