Picture by LEFTERIS PARTSALIS
The next is an excerpt from an op-ed within the Stavros Niarchos Basis (SNF) Dialogues, written by Particular Olympics Chairman Dr. Timothy P. Shriver:
For years, the Stavros Niarchos Basis has supported Particular Olympics Worldwide’s effort to increase its Unified Sports activities packages in faculties world wide. This system, “Unified Sports activities” is designed to allow youngsters with and with out mental disabilities to play collectively and by doing so, to be taught to reside collectively too. The lesson is so simple as it’s profound: everybody deserves to be handled with dignity and when that occurs, everybody advantages.
In the present day, that lesson is vital not just for individuals with mental disabilities but in addition for the remainder of us. There’s a brand new challenge in our politics, but it surely hasn’t but captured the pressing consideration it calls for. We debate immigration and copy; we problem one another on problems with training and legislation enforcement; we voice highly effective beliefs round battle and peace. We labor over the way forward for our planet and the sources of our power.
These are certainly enormously essential points, however what’s hiding in plain sight is the one challenge that’s holding us from with the ability to handle any of them: our sample of treating one another with contempt and robbing one another of their dignity. In neighborhood after neighborhood, in state after state, in faith after faith, we’re being torn aside not by our coverage or non secular values or variations however by the devotional anger and addictive virus of contempt. It’s not that we disagree that’s problematic; it’s how we disagree. And once we disagree with hatred and contempt, we make it unimaginable to unravel the very issues that we declare to need to clear up.
