Life is strange

A couple of weekends back I was watching a documentary on primordial dwarfs. Unlike midgets or dwarfism as we know it, primordial dwarfs BARELY develop beyond the physical stature of their early life – so a primordial dwarf who is 40 looks like a child of 4 years. This is just heartbreaking to see. One of the subjects, an adult woman, described the loneliness and isolation of being waist high to most people her age. As if her condition weren’t enough the one part of her physiology that HAD fully developed was her front teeth, which protruded over her lower lip, permanently. This, combined with severely underdeveloped vocal cords, made sub-titles a necessary accompaniment to her spoken words.

Sadly primordial dwarves are seen by most as oddities, which is understandable as we all have a natural curiosity for the incomprehensible. Fact is there are only
60 of them in the entire world.

So where do we, as relatively healthy adults, fit into the grand scheme of things? This has always bothered me, “handicap and equality” as singer Peter Hamill puts it. Simply stated, why them and not us?

Don’t know.