Tuesday, January 5, 2010

HELP!

Friends,
If you have a good resource, can you please share it?

I'm trying to help educate some really good people who unfortunately say something I find hurtful and painful. If you have ARTICLES or WEBSITES that help people realize why they shouldn't say, "Oh, oops, sorry, what I did was so retarded," I would be really grateful.

I apologize if you are offended that I even posted an example of their comments, because I realize their words sound incredibly insensitive. These are good people who just need some help remembering what they already know about respect for all people. Thanks if you can point me in any good directions.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

I'll poke around a bit, but here's something I wrote on the topic a while back.

http://jesswilson.wordpress.com/2008/08/14/words-matter-or-theyre-both-fish/

Christine said...

I don't have any internet resources, but I dealt with this very thing last night. I simply said: "You're my friend so I know I can say this to you. I find that word very hurtful. I know you didn't mean it that way; it is so easy to forget that the words we use have so much power."

Good luck. Conversations like this are hard but so important.

erin said...

Here are a few ideas...

http://www.5minutesforspecialneeds.com/1902/1902/

http://www.jennaglatzer.com/pledge_to_stop_the_word_retard.htm

http://kateharding.net/2008/05/01/why-i-dont-use-the-word-retarded/

http://www.saratogaareas.com/ellie/blog3.php/2009/04/01/end-the-word-retard

I hope you find something that will help. This is something that is important to me too and for me, it can be a very hard thing to bring up without alienating others, which is the opposite of what I want to do.

-erin