As a family with a disabled sweetheart who occupies our thoughts and time we’re especially grateful to the work Eunice Kennedy Shriver did to normalize and treat as special individuals all those with disabilities. She died this morning at 88 years of age.

Beginning in the summer of 1962, she hosted Camp Shriver at her Maryland farm, an outdoor camp for mentally disabled children to whom other summer programs were shut. Ponies roamed the lawn, children raced and threw balls, and the dream of a new kind of life for the disabled was born.

So when someone suggested a race for the intellectually disabled children of Chicago, the vision sparked to life: not a one-time race but a biennial Special Olympics, founded on the principle that, as Ms. Shriver later said, “all human beings are created equal in the sense that each has the capacity and a hunger for moral excellence, for courage, for friendship and for love.”

Washington Post

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