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 develop its Unified Sports activities applications in faculties around the globe. This system, “Unified Sports activities” is designed to allow youngsters with and with out mental disabilities to play collectively and by doing so, to study 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.
Right this moment, that lesson is necessary not just for folks with mental disabilities but additionally for the remainder of us. There’s a brand new problem in our politics, but it surely hasn’t but captured the pressing consideration it calls for. We debate immigration and replica; we problem one another on problems with training and regulation enforcement; we voice highly effective beliefs round conflict and peace. We labor over the way forward for our planet and the sources of our power.
These are certainly enormously vital points, however what’s hiding in plain sight is the one problem that’s maintaining 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 group after group, 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 after we disagree with hatred and contempt, we make it unattainable to unravel the very issues that we declare to need to remedy.