I used to make coloring books for children’s hospitals. I would draw animals with various conditions and medical devices—a giraffe with forearm crutches, a unicorn with a trach tube—and kids in hospitals would color them. As a result, my wife and I would often see kids in the wild with different disabilities and offer their parents free coloring books. Most said yes. My wife is very extroverted and I’m an extreme introvert, so when it was just me, it would sometimes take me a bit longer to justify approaching a stranger.
One day, I spotted a woman and a boy with leg braces called AFOs, at the park where my sons and I were playing. He looked to be around six. My boys were nearby and just as I was preparing to approach the woman who would turn out to be the grandmother, something somewhat alarming stopped me in my tracks.
The boy with the leg braces was standing in the middle of one of those plank-type bridges that are so common in playground structures. They’re the kind that rock and sway and wobble about when kids are jumping up and down on them. Otherwise, they hang in a downward arch that looks as if the playground structure has a lazy smile. The boy with the leg braces wasn’t jumping, and though the bridge was smiling, an even smaller boy beneath the bridge was not.
“Ow. Ow! OW!” he shouted, trying to wriggle his little fingers free from the edge of one of the planks that he had decided looked like a perfect handhold from which to dangle. He would have been right, had the boy in the braces not taken the opportunity to grind his medicalized feet into the dangling boy’s fingers. The grandmother rushed over to pry the orthotic shoes off the other boy’s digits, and I was frozen in place.
This was no accident. The disabled boy was working his little shoe back and forth like a smoker snuffing out a discarded cigarette before returning to a shift at a barely tolerable job. He was holding the metal handrail and pushing down with all his might to get as much weight and leverage into the act as he could muster.
Now, listen. Sometimes kids are rotten. My boys are no exception, nor was I at their age. There are no perfect kids nor perfect parents. But this was different. What most unsettled me was the look of genuine pleasure on the disabled boy’s face. I’d only recently returned to college after leaving the service to study psychology, but I would have known the correct term for what I was seeing years before: sadism.
I would go on to approach the grandmother. She said yes to a coloring book. She also said, somewhat still aghast, that the little boy with leg braces did that sort of thing all the time. To kids. To his little sister. To animals. Even though I was early on in my education and eventual career in psychotherapy, I knew what that likely meant.
While I’ve yet to find a crystal ball that allows me to trace out the developmental trajectory of kids like that, that boy became a concrete example of why group identity politics could never work. I cared deeply about the plight of kids with disabilities and their families—my own son has CP—but an uncomfortable realization settled over me that day.
Every sizable demographic category has its fair share of murderers, psychopaths, sadists, and opportunists.
Which means you have to treat people as individuals and not police or legislate on the basis of demography—lest you unwittingly advantage the small but durable subpopulation of bad men and women that exist across every identity group without exception. You cannot extend blanket moral immunity to a category of people without handing that immunity to predators inside the group. One such predator—who understood exactly how to exploit a society foolish enough to overindulge in what I’ve come to call Infant-Predator Politics—was a twenty-three-year-old man named Vickrum Digwa…
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