| Glenn Seaborg |
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Sydney Taylor
acrylic on canvas
54" x 47"
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an old girlfriend
once said that if she ever had a child with birth “defects” she would simply have to kill herself as we claw our way through academia corporate life the political world we are constantly ranked by iq, sat, gre by sales by salary we constantly rank am i too good to be here am i good enough to be there and yet people like deborah faust erin gruwell father boyle jaime escalante repeatedly demonstrate that what matters more than a tabular printout of performance and potential is whether or not somebody cares duncan & joyce taylor care they do not seem to share the old girlfriend’s fears |
i don’t know that i could have their courage still when you meet sydney taylor down syndrome “survivor” it does seem more like love than courage destined for a shuttered life of special ed classes her parents sued the school district and won the right to have her mainstreamed the girl who experts said would never read was last year elected to eighth-grade student council the girl expected to achieve little works toward a life of self-sufficiency how self-sufficient will she be how self-sufficient am i how self-sufficient are any of us we don’t know if she’ll ever win the national spelling bee or land a plum job as a white house intern we do know that because people cared a girl who could easily have been discarded by our culture is thriving in it |
| Survivor |
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9 October 99
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