Writing in the Huffington Post, James Moore introduces family friend Jeremy Vest, left, one of the hosts on MTV’s new show “How’s Your News?” All the show’s hosts have disabilities of one kind or another. Jeremy’s is Williams syndrome.

An excerpt:

Most of us do not have a handicapped person in our lives and, when we can, we likely avoid the complication. We suspect there is nothing we can understand and little we might do to help or make a difference. But not to worry. The How’s Your News? crew has sufficiently proved that they do not need us and they are doing just fine. More importantly, they have given us a window on their world to show us they laugh and hurt and cry and love and communicate and misunderstand with about the same degree of proficiency as those of us without what is described as a handicap.

… We never worried about Jeremy because there was a tenderness and an honesty in who he was as a person and he had no ability to understand the difficult odds. He just went after the thing that he loved and he got it: music, and people, and travel, and, yeah, the girls are coming around, too. The program he is now helping to produce and narrate is quickly becoming a cultural icon that says people who are different from normal can have meaningful and useful lives. How’s Your News? is hopeful and redeeming, not just for the parents of people with handicaps, but for all of us who did not understand or hear their secret song.

Earlier posts here, here, here and here.

(Photo from How’s Your News?)

This entry was posted on Friday, February 20th, 2009 at 5:47 pm and is filed under entertainment, genetics, humor, normal, NOT2BEMISSED, public attitudes. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.