Sir;... My guess is that if Mrs. Shriver had had a unit, that she, like all the other Kennedys would have been on the lookout for some one to keep it warm... Certainly we should treat the retarded as human beings, in or out of congress... The problem is not that we do not have the wealth and resources, but that we must deny rights to the healthy and hopeful to help the challenged.... My child is dead average... She has extremes of intellectual highs, and unintellectual lows.. Because she tests as average, she can forget getting help which she needs desparately... And she has more potential than any number of special education students who would be better trained to stay out of the way...Do not believe our education is not rationed as much as our medicine... Do not accept for a moment that such rationing in necessary... We make a huge mistake when we say our children, or my parents... They are ours only in a rhetorical sense...If we do not accept responsibility for our fellows we will suffer them as we would an enemy...Our children are not our property, and if they were, we would care for them, dust them off and coat them with paint, metaphorically speaking... Speaking personally, as a person with educational challenges as great as my own child's, there is no worse poison than than the resentment of a person denied their potential, and that is happening across the reach of our whole society...Never go short in the land of plenty... Never look around and say we can't afford education and health care while so many rich sit on the plunder of this land... Let them give everyone a chance at their wealth as they will only have with health and education...This land was too easy for the rich to take, and is too easy for the few to hold... All the commonwealth can be in private hands, and it still must support the population... We cannot say: My Children, or Your Children... The next generation are the children of us all, and if we do not have the courage to rob the rich to feed the poor we are not a land of heroes, or even free... We must be virtuous to be free, and that requires that we have the courage to do what is right, and not only for our own individual children, but for all people... Property rights are an ideal... Property rights as an ideal do not work because ideals never work....People work, and societies work when they have the sense to see through their failed ideals to the people left behind...If you respect people, you will respect their property, but the respect of property alone as an ideal means less than nothing for the respect of people as human beings...We have enough for all in this land, and too few rich sitting on too much wealth while the nation suffers... There is no nation, and no point of continuing if we are all out for ourselves...On some issues we must find consensus and stand together..Education and health care are two such issues....Thanks...Sweeney