I greatly appreciate the young handicapped athlete, Cindy Bently, for that wonderful introduction. Do you know she was voted the 1990 Disabled Athlete Of the Year by the Colorado Amateur Sports Federation, which is affiliated with the US Olympic Committee. Cindy is a speed skater, basketball player, and does track and field. What an athlete.
Actually, I thought you should know, I heard through the grapevine that your Board of Directors while seeking a speaker for today’s event, considered many people, but it came down to three Germans, believe it or not! First choice was Arnold Schwarzenegger. Second choice was General Norman Schwartzkopf. Third choice was Sargent Shriver. What a group!
It turns out that Arnold Schwarzenegger couldn’t get permission to come. My daughter, Maria, would not let him come! General Schwartzkopf is cruising the Caribbean with the Queen! So here I am, I’m sorry you’re stuck with me!
What a joy it is for me to be here with you today; to help you celebrate the 115th anniversary of your founding, and to bring you some good news on the 23rd anniversary of the founding of Special Olympics. I hope some of you visited the exhibit presented by the Joseph P. Kenned, Jr. Foundation in your exhibition hall. It is called “From Darkness to Light,” and it gives a brief but vivid accent of the history of our national response to mental retardation during the past 150 years.
One of the brightest lights in the otherwise bleak landscape of ignorance, neglect and even brutality in those early days was the work of this great organization. Over the years you have changed darkness to light for so many individuals with mental retardation and their families. You have provide that professionals can have passion as well as knowledge, and that organizations can act as well as hold meetings. My wife and I have been proud to work with you over at least 45 of your 115 years.
When the AAMR was founded, it was far ahead of its time. A 20th Century organization in the 19th Century. Today I am proud to be the Chairman of an organization, a movement, that was launched in the mid-Twentieth century, but is really a harbinger of what the 21st century could be like, if we followed its example; if we learned from its athletes; if we absorbed its values into our cultures. I am speaking, of course, about Special Olympics.
I know you will think I am somewhat biased. That I have to say what I’m saying because I’m related to the Founder of Special Olympics, my wife, Eunice. NO. As proud as I am of our program and of her contribution, I know enough about the world to know that Special Olympics is a sign, a portent, of what the world can be if we will only wake up to it. When I say that Special Olympics is a new venture, a new movement for the 21st Century, here’s what I mean.
Special Olympics is not built on nationalism. We do not play national anthems, raise national flags, or keep score according to points won by national teams. Special Olympics is true 21st century Internationalism, based on the equality of all human beings in the sight of God.
Special Olympics is not based on political or economic power. It is not corrupted by money or drugs. It is not militaristic. It is not restricted by race or sex or age or intelligence or beauty. These are the false values and superficial measures of worth that have corrupted our Century. Instead, it is based on the idea that excellence comes not from the gifts of birth but from learning, training, competing, and from the love of family, friends, and community. As the poet, W.H. Auden wrote at the beginning of World War II, “We must love one another or die.” Our Century has been a time of war and death. Special Olympics brings us a message of life and hope.
Special Olympics is part of a new world -- a world where might does not make right, where mutual survival transcends mutual assured destruction. We did not plan that Special Olympics would achieve these objectives. That would be been presumptuous and grandiose.
My wife had a much simpler idea back in 1968. She knew that children and adults with mental retardation had not only the right but the ability to experience a universal joy that had long been denied them: the joy of fair and even competition in sports. The joy of becoming fit and healthy. The Joy of winning a race. Of getting a medal. The Joy of being accepted with pride by family and community.
So, instead of giving medals for intellectual achievement, Special Olympics turns this practice upside down by giving medals to persons with mental handicaps. Instead of cheering the world’s fastest runner, or jumper, or the most powerful man or woman, Special Olympics celebrates the courage and skill of children and adults the world once called hopeless. We have discovered, and the world has shared in our discovery, that persons with mental retardation can inspire everyone with their spiritual energy, with their courage and their accomplishments.
23 years ago, July 20, 1968 -- 1,000 Special athletes from 26 States and Canada became the world’s first Special Olympians. There had never been a title like that before. No one had ever called a person with mental disabilities an athlete, a competitor, a winner. Almost no such person had ever run a race, played a team sport, shot a basket, thrown a baseball, kicked a soccer ball, jumped over a high jump bar. But once the world saw that people with mental retardation could do all these things and do them well and go on to do them better, the idea and the organization literally swept through the nations of the world.
Think of it -- this coming July 20 at the Hubert H. Humphrey Metrodome in Minneapolis, not 1,000 athletes, but 6,000 will take part in the Opening Ceremonies of the 8th International Special Olympics Games. Not a handful of parents, but almost 10,000 family members will be in the stands. And they will not sit conspicuously alone as they did in 1968. There will be 50,000 other cheering spectators in those stands, who will have come to see, to hear, to catch the glorious spirit of one of the most thrilling events of our time.
The athletes and their coaches will come, not from a single program in one of 26 states, but from almost every county in every State. Not from one country outside of the United States, our good neighbor, Canada, but from more than 100 countries, from every continent. They will come from every racial and ethnic group. From every culture, all of them united under the Special Olympics flag, sending a powerful message of unity and peace from the 21st Century, to remind us what we can and must become.
And imagine this. Special Olympics was not launched by a bureaucracy. It wasn’t tied to a political party by grants of money. It didn’t originate in some think tank, or even an airing as smart and dedicated as yours. In fact, when my wife started Special Olympics, many learned experts and professional organizations said, “It can’t be done. It shouldn’t be done. It will do more harm than good.” People with mental disabilities can’t run 300 yards, they said. They can’t swim and dive. They can’t learn a team sport. And above all, they can’t understand the meaning of competition. They won’t know what it means to win, and they’ll be crushed when they don’t win.
My wife didn’t believe any of this. She had run a summer day camp for years, and she knew what fine athletes people with mental retardation could be if they were only given the chance. And she was right. But what she was most right about was the meaning and value of sports as the vehicle for changing the lives of millions of special people.
She recognized that sports is the unifying activity which brings everyone together. Sports is a universal language even more so than music, because sports is conducted by rules, and according to standards of fair play that are recognized and accepted throughout the world.
Sports are used by Special Olympics in a different, 21st Century way. They are used to demonstrate the humanity as well as the ability of the athletes. Sports release Special Olympics athletes from the confines of institutions, from the dull anonymity of special classrooms; sports give them opportunities for travel, socialization, leadership and acclaim. Through sports and competition, Special Olympics opens the minds and hearts of everyone to the abilities and the worth of people with mental retardation, not to their disabilities.
The Spirit of Special Olympics arises out of the challenge of competitive sports, but the spirit of Special Olympics also celebrates the courage and skill of losers as well as winners. The slogan, “Special Olympics, a World of Winners,” is a cornerstone of our movement’s philosophy. Though for us it is expressed in terms of sports, it is your organization’s philosophy, too. To win on behalf of the least powerful, most disenfranchised most misunderstood and underestimated people in the world, is far more gratifying than to win for oneself. That, too, is a 21st century idea. We’d better get used to it and practice it in our social, business and political lives.
One thing that sets Special Olympics apart from every other sports organization is its inclusion of all the members of an athlete’s family in every aspect of the program -- from coaching and training athletes, to providing food and transportation, and serving on local Boards of Directors. Family programs have been established in 90% of the counties in America and in 80 countries worldwide.
There are now nearly 500,000 family members who actively support their athletes. And where, once, parents hid their faces if they came to the Games at all, today, grandparents, parents, brothers and sisters, ants and uncles sit proudly in the stands wearing T shirts that say, “My son, John, is a Special Olympian, and we’re proud of him.” Or, my daughter is batting .300. Is yours?
I know that there are still some people who claim that Special Olympics is segregated because it insists on mental retardation as a criterion for participation. Certainly, we could open up the program to everyone. And then, we’d end up with no one really benefitting. We believe strongly that the best form of integration, of mainstreaming, is to make Special Olympics so attractive, its athletes so skilled, so confident, that the world will come gladly to Special Olympics and not grudgingly accept its athletes into society. Here are some signs that this is happening:
Thousands of athletes in schools and communities, who are not good enough, perhaps to make a team, are joining to the Special Olympics Unified Sports program in which an equal number of athletes with and without mental retardation play on the same team in the same sports league.
The high school Partners Clubs, created by Special Olympics, have brought together more than 25,000 students throughout the United States who work weekly, coaching and training thousands of Special Olympics athletes. Leading corporations like Hardees and Red Lobster are so impressed with the skill and dedication of Special Olympics athletes that they are creating job opportunities for thousands of them. Hardees, alone, is working with Special Olympics to recruit 16,000 athletes for regular jobs with good pay.
Great corporations like Procter and Gamble, Revlon, Kodak, AT&T, American Express, Three M and many others, have proudly allied themselves with Special Olympics, not as a charity, but as a respected partner. These are only a few of hundreds of examples which demonstrate the normalizing, mainstreaming power of the Special Olympics movement. And the mainstreaming goes on, not only between those with mental retardation and those without, but among nations and peoples once devoid of any common bonds of values or traditions.
At a press conference in Washington, a few months ago, when we were announcing that the Soviet Union and all its republics had decided to join Special Olympics, I heard the minister-counselor of the Soviet Union say, “it is time for all of us, east and west, communist and non-communist, to synchronize our moral compasses. And I believe that Special Olympics can help us do that.” He was right. Special Olympics is equality, it is respect. It is opportunity. It is justice. It is purity. Because of what it stands for, for millions of people, with and without mrntl retardation, Special Olympics has become the magnetic north of the moral compass of the world.
Yes, we take pride in that word special which graces our name. We are Special in our motivation. Special in the ways we develop the physical, psychological and spiritual dimensions of our athletes. Special in the way we touch the hearts and minds of parents, volunteers, spectators, kings, presidents, legislators, businessmen, teachers, scientists, workers. Now that’s mainstreaming!
Special, yes. But at the same time, Olympian. Olympian in our dearie to reach out and embrace all of the 150 million people of the world with mental retardation. Olympian in our dedication to the spirit of our movement and to the great movements of advocacy and justice for which you have labored so diligently for so many years. Olympian in our belief that we can mainstream the world because in Special Olympics we all share the work, share the success, share the glory and share the love for one another as human beings.
May our work -- our very special work -- continue to be blessed. And may our work and our life here on earth be just the beginning of that eternal life and love we seek.
Thank you.
