This essay was written by Peyton to satisfy the requirements of a College composition course. It later went on to be published in the Facilitated Communication Digest, Semptember 2001.
(Addressed Audience: Directors of Education Our Town, U. S. A.)
I quest a job and a purposeful life; you tell me that I am stupid. By not accommodating my movement disability, apraxia, the sure bet is that I cannot get an education. Please tilt your present thinking opposing people such as myself to access Facilitated Communication by continuing to use the excuse that F. C. is a fraud.
I am a person who needs touch to move. If the physical resistance to my hand, wrist, forearm, or elbow, which is a necessary accommodation for the success of my purposeful movement, is a strategy I can count on not being supplied, than the hulk of my life is insanity because you, the educator, and I, the student, cannot co-exist in peace. You become the care-less oppressor daring to try constantly the ploy of controlling my behavior. I become the oppressed, even though I am neurologically unable to dependably move in complying ways to your exploiting directives. Ill we both become because you become oppressed also by the never successful strategy of control. Looking at climbing this hill we should not be. Your being able to hear what I say is what eventually frees the fullness of a life I gut wrenchingly desire.
The journey I am on is tough. Up in the expanse of my brain I cannot compartment my golden desire to plot my allotted, motor-planned moments of movements successfully. I am verifying that I know intelligence in my somewhat differently operating brain; you presently are verifying by the daffy ways I move that I am an idiot. Therefore, jolly opportunities for learning and living I am not allowed, and wasting I am. Please kill my movement insanity with the quest of your touch, allowing the tilting eagerly of my brain compartment so that my moments turn jolly as I moll plotting golden dependable movement mopping my brain, and mull never the insanity of motor madness again.
Sadly, the main reason that you and I presently never reap peace is that you regulate the policies that ultimately control me. In cases of your inflexibility and understanding not another way of readying people for life, you imprison me. Unfortunately, things will not be peaceful until you and I no longer listen to dangerously inflexible people who are unable to tolerate ambiguity and embrace change. You and I together must joy quest to answer the dream of people appearing dumb by supporting students with apraxia to exhibit their intelligence by implementing the strategy of Facilitated Communication. You are among the few who have the great opportunity to change the lives of thousands. Therefore, I implore you to teach resistance therapy, the tugging barely method of typing with support.
However, you will golden gut wrenchingly have to protect yourself journeying into territory loitered with land mines that declare you greatly foolish. Others will say FC is a fraud. Gear up to each day answer the questions that will plague you. Reach into your fearless leadership mind, carefully preparing arguments for the opposition’s claims that people like myself should be treated utmost as retarded because we behave retarded, that parents are trying to falsely plot wishful evidence that their children are not dumb, and that tilting ready research supports that people like myself cannot pass messages in scientific studies.
Ordinarily, it is pretty pleasurable to learn radically good-looking news about a person, such as that they ARE capable of learning and contributing to society. In the past twenty years countless facilitated communicators all over the world have moved to finally access their “voice” through support typing, to leave institutions and live in their communities, to acquire an education including college, to have contributing jobs, and to move to typing independent of touch. Thinking I am that the reasoning of ego driven doubters still whispering or yelling “F.C. is a fraud” inspite of the documented successful journeys of these people is insane. Kill your gut wrenching plugging of possibilities about what the toll of this great news may hold for you personally and professionally, and open your imagination to realize anything is possible in the golden human soul. Embrace as a true leader the infinite opportunities Facilitated Communication enables and the promise of great luck in this discovery allowed by ignoring old ideas. The cost of believing requires the brave replacement of your illusion data representation of retardation. I count on the overcoming of this longstanding myth early in this millennium.
On your path to implementing F.C., you’ll hear many opposing your choice. They have long convinced themselves that people such as I deserve no education because I am filled with nothing in my thinking brain. The truth is that pleasurable learning is sought by my brain at all times. All my life I search for opportunities to learn all things hidden in the hulk of readily available, print-rich environments. Never ultimately is the brilliance of the barely ignited brain turned off. Therefore, you’ll eagerly look at the ambiguity of my movements, and see a person intelligent, who realized literacy mulling self-sought learning while receiving no real education in school.
Carefully, you’ll need to consider the thinking of opposition that calls F.C. a parental tool freeing their stupid children to look silly never again. Overcoming this argument requires you to understand that millions of parents bet on their kid’s myth of retardation. The hill that F.C. requires of them is mounting the reality that all the years of looking at their kid as dumb is not regainable. Their parenting has been disabled by schools that opposed educating their child’s ability to journey to a productive job and the toll of the wasted years they hopingly attempt to regain before they die. The heart-aching coping will kill many reasons of cool joy and opportunities for peace in marriage. Furthermore, never caringly would they want to fraud gently plow an ultimate hoax because they could never die in peace. Who would then be left to cover or continue their hoax? Join your leadership plan to embrace ambiguity by realizing what parents want is that their child has a life after they are gone.
Cautiously prepare for the opposition’s representation that studies “prove” F.C. is a fraud. In reviewing scientific, polluted-not studies, I’ll think you’ll scrutinize carefully so that nothing is incorrectly alluded to that could harm humans. The journey touch-tugging on my arm is very personal. You must be someone ultimately I trust. If opposing you I am, then arriving at valid data is impossible. You my great face will teach the world through my verified fingers and never can I feel safe if your unethical hang-ups empty my brain. I must type with the power of hurdling no emotions. As leader, you must rule-out the early unscientific data, incorrectly gathered and unjustly reported on Frontline PBS, the toll of which kept me, for one, filled with the insanity of voicelessness, plotting suicide for five additional, unnecessary years. In respected research studies many people have proven beyond any doubt they can message pass.
The choice to implement F.C. is challenging. Bullishly arm your daring with my arguments and create exponential opportunities for those who await. Know that I will be watching. It’s your move.