Dialogue: Let's have an end to lies and deceit

By GARTH GEORGE

I suppose it's too much to hope for, but if I have one wish for this nation this year, it is that we might see an end to public stupidity and to the dissimulations and downright lies that permeate our politically correct society.

The sort of stupidity I'm talking about is that which censors a clever and committed schoolteacher for using a video camera to catch a persistent pre-teen thief, who presumably gets off scot free, learns nothing, and will probably end up in jail.

It's that which causes an officious bunch of Mr Plods to fiddle around at a fatal crash scene for six hours while thousands of cars pile up nose to tail in every direction. What happened to chalk marks and cameras?

It's that which insists that speed and alcohol are the main reasons for the road carnage when it is patently obvious that the cause is ignorance, incompetence, inattention and impatience on the part of too many drivers. So millions are spent on advertising, booze buses, speed cameras and highway patrol cars - and the holiday road toll shows every indication already of being even more appalling than usual.

It's that which insists that a Defence Force can be such without close air support and cover, that two frigates and a handful of support ships make a Navy, and that hundreds of light armoured vehicles should be bought even though they can't do the job they are intended for.

But the even graver problem facing us is the dissimulation - I call it lying - that increasingly infects every facet of our society and particularly the way we see ourselves and our neighbours.

We seem determined to con ourselves into believing that we are all the same, that there are none among us who is lame, blind, deaf, crippled, mentally retarded, insane or whatever.

For instance, once we had a Crippled Children Society and an Intellectually Handicapped Children's Society, and the very pronunciation of those names would melt our hearts and loosen our purse strings.

Then along came the social engineers and told us there was a "stigma" attached to words such as "crippled" and "intellectually handicapped", so the two organisations dumped their names and became the meaningless CCS and IHC.

I suspect this kow-towing to the misguided notions of the politically correct has cost the societies untold millions in public donations, not to mention a deep public sympathy largely turned to indifference.

And I suspect the same applies to those organisations that provide for the blind and the deaf. I know that those charged with promoting such causes are at their wits' end to mount meaningful campaigns, so constricted are they by the dictates of circumlocution.

Because these days you aren't supposed to call a person who can't hear "deaf" or a person who can't see "blind" or people with physical deficiencies "crippled" or a person with stunted mental growth "mentally retarded".

And someone seems to have done their damnedest to remove the word "disabled" from our language. Such (I was going to say "unfortunate" but that's probably taboo, too) people, they say, are not disabled and we have no right to see them any differently from ourselves.

But at the same time, strangely enough, we are always being asked to supply money to provide for the special needs that disabled folk invariably have.

As usual with political correctness, everything has been looked at down the wrong end of the telescope.

In an effort to get rid of the so-called stigma attached to physical or mental disability, the PC brigade has tried to convince us that they must be seen to be as normal as the rest of us.

Yet I doubt that there were many deaf, blind, crippled or mentally retarded folk who ever thought of themselves as stigmatised. Rather, the stigma is and always has been in the minds and the mouths of the ignorant and insensitive among us. The appropriate target for destigmatisation, therefore, is not the disabled but those who look upon the less fortunate among us with fear, anger, loathing or contempt.

This back-to-front exercise to bring greater acceptance of the disabled has not worked. I have a son who was born with Down's syndrome. He is now 37 years old. In his early years, he was educated in IHC facilities and for the past 27 years has been in the Hohepa organisation.

He lives in a Hohepa house with a group of other lads, under the care of a houseparent, spending holidays with his mother or with me.

But when he goes for a walk in his suburb he avoids all the schools, primary and secondary - because the schoolkids give him a hard time.

* garth_george@nzherald.co.nz