I read this earnest story about intellectually disabled Americans, and several thoughts came to me. I guess the PO-faced will be upset and professionally offended by such thoughts, but frankly, my dear…
1. Are they talking about politicians, aka lawmakers?
No, they always land jobs, but the utterances of Nancy Pelosi suggest that she is a sandwich short of an intellectual picnic.
2. Were these people previously intellectually able? Well, no. Not like About Henry, the lawyer movie about Harrison Ford’s character who gets shot and intellectually disabled. These people are born with impaired mental capabilities (tbftgoGgI).
Having wrestled with that, I thought “FFS, what is unusual about that?” In an America where 40% of the mentally unchallenged (euphemism!) available workforce is unemployed, and where there are 11 million illegals willing to undercut Albania’s minimum wage, let alone Obama’s, we should be celebrating businesses like HEB who go out of their way to hire those who are intellectually sub-optimally equipped.
The IRS and Homeland Security also do their bit.
3. How do you provide career progression and stimulating opportunities for those called NFN (Normal For Norfolk) people in, er, Norfolk, England? People find stimulation in their work, each in their own way. When I was in the ad agency business, I managed (briefly) the Ercol account. Furniture. I was shocked that one guy hand carved the same pattern on wood panels all day. Every day. It was explained to me that some people seek perfection through repetition, and not everyone wants to be a clever-dick ad agency account man. Quite right too. Lesson learned.
That was nearly 30 years ago, and I recall that lesson vividly.
4. It is almost impossible to start a “career” without a degree. But many degrees require about the same intellectual capacity and rigor as it took to pass school exams at 16 or 18. To employ more “educators”, our “lawmakers” foisted upon us longer periods of “education” – so that we could start working later, and exclude the educationally disabled from the labour pool. The educationally sub-par are at the bottom of the heap, unless we can get them a degree in something useless.
5. Do foreigners keep changing the names for types and groups of people? Is it because there are so many Americans in perpetual education that they keep coining new euphemisms, to earn grants, justify tenure and trap the politically incorrect?
6. We need to teach our children that The Dignity of Labor is valuable, worthy of undertaking for its own sake. Physical labor is redeeming. It offers immediate reward in the accomplishment, not the pay. I thought this earlier, sweeping up leaves, when so many Americans contract this out to gardeners.
7. Welfarism kills society. We need to cut back welfare, localize it, so that towns and counties support their poor, help their unemployed, and we need to recognize that work is good, it feeds the soul. The obverse of this is that no work destroys, and idleness needs to attract shame.
8. If we are concerned about employing the mentally challenged, we need to also be concerned about the mentally and physically unchallenged. Start by cutting, and localizing, welfare.
9. Only in America is a spade not called a spade. And there never were any shovel-ready projects. Another lie, up there with “you can keep your doctor. Period”.
Colin Bastable 
Well said. Scary times we’re living in.