Dear Governor Romney:
When I read the article at the Atlantic Monthly today detailing your "high school hijinks" (link below) I was thrown back into my own adolescence which, I assure you, was a time of terrible struggle and pain. I was like your teacher who had the thick glasses–a teacher who you side-swiped, presumably for a cheap laugh. I was the kid with glasses thicker than Coke bottles–they were as thick as padlocks. I walked bent over. I struggled to read the printed word. I belonged to no known social group. I was harassed by able bodied kids in the hallways. By my junior year I was hospitalized with anorexia and exhaustion. I was, in short, the kind of person you would have gleefully victimized. I don't think the word "hijinks" quite captures what you did, Sir, for cruelty is steeper than easy shenanigans. Cruelty to people who have disabilities or who are gay requires a penchant for stigmatization, an intellectual property that balloons inside unreflective and judgmental human beings.
Do I believe that people can grow? Certainly. But there must be evidence, and given your wholesale support for the Ryan budget plan, a plan that calls for cruel and unnecessary cuts to the social programs that help people with disabilities actually live, I'd say that there's no evidence to date that you've grown one iota.
I have never thought of blindness as an antagonist, merely the people who make the way harder. Of this I am certain: you know plenty of those folks.
http://www.theatlanticwire.com/politics/2012/05/time-when-mitt-romney-was-bully/52151/
Stephen Kuusisto
Planet of the Blind 