If you are a parent of a child with a disability or learning difference, (or maybe just a citizen of the USA) you are likely besieged by experts. The sad news is that it is often of our own doing. Let’s face it – parents are, in part, responsible for the already huge and growing disability industrial complex.
We are so dang gullible, so eager to fix our children (as in treatment and remediation), so eager to create special places for our sons and daughter so they can have the experience of school (think special education, special post-secondary college programs), the experience of play with others (think special olympics), or the experience of work (think sheltered workshops) or the experience of community (in, of course, a segregated setting).
None of these so-called “experiences” are real in any stretch of the imagination. They’re manufactured and they’re exploitive. They exploit people with labels of disability and work to the detriment of connection, contribution and community. They explode the budgets of programs, agencies, and organizations and landscape the lawns of experts. Worse, we regular folks are left with the sense that we can’t. We can’t possibly create the real thing so we turn to the experts and professionals to create the artificial.
In the Unsettling of American, Wendell Berry writes about agribusiness experts and their effect on farm and culture, but his message of exploitation is informative to the situation we find ourselves in. Berry suggests an antidote and describes a remedy. He write “the first necessary public change is simply a withdrawal of confidence from the league of specialists, officials and corporate executives who for at least a generation have had almost exclusive charge of the problem and who have enormously enriched and empowered themselves by making it worse.”
But if we withdraw our confidence in experts who do we turn to? How about each other. The power to create what we long for is found within our selves and within our circles of conversation, inquiry and action. The seeds of our creativity and our courage, the hope for real communities and real experiences for our kids is found in the center. Those seeds, and our souls, can be nurtured by turning to one another with our questions, our puzzles and our dreams for the real things in life.
