{"id":185005,"date":"2024-10-18T06:19:58","date_gmt":"2024-10-18T11:19:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/thevwindependent.com\/news\/?p=185005"},"modified":"2024-10-18T06:19:58","modified_gmt":"2024-10-18T11:19:58","slug":"meet-my-brother-tony","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thevwindependent.com\/news\/2024\/10\/18\/meet-my-brother-tony\/","title":{"rendered":"Meet my brother Tony"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p><strong>To the Editor,<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I wanted to introduce my brother, Tony, to you.&nbsp;Sadly, he passed away several years ago but his story is still relevant.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Tony was born in 1945, the fifth child of eight.&nbsp;Due to a difficult birth, Tony did have some brain damage and so was considered \u201cmentally retarded.\u201d&nbsp; While Tony\u2019s life was challenging for the family, in most ways he fit right in annoying his youngest sister (me) with great zest.&nbsp;In fifth and sixth grade I can remember the taunts of, \u201cYour brother is retarded.\u201d&nbsp;Because that&#8217;s what boys of that maturity level did.&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>There were not a lot of services available to someone like Tony, so my parents did many things to help improve his life and those of his population which were underserved.&nbsp;Fast forward many years and life found Tony living in an apartment with a roommate (with some supervision) and working at a job for over 25 years that gave him a 401K and a watch when he retired.&nbsp; Not bad for someone who is&nbsp; \u201cretarded.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Imagine my sadness when a man who would have us think that he is the man for the most important job in our country, calls out his opponent as \u201cretarded.\u201d&nbsp;I would say he was right with those fifth and sixth grade boys who thought saying \u201cretarded\u201d was a cool thing to do.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>When will his followers say enough is enough?&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Teresa Plas<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Van Wert<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>To the Editor, I wanted to introduce my brother, Tony, to you.&nbsp;Sadly, he passed away several years ago but his story is still relevant. Tony was born in 1945, the fifth child of eight.&nbsp;Due to a difficult birth, Tony did have some brain damage and so was considered \u201cmentally retarded.\u201d&nbsp; While Tony\u2019s life was challenging [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[84],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-185005","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-letters"],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-04-18 03:18:02","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thevwindependent.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/185005","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thevwindependent.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thevwindependent.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thevwindependent.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thevwindependent.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=185005"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/thevwindependent.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/185005\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":185006,"href":"https:\/\/thevwindependent.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/185005\/revisions\/185006"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thevwindependent.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=185005"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thevwindependent.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=185005"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thevwindependent.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=185005"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}