Years ago, a book titled Who Would I Be If I Could Be (OL no. 77/2002) offered important reflections on how the disability of a certain "Mr. Down" became a reason to limit expectations for his active role in society.
He was chosen because his cognitive disability was immediately recognizable—emblematic of all those who, though "able to become ordinary men and women, are instead held back in perpetual childhood, made to live in places without history and without time." We wish instead that each person, in ways suited to them, could conjugate the verb to grow into its past participle: adult. That is what Marco Paolini reminded us in one of his performances.
Adults who, despite an intellectual disability, once grown, are capable of choosing, of taking responsibility, of having both rights and duties.
It is not easy. Patrizia Ciccani, a pedagogue and author of the book we are presenting, explains that it seems increasingly simpler to take shortcuts—to frame and categorize a person with a disability (and not only them) at first glance. Economic shortcuts. Prejudices. They guide us forcefully, hiding from us alternative and deeply human paths. In such a context, a person with a disability faces an additional disadvantage when expectations toward them shift in ways that are not always balanced.
The risk is to give meaning to the person only as someone to be cared for, medicalized, sometimes not even evangelized—made a saint regardless, an object of charity rather than a subject alongside all other brothers and sisters (S. Toschi, 1995).
We must make an extra effort. We know that disability, with the struggle it brings, makes each step taken far richer in meaning for those living it and those walking alongside them. We must try to change our expectations of those who start with a disadvantage, because these expectations themselves play an important role in shaping how we inhabit the world. We must expect that each person can, in their own way, run toward their own finish line. It is no accident that Reuven Feuerstein—known for his psychopedagogical method with children who have intellectual disabilities—said to his son two days after the birth of a grandson with trisomy 21: "From now, from this moment, we begin working to prepare for his wedding."
To speak of marriage for that child gave his father a new way of seeing his son—it opened him to possibility. Not the possibility of marriage itself, but everything that possibility meant: being an active member of a community, of his neighborhood, of his Church; with work suited to him, where possible; capable even of following a vocational path. So Cristina Acquistapace, though carrying an extra chromosome, raised by her parents "not as a normal daughter, but as their daughter," was able to make her choice to consecrate herself fully. The possibility of authentic work integration is one of the most effective ways to create for the individual—within the dynamics of rights and duties—a recognized place in the community they live in.
Yet we must always sustain care for the development of a sense of self in its social dimension—not only within the family—even in those who cannot work or in those who live their lives within an institution (p. 15). They can do so through their neighborhood or their parish.
So we hope that, even if hindered by a sack, everyone can still run, called toward the goals that life offers. And not end up trapped inside it.
Cristina Tersigni, 2016