The Perfect Career

That’s how Christine Gralow describes her job as a teacher of special needs children yesterday in Becoming an Autism Educator on the NY Times’ Lesson Plans blog:

It sometimes astonishes me that I found my perfect career. I never meant to be a teacher. I meant to be a serious journalist. But when my grad school classmates went off to write for esteemed media outlets, I went off to teach special needs kids. It made no sense. It was the best decision I ever made.

Gralow works mostly in Manhattan, providing preschool and home-based services to autistic and other special needs children; she does behavior therapy of the sort that’s been fundamentally important for my son Charlie (onto his fifth “good” day back to school—”good” being his honest response when we asked him, how school’s been going). We’re across the Hudson in New Jersey which gets described as “‘pretty progressive’” by a woman who has an autistic nephew.

This mother is quoted by New York Times columnist Judith Warner in No Laughing Matter, in which Warner (Democrat; liberal) describes her experience at the McCain/Palin rally on Wednesday. She concludes:

“Palin Power” isn’t just about making hockey moms feel important. It’s not just about giving abortion rights opponents their due. It’s also, in obscure ways, about making yearnings come true — deep, inchoate desires about respect and service, hierarchy and family that have somehow been successfully projected onto the figure of this unlikely woman and have stuck.

For those of us who can’t tap into those yearnings, it seems the Palin faithful are blind – to the contradictions between her stated positions and the truth of the policies she espouses, to the contradictions between her ideology and their interests. But Jonathan Haidt, an associate professor of moral psychology at the University of Virginia, argues in an essay this month, “What Makes People Vote Republican?”, that it’s liberals, in fact, who are dangerously blind.

Haidt has conducted research in which liberals and conservatives were asked to project themselves into the minds of their opponents and answer questions about their moral reasoning. Conservatives, he said, prove quite adept at thinking like liberals, but liberals are consistently incapable of understanding the conservative point of view. “Liberals feel contempt for the conservative moral view, and that is very, very angering. Republicans are good at exploiting that anger,” he told me in a phone interview.

Perhaps that’s why the conservatives can so successfully get under liberals’ skin. And why liberals need to start working harder at breaking through the empathy barrier.

Maybe, that is, they need to work on having (ahem) a little…….theory of mind, in order to understand the emotions and the feelings that the idea of a special needs mother as Vice-President is stoking. What more perfect career for a special needs mom…….. Personally, I’ll stick to the one I have.