Heard a story this evening from a friend who works with special needs kids.
When I was at secondary school in the north of Scotland, we had a special needs department as part of the main school complex. The special needs kids were partially integrated into the main school and would join the rest of us for certain classes. Being typical schoolchildren, we refused to call them anything as politically correct as 'special needs kids'; instead, we called them 'spastics' or, if we were feeling particularly generous, 'spackers' - a phrase that is still in common use among my generation of Scots (perhaps in other parts of the world as well; I'm not sure).
Apparently, at some point since I left school, The Spastics Society, as it was then called, realised that a generation of kids was being labelled 'spastics' and 'spackers' and decided to go for a rebrand, changing their name to SCOPE. This, I suspect they thought, was an innocuous name that no one could mould into a nasty pejorative term of abuse.
They should have saved their money. Today's schoolchildren now refer to their peers with cerebral palsy as, wait for it... 'scopers'!
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There was a fantastic fly-on-the-wall documentary about a bunch of wannabe advertising creatives who were shadowing the rebranding of the Spastics Society. They had to create a dummy campaign for the launch of Scope, and the best one would get a job at the agency.
Two moments stand out in my memory. The first was a brainstorming (also no longer an acceptable word) session for promotional events to encourage the idea that people with learning difficulties could achive great things. The phrase "spastic bungee jump" will haunt my dreams forever.
The other was when the aspirants were asked to devise a poster campaign for the countdown to the changeover. One bright spark stood proudly by his flipchart and with a flourish revealed: "ON JUNE THE FIRST, THE SPASTIC WILL DIE".
They're just now whingeing about Prince Harry's racist remarks on "Sky News." Apparently it's important to the modern British Army to kill ragheads in a culturally sensitive way. It must have come a long way since my day.
Tim: I suspect the phrase 'On June the first, the spastic will die' will live long in my memory. Still laughing as I type this.
Johnny: I thought 'your day' was still to come, or have you given up on armageddon?
What does it mean that we have invented ways to destroy all life on Earth? nothing much. We have dreamed this as an escape from the contemplation of our own individual deaths.
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