Some disabled people spend a significant amount of their energy on trying to come across as abled or as not that disabled.
You see what I am driving at. The mentally handicapped do not have a consciousness of power. Because of this perhaps their capacity for love is more immediate, lively and developed than that of other men. They cannot be men of ambition and action in society and so develop a capacity for friendship rather than for efficiency. They are indeed weak and easily influenced, because they confidently give themselves to others; they are simple certainly, but often with a very attractive simplicity. Their first reaction is often one of welcome and not of rejection or criticism. Full of trust, they commit themselves deeply. Who amongst us has not been moved when met by the warm welcome of our boys and girls, by their smiles, their confidence and their outstretched arms. Free from the bonds of conventional society, and of ambition, they are free, not with the ambitious freedom of reason, but with an interior freedom, that of friendship. Who has not been struck by the rightness of their judgments upon the goodness or evil of men, by their profound intuition on certain human truths, by the truth and simplicity of their nature which seeks not so much to appear to be, as to be. Living in a society where simplicity has been submerged by criticism and sometimes by hypocrisy, is it not comforting to find people who can be aware, who can marvel? Their open natures are made for communion and love.
At the same time, however, the necessity for economic change in our countries has led us to conceive laws and accept traditions often at the expense of the individual person. Just when many are becoming conscious of the fundamental heritage of the Judeo-Christian tradition to respect each human person, friend or foe, within the actual structure of our society to apply this truth. The very efficiency demanded by our technocratic industrial society renders the life of the old, the unstable and the handicapped almost impossible. as the values of efficiency, individualism, and wealth become the only motivations, they tend to stifle the profound aspirations of man so that little by little he loses all sense of fellowship and community.