When I was in high school, my dad was a Civitan, and one of the club's civic projects each spring was to make repairs, paint, and otherwise physically prepare the grounds of a summer camp in our county for children with Down's Syndrome.

On the last day of camp each summer, the Civitans and their families were invited to a cookout and pool party. On the last of those days before I went to college, with the cookout over, the day winding down, two of the boys' counselors came up behind one of the girls' counselors

and as college kids in the '70s were wont to do, they threw her in the pool. All in good fun, and everyone was laughing. Everyone except the kids, most of whom burst into tears. I vividly remember one little girl bent over at the waist in pain.

These kids, so full of love and empathy, could not comprehend that friends and colleagues would do such a thing to another. The counselors spent a good deal of time going from child to child explaining that they were playing, that the counselor thrown into the pool was not hurt.

That day has stuck with me all these years as a reminder that while people may be different from me, or differently abled, they are equally worthy of dignity and respect, and to understand that their perspective of the world may be different from mine.

That lesson failed me today, and for that, I am deeply embarrassed and regretful. Like the counselors, I failed to consider how my actions would affect a hardworking young man who does his job in an exemplary manner, and who frequently is the only other human being I see in the

Press Room these days during his visits two or three times a week. That he finds comfort in creating order in his world is not something I should have belittled: it is something we all wish to emulate these days.

I was called a bully today, and the skinny bespectacled grade school kid who was picked last for sports shutters at the thought that is what I might be.
I'm sorry I betrayed my better judgment, and sorry I betrayed that little girl who taught me so much about empathy so long ago.