Stuttering in the News

There's been a kerfuffle in the news the last day or so about Lara Trump (wife of Eric) who made fun of Joe Biden's stuttering.  Ret. airline pilot/hero "Sully" Sullenberger weighed in--blasting her for ridiculing Biden for a problem that Sully has also had.

Now, I'm not defending what she said--not exactly. But read on ...

I was a stutterer (as I think I've written here before). Kids made fun of me in elementary school, and it got to be such a problem in class that one of my teachers sent me to the speech therapist.

According to my mom (years later), the therapist asked me, "Danny, do you know why you're here?"

And I replied, "N-n-n-n-o." (There were probably even even more n's.)

The therapist told my teacher (and my mom) that I didn't seem to be all that upset about it, so she sent me back to class. And I took, oh, several decades to get my stuttering to simmer down.

There are still a few words that give me pause--literally. When I know I'm going to say them, I have to stop and think a minute, take a breath. One of them is statistics. (You can imagine the fun I had in grad school when I took a couple of statistics courses!) (And I can already picture some of you approaching me in the coffee shop, asking me to say "statistics." Sometimes adults are exactly like fourth graders!)

I knew I'd found someone to love me when I met Joyce back in July 1969, and she told me she thought my stuttering was cute. That's one of the things love is, I guess--finding attractions in your lover's weaknesses!

Anyway, the Biden-stutter story sort of dovetails with something else I've been thinking about--about how we want to hold politicians accountable for everything they've said for decades. Now that recording devices are ubiquitous, no politician can say one thing in Ohio, another in Alabama. And every inanity they muttered back in their twenties or thirties is now ... out there.

And one consequence, of course, is that we're forcing politicians to be scripted. Going off script can consume a few news cycles, you know? And so we often get repetitive pablum.

I wonder: How many of us would like to have everything we've said the last, oh, thirty years, recorded--and played to millions of listeners/viewers?

Not I, my friends. For I--like the rest of you (I suspect)--have occasionally said things that are cruel, insensitive, un-PC, inappropriate, thoughtless, intended-to-be-funny-but-not, etc. And I definitely wouldn't want them on CNN or Fox tonight.

And so ... maybe my childhood/young adulthood stuttering was a gift in a strange wrapping: I didn't say as much as I otherwise might have; I didn't finish things I started to say. Whew!

So I think we need to lighten up. If a politician said something untoward back in 1975, well, guess what? He/She wasn't the only one!*


*I'm excluding from this discussion, by the way, those hateful things that a person might have said throughout her/his life. For you longtime racists, sexists, homophobes, xenophobes, etc.--you do not get the protection of the umbrella of forgiveness I've described above for those who make those slips of the tongue (and brain) that are profoundly human--especially when we're "off script."