I took this for granted as a young man and as a child, but now I know how blessed I have been by this single simple reality. I now meet people who believe the experts more than their own eyes, and I worry for their children. I worry that those parents will be like a Gepetto, who dreams of having a real child, but who cannot hear the loving beat of the new heart inside the stiff wooden boy. And I worry that the boy, always talked about as wood instead of real, will believe that the new heart is not real either, if the wait for good news becomes too long. The answer to that question is one I hope to begin today.
All people are real, in the deepest sense of that word.
That means that there is no such thing as a non-human human. But if you look around this room, you will see people who look at least non-standard. And that is where the problem begins. We live in a country where image is kind of a reality more real than reality. And eagerness by parents to cure autism or retardation or compulsiveness will not drive great distances toward the final solution to the actual problem.