When Bad News Hits

Last week, we found out that our grandson, a lively little seven-year-old boy, has Asperger's Syndrom. It was not much of a surprise, as we suspect our son, his uncle, has it too. It's that hard-to-manage thing -- the Asperger child is bright but often thought to be ADHD. And they're not. They can spend an afternoon reading something they are interested in and hardly move an inch. It's the upper end of autism, but then, too, that doesn't quite fit.

I wonder how many people have had Asperger's through the years and, even though they made great contributions to society, were misunderstood and miserable at heart. Maybe Albert Einstein? Howard Hughes? Sigmund Freud? Winston Churchill? Alexander the Great? We'll never know...

We'll never know how many people have been inappropriately pigeon-holed, never allowed to reach their full potential, or worse -- institutionalized -- for being that little bit different, when they had so much to give -- if we had only accepted them.