What?
The woman who sits next to me in choir
was telling a story tonight. She went down to the mail room and asked
an employee there a question. The question was not directly related
to his job. She mocked the fact that she didn't understand her
question. She was even more disdainful of the fact that when she
explained it, he didn't know the answer.
I inquired if it was possible that he
might have been have been unable to give her the answer she required
because he had been placed in the job by the local developmental
disabilities agency. It was the sort of job that would be a good
placement for an intellectually challenged person. She responded that
this was possible, but if he was, he should wear a badge or something
so she'd know she was working with someone of limited capability. (My
more polite words, not hers.)
What? Someone is supposed to wear a
badge to indicate their IQ score? I told her there are groups of
people who might think that those with so called normal intelligence
should do so. She took that as a joke. I was not really joking.
My mother and my older sister were in
the high IQ society, Mensa. I took the test at fourteen, because it
would have matter of total humiliation if I couldn't make the grade.
I passed. As a result, I grew up in Young Mensa. To be considered in
the intellectually disabled range generally requires an IQ score
about thirty points below average. Most of my friends and I,
depending on the test used, had a gap bigger than that between us and
the so-called normal population, most likely including the lady
sitting next to me in choir. I don't ever recall anyone proposing
making the "normals" wear badges because they would be slow to work
with, but there was plenty of frustration expressed about having to
deal with people who couldn't keep up.
People are who they are. We all have
different gifts and different levels of functioning. We don't label
people as Alphas or Deltas as Aldus Huxley had his society do in
Brave New World. We are all entitled to basic human rights and basic
human dignity. No one is proposing that someone at any level be put
in a job they are not capable of doing. But whatever the job is, if
it is done competently, there is no reason for derision, if they
don't have knowledge in other areas.
Sometimes “normal” folks don't have
knowledge that would make them better at what they're doing. A quick
example, the lady in my story doesn't read music. When the musical
director mentions half notes, or rests, or musical terms, I explain
them to her. Does she have any plans to learn to read music? Nope. Maybe I should hang a badge on her.
