Welcome to the special needs club

'TRAMPLE THE weak; hurdle the dead." Hockey moms in Plymouth can buy T-shirts with this motto for their kids at M&M's Sporting Goods in the center of "America's Home Town."

How will Sarah Palin, self-described hockey mom, reconcile this brutal ethos with her promise to "be an advocate for parents of children with special needs," now that she's a member of that club, too?

I used to be a member of Palin's special club. Not the hockey moms - the parents of special needs kids. My son, who was a quadriplegic, died in 2005. Not long after his death we donated his wheelchair van to a family that was emblematic of the struggle for decent healthcare facing average people, not those in the $5 million income bracket that are members of John McCain's club.

Former schoolteachers, they were now bankrupt. The mother had a debilitating disease that required a wheelchair, making her unable to work. The father's new full-time job was wrestling with social services to get healthcare for his wife and their severely disabled daughter. McCain's voting record on healthcare is abysmal, and he voted against expanding the S-CHIP program for childrens' healthcare services.

In the warrior culture espoused by self-described "pit bull" Palin, there is no place for the weak. When I saw the T-shirt in the window of M&M's, I thought of my son and how hard we had to fight to get him basic healthcare and to enroll him in public school.

Even though the laws are in place for inclusion of students with disabilities, many parents face an uphill battle to implement these laws. Palin supports vouchers, so that parents can "choose" schools for their children.

But private schools for able-bodied kids are not required by law to accept kids like our son, Jesse. If we wanted to use vouchers to send our son to a private school, the only ones that would accept him would be schools specifically for disabled children. In Palin's perfect school universe, segregation would be the norm for kids with disabilities.

My son was too weak to kill an animal or shoot a gun. He was nonverbal, but he could write a poem on his computer. He learned to do that in public school, with resources from special education. A line from his last poem reads: "the world is my book; I hear all its voices." Would a McCain/Palin administration hear his voice?

I walked into M&M's Sporting Goods and complained to the manager about the T-shirt and its vicious message. She shrugged and told me, "We sell a lot of 'em." Palin is selling her message, too - that of the feisty mom who will also be an advocate for parents of children with special needs.

But the facts show that she and McCain are more likely to continue the brutal and failed Bush policies of trampling the weak and hurdling the dead.

Marianne Leone is an actress and writer living on the South Shore.