Special Olympics: My only complaint

A few weeks ago, I had the privilege to attend my first Special Olympics event.  For whatever reason, in my adventures through The Community I’ve never actually been invited to attend them before.  Not in that ‘No Barry, last time you got everyone drunk and singing Irish whiskey songs’ not-invited sort of way, just that it hasn’t ever come up.  Anyways, here I am, for the first time ever, and I’m floating around working with people and watching events, and seeing people I haven’t seen in a blue moon.

            And it was genuinely a pretty good time.  I mean, with every special needs centered activity, it appears that there’s a pretty hefty lack of communication, and some general confusion, but in my group, at least, everyone who signed up to participate got to participate in every event they signed up for.  So, kudos for keeping it together, team.

            It was great, though.  A number of families came by to show support and watch their family member participate.  There were enough people that the stands were relatively full.  There were the girls- must have been from the high school that was hosting- that were going around to participants, and cheering directly around them.  Which, you know, considering the population, actually caused some incidents in itself, but for the most part it was rather charming, and many of the participants walked away with a big ole’ grin on.

But this article was prefaced with a title that leads one to suspect there was something amiss.

Very astute, Mr. Bolded Transitional Sentence!  My only complaint was that a handful of participants did not seem to actually have wanted to be there.  I mean, I’m not talking about people who signed up and changed their mind on D-Day.  Nor am I referring to people who went, did their schpiel, and then didn’t want to have to wait for the other students in their programs.  I mean people who probably didn’t have any interest in becoming a Special Olympian to begin with, but through pressure of institute, family, or some other outside force, they were conscripted to participate anyways.

            We work in a field of individuals who often cannot voice their own wants and needs.  And while the Special Olympics is an absolutely wonderful event, which truly benefits the people who go out of their way to train and participate for it, it isn’t for everyone.  I mean, yes, it’s for anyone who wants to sign up, come what may, regardless of physical capacity or condition which may cause a conventional competition to shut their doors in your face.  It’s for anyone.  But it’s not for everyone.  Just like our charges’ inability to vocalize wants and needs, they also may not have the ability to discuss preference.

            Let me put it to you this way.  Let’s say that there were a set of physical trials set for people who didn’t have special needs to participate in.  Let’s call them The Less Special Olympics.  Not everyone who exists outside of the special needs umbrella is going to want to train and participate in them.  I, for instance, am much more prone to the ‘modeling for stone statues’ side of ancient Greece rather than the show up everyone with expressions of physical finesse and strength side.  I’m just too humble, and it would really feel bad to kill all those poor athletes’ ambitions by thoroughly trouncing them.  So, maybe, using my ability to self-advocate, I’d do something like say ‘hey, don’t sign me up for them there The Less Special Olympics’.

            And then, having voiced that objection, I would follow up by then not actually participating in The Less Special Olympics.

            However, some of the people engaging in the Special Olympics seem to have had that choice stripped away from them.  Whether by an agency that wanted to show how many of their participants they could engage in them, or by family who wanted them to get ‘as much out of life as they possibly can’, somehow that person, who may have other dreams and ambitions- ones of art, of music, of automotives, or geography, or politics, or anything that lays outside of the quasi-Olympian sport circle- are made to participate.  And that frustrates me.

But don’t get me wrong.

I’m very much in support of the Special Olympics.  In fact, I think that the future of day programming is going to be the sort of specialization that the Special Olympics stand for.  I mean, have I mentioned how much of a fanboy I am for Arts of Life?  People SHOULD be able to pigeon-hole their interests, and do the sorts of things that they really love.  Artists should be able to do art, regardless of whether they have special needs or not.  And athletes should be able to compete.

       But not everyone is going to be an artist.  And not everyone is going to be an athlete.  Just as we should be pushing people to try new things, and let them be included in the world that lays just outside their doorstep, we also shouldn’t be forcing them to be who they may not want to be.

       Now excuse me, I’ve got a block of marble that’s craving my image.