2 Wk Window to Discuss Here 2 Autism Documentaries

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To continue:

The point is each parent is doing the best he can, obviously, according to his level of awareness and what he knows, but the kind of focus as pinpointed in the quote above puts the emphasis upon genetics in a way which is oversimplified. There is no evidence at all in this statement about how this particular autistic child in the park was behaving and/or if parenting was playing into his behavior. It is creating a false spin to garnish social pity and behind it is the subtle thingizing of objectifying of the autistic child. I do not like this at all, and I suppose it is this which so many participants on Wrong Planet are objecting to. So a seemingly innocuous and well intended statement by an autistic mother who loves her child and wants the best for him and other children like him is perhaps contributing to the formation of certain trends and tendencies in broader society that may ultimately be harmful.

If you are a parent of an autistic child I do suggest to look not only at your child but also at yourself in interaction with this child. Speaking as a mother, I know that this is very hard hard to do. I could not see myself but only the behavior of my child. So, from this angle, asking for help from society would put the child in a particular position. He would be viewed as being in this position.. I guess this is the objection of so many people to Autism Speaks. Quite honestly, until I saw this video I was not thinking of it from this angle. Now I have to think it through.

This subject is painful for me to write about, as I do not want to upset any people who are suffering with autistic children and who have such good intent to help their children, but I think it is important for people to feel free to speak their individual truth and not be hindered from others from doing this. So this is my truth, and I am going to go little by little.

First when I saw this segment on autism it was no big deal. Actually I am kind of dim and it first probably made approximately the same kind of impression upon me from one watch as it would the general tv viewing audience except I am more in question as I am writing a thread here about documentaries. One question that came up right away was if a parent of an autistic child would be taking a child who was inclined be roaming around a tightly packed restaurant taking food off of other diner's plates would take such a child to such a restaurant. Also it did seem odd that the entire audience burst into applause when this one diner (actor) who objected to the actor child's behavior left the restaurant, but because I am kind of dim, it took me a a couple more watches to realize how editing played into this (will go into this later)..So then I began to realize how very odd this was, whereas if I were watching it on tv (and were not autistic myself) it all would have just flowed by in one brief time segment, and I would have been left with this false impression of huge general sympathy for an autistic child who was badly misbehaving, and maybe this would have inclined me to be more sympathetic in the future because I wanted to kind of emotionally fall in with the pack.

The key point here is that the understanding and sympathy behind it, if merely influenced by this video, would be very superficial and even ultimately detrimental to helping and understanding people who are autistic. I think that video encourages lying (by deliberating creating an extremely false slant) and encourages enabling of both autistic children and parents of autistic children. That is a bad tendency.

I will say this video is a good learning tool if looked at with an enquiring mind and not just mechanically taken in by rote.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dgwYukPReKw

Again, to continue, and this is work: This segment is prefaced by the announcer commenting along with some snippets that are shown right before the commercial after which will be the running of this segment: "Somebody's out of control, but its not this kid." Problem here, this kid WAS out of control if he was roaming around the restaurant taking food off other diner's plates and even yelling out very loud, "Eggs! Eggs! Eggs!" I guess the message is meant to be that because, being autistic, he could not control himself, so therefore (???:-) he was not out of control. This makes some kind of vague sense, but too much context is omitted. Bear in mind we are not talking about a real autistic child here, bu rathert an actor pretending to be autistic. And again, no parent is going to take his autsitic child to a restaurant if that child is going to be wandering around the restaurant taking food off other diner's plates. At least I hope not. It is kind of amazing the things some parents will do.

So what is the basic idea of this tv segment? It is to accept autistic people, to be socially aware of what autism is and to be tolerant of autistic people because this is the way the are, and they cannot help the way they are. Well it is also true that the hard working person (also an actor:-) who went to that restaurant to get a quiet meal, maybe his only few moments to unwind in the entire day, and who objected to the child's outrageous behavior, cannot help the way he himself is either.

The main message is for society to accommodate autistic people. I go along with that, and I think it was a good idea to have that kind of segment on the show,, though imo they botched it as there was no dimensionality in the way the material was presented, just very black and white, exaggerated by dishonest editing (which I will get to). Most of their episodes are not like this. I have watched this show quite a bit, though it is kind of zzzz., and in almost all of the episodes they have a lot of comments given by people who defended whatever character is being presented in whatever situation. Maybe here they do not do this because these people would have nothing much to say. What are they supposed to say?----how dare anyone object to a child taking food off of his plate?

To the parent or parents who had a hand in making this video, I know you care about your children and other people's children also, and that you meant and mean well. This here is enquiry. I am starting to wonder what kind of attitude toward the child and towards society is behind the way some parents of autistic children are thinking and feeling about autism. Perhaps a more dimensional approach might be more beneficial for these children and also to society in general.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dgwYukPReKw

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dgwYukPReKw

The thing is this video is already made.Whatever effect it has had on the general population will not be undone by anything I write here, nor am I even sure I would want it to be.From an overt persepctive it has probably made most of the people who viewed it once on tv more likely to be accepting of an autistic person because it is perceived by most people watching it one time that that anyone who does not accept an autistic teen running rampant in a restaurant where people are trying to enjoy their meals and relax is a social reject because all the people in the restaurant applaud when this one objecting man (an actor) gets up and leaves. Of course whatever he actually said and did to make these people applaud is completely edited out of the video, as it is obvious that his one brief comment was not enough to make these people applaud. So this is very rigged material, and this is corrupt. Moreover, this episode has a distinctly different flavor of being extremely edited that none of the other episodes I have watched have. It is all very staged.

The video is very short. Watch it and it is easy to see, though if you are just watching it once on tv you might easily miss everything I have commented about, as it all goes by so fast.

Again, bear in mind, probably no parent of an autistic child who is behaving like that actor child was is even going to take that child to public restaurant, and imo if they do, which is very unlikely, they should be asked to leave, just as a crying baby should not be allowed in a movie theater. Now I am assuming that the people from Autisim Speaks know all of this, which does make the production of this tv episode kind of problematic.

The question is, does shifting and slanting material in this way really help autistic people in the long ruin? Does it make them weaker or stronger. I would call the production of this tv show episode on autism a vivid illustration of what I mean when I speak of playing the autistic card. Of course many, though not all, of the autistic people who are opposing and fighting the work of Autism Speaks seem to be doing so because they do want to be included in this playing of the autistic card. It is all kind of complex to sort out, and I am not even capable of doing it, but it is interesting to enquire into, and this is not to discount any of the good work Autism Speaks may be doing. I do not know that much about this organization.

I want to step away for a while from this analyzing this particular video for a bit, and begin to talk about human brain function, as I do not intend to focus on Autism Speaks, but rather on how human beings slant material to others and to ourselves, including how I slant material to others and myself. It is very hard for me to see it about myself and admittedly much easier to see it about others. The main point is the video is already made, and the intent was loving and positive. There was obviously a heartfelt altruistic motivation. How much does this count? A lot, actually, but when combined with knowledge it obviously makes a big difference, and I am not saying the people from Autism Speaks who had a hand in the production of this video did not have knowledge, but we can always learn more,a nd what we learn can change everything..

So much of our lives are already made, and this can be very sad, but this is where we have to start.

To be continued.,,,,...

And for those who think I am coming out against Autism Speaks, remember, .the opera is not over until the fat lady sings:-)

Christmas is coming so not much time....I am thinking how easy it is to influence someone's thinking by making a film....We so tend to believe what we see, especially if it is a documentary...after all, it is a picture of something that happened, and it doesn't occur to realize it is edited....the brain is taking in the documentary in one big bite rather than chewing and digesting it in the way I am trying to do the latter here, so replicating right brain function which works in generalizations. And what is autism? Each child is so unique, so to say "autism" is to make a generalization. It is not the uniqueness and specificness specialness of that child. Therefore there is this advice I have heard--to always start an activity from the left..

And no one knows what a parent is going though. I think for a parent the name "autism" can seem to explain so much, but how much does it explain? a name can seem to be a harbor, but is it? What is the difference between a name and a form? My name is littlebee but the me of me is the physical shape of me, the topography and the touching of life. If a child is autistic, this is a name, but not the form. If the child is perceiving by form, then perception by form would be the doorway back to that child. I wish I had understood this when I was having very serious problems with my own child. I think the child needs to be accepted by form and then feed data back to the parent.. This is the child's way of giving back and reaching outside his own self.. It is an expression of the child's form nut it starts from the left, as data is being selected to feed to the parent. So telling the parent about ones day, or anything, giving the parent a stone from the ground. The stone is form but it is being charted and selected, so it is data. I see parents constantly trying to get their children to perform. But to see myself doing it with my child, that is something else entirely, as I am so engaged in the process of whatever I am doing it is hard to see.

I wonder if I will understand tomorrow what I just wrote.

I am a crafts person. I work in a big marketplace and everyday see many parents trying to kind of force feed their children data or gert their children to speak and basically to perform like trained seals. This one little girl age eight came with her parents to my booth yesterday and she was bizarrely shy. It was obviously some kind of personality disorder but her parents were acting as if it were her. Just her and there was no kind of experience behind it. But there was something behind it. Who knows. Maybe no one will ever know, but her parents were trying to prompt her not to be shy. The shyness was her and yet it was not her. She and I had a good speak.I will write more about this later, maybe, but the beginning point is that in that some children are just shy; that is their nature, but with this child it was obviously not the case. Where I am going with this is not that an autistic person is not autistic, but that in order to have a subject/object relationship within oneself it is necessary to in some sense be able to be impartial to oneself, to make an observation Just wanted to begin to write about this child while it is fresh in my mind...and to be continued....

There is this Lifetime movie, Speak, which most women reading this have probably seen. I have seen it two or three times on Lifetime, but I just found it online, and you can watch it one part at a time. It is about a teenage girl who was raped and cannot tell anyone about it, and then she recovers her voice and her power to speak through art. .It is fiction and not the same as a documentary, but I think it is a good allegory for the situation of the autistic child and maybe for all us..Art could be equated to story. Story is a form of art. We tell ourselves stories, though sometimes we do not know if it a story. We know our own story...We edit our stories. We try to impose our own stories on other people and to orchestrate the stories of other people, as well as our own, so it is like being in a theater.I think the colors get very rich from this perspective, and their is a new sense of possibility. Anything could happen next, but a person is directing his own action. This is what I tried to talk about to the little girl in very simple language. Nothing about theater; nothing about story, but just in a few simple words I asked her if she thought her shyness could be a habit, and she seemed to understand this right away. All of this interchange occurred when I was preparing a product that was being purchased by her parents for the child..Of course shyness is not a habit with a lot of shy children, nor am I saying that autism is a habit, but there needs to be a possibility for a child to see himself. That is a part of being himself. If a child doesn't have the words we have a problem, but how to give a child words? The first step would be to engage the child, not force feed the child. In the movie, Speak,the girl became engaged in art and so was able to work through in her mind what happened to her and get out of the stalemate position, but it could be any kind of activity..

http://www.fanpop.com/clubs/lifetime-mo ... ak?part=10

This is for parents of autistic children, as I said I would be writing to you, and this thread is going to be hard core dedicated to this for a while.

So what does not being able to speak mean?

"Mean" is an interesting word, It conveys having understanding, but also the middle, such as the golden mean or even when someone is not nice as approaching from only their 'side' of the middle. Obviously deep listening needs to be approached from two ends of the stick. If the child who cannot speak cannot tell you what something or other means to him, then you need to listen from other angles and speculate what he actually is trying to say, as he is speaking in his own way..

This is how communication occurs. It is necessary for the listener to take a leap, and sometimes you just know because you are in tune with your own understanding. .This is for parents of autistic children. To be in tune is a very interesting thing. Being in tune almost or even has a song locked inside of it in the sense the potential for music is inherent once the instrument is tuned, and tuning is a facet of listening which does does a conscious adjustment of ones own sensory apparatus.

I have to go back and take a look at some of the episodes.of Speak, but after being raped and not being able to tell anyone what no one could have possibly known unless she told them, the girl gets back her voice because the teacher gives her art. That is for her the bridge, not being forced to speak..

Even though it is not a documentary, I have decided to use this lifetime film, Speak, to look at autism. A lot of lifetime films are crappy, but this film is really quite well done for what it is trying to present---actually even a genuine work of art. it is divided into 10 parts and each segment is approx ten minutes long, so it will be very easy to watch and will be east to use as a learning tool, and we can easily pinpoint particular sections of the film.

http://www.fanpop.com/clubs/lifetime-mo ... ak?part=10

No time now, but will start with part one soon. For any parents watching, which includes myself, lets look at this from the perspective of our own relationship with our own autistic child or with any of our children or even with anyone.. Part one is wonderful from this perspective.

To continue, this Lifetime film we are going to examine at least some segments of could be called a melodramatic, over=simplified piece of trash, but actually it is extremely well done because in a clear and interesting it conveys the exact 'point' it is trying to express in such a way that that the viewer can really feel it and also atg the same time begin to understand something new. Many films just arouse an emotional response but the watcher does not really learn anything.

The film starts with the protagonist, a fourteen year old girl named Melinda Sorvino, sitting on the floor in her bedroom looking into a mirror, having just drawn big black vertical stitches on her lips with makeup, indicating her lips are sewn shut. (It should be noted that in this film the girl actually can and does speak, but she cannot adequately convey what has happened to her, and when she did originally try to, no one believed her). Her mother who has been calling her enters the room, and when she sees her child with the stitches, her mouth drops opens in shock. Then she sighs a frustrated and judgmental I give up kind of sigh and says " I don't want to know. There's a chicken pot pie on the counter---Dad is not coming home---and I'm going to therapy.".

So what is the significance of this story in terms of looking at autism? First, the girl in this film is not autistic, she can speak, and she was able to tell people what happened to her.

The main theme of the entire movie is that this child regained her own inner power by learning to speak to (connect with) herself in a new way. She was able, in this case, through art, to reconnect with herself, and by this she regained her personal power.

http://www.fanpop.com/clubs/lifetime-mo ... eak?part=1

So, to continue, the mother's cut off. That would be' normal' in the sense that so many people are. This is something for any parent of an autistic child, or any child, to really think about.

This does NOT mean the parent is responsible for what the child is experiencing. After all, the parent needs to go to therapy, so who knows what kind of stresses that parent is going through, what she experienced as a child, and what her personal life is like? Also, this is NOT to imply that such a parent should not take responsibility for her own behavior (ie cut-off-ness), but in this instance the parent is obviously not aware that she is cut off...and it should be noted that an extraneous factor of the girl being raped played inoit this drama. though it should also be noted that if the child had had better parenting, she would not have gone to such a party in the first place.

Bear in mind that this video is not an exact analogy for anyone's particular experience but we are just using this video as a learning tool to look at material from a new angle that may help us to sort some things through.

What is a conundrum. It is basically a problem that appears to be unsolvable, the key word here being "appears."
http://www.thefreedictionary.com/conundrum

To continue, a key point about this film( which film I suppose, from one perspective is kind of a piece of trash except that it makes its point, which is its redeeming quality), is that the conditioned mechanical qualities of most of the supporting characters are bizarrely exaggerated and stereotyped, whereas the basic human qualities of the main character, the girl, and also her male student friend and the art teacher are not really exaggerated, but stand out from the perspective of integrity against the other characters. I think this is skillful film making. Who made I? I dunno, but imagine knowing how to do something like that? A person is not born knowing it. Interesting, the boy she meets in class who is to become her friend is presented as being kind of autistic---notice him making all kinds of hand gestures resembling stimming when we first see him in episode one. That was obviously deliberate on the part of the filmmaker. (Who made this film? Don't know, but I would like to meet him). Also note the extremely stereotyped character of the redneck ultra conservative male teacher she meets in the hall. Could any person really be this extreme and still keep his position as an educator? In this day and age the things he later said to his class would get him fired. But no matter:-)-- When the mind is processing information, especially with lifetime watchers (which watchers definitely include myself), it works best, to make various characters and situations very simple. keep this principle in mind, as the way the brain processes data will be the basic gist here---how we as parents and people in general tend to leave out information and exaggerate details in order to make things easier for ourselves, how autistic children, like anyone, surely do this, and how to consciously run this pattern backwards in order to help our children come out of their protective shells and enter more fully into the world of making and doing. .

Sorry I have not been on this thread for a while. To those who were beginning to follow my commentary on the move, Speak, the version I have linked to is no longer available online, and it is taking me quite a while to find the best version, as a lot of them are blurry. If someone can find a good version, especially one divided into parts like the other one was, please let me know.

In the meantime, while looking for another documentary to discuss here (Speak is not a documentary), I came across a rather long video about mercury and other toxins in children's vaccines and I am going to post a link to that here and suggest to look at a certain part of it which shows how material can be i slanted by drug companies, government agencies and the media and then swallowed by the general public, and I am thinking this would be perfect to discuss here.

I am very interested in the interpretation of various ideas, actions, videos, pictures, anything, as I think an interpretation can bring us to the edge of new understanding. There is this e edge between what we understand and what we do not understand which can be very alive but also very scary, so it is understandable that some such as explorers, artists (and maybe even self destructive people) would be drawn to edges and that other people, more homebody types or maybe more timid or even intelligent but conservative people just wanting to be safe might tend to stay away from them.

Regarding documentaries, it is very fascinating what people can do with them and how they can affect society in various ways. One thing that greatly fascinates me is that certain material can be right in front of us with something very obvious staring in our faces if we just look at the picture, and yet we still do not see it because of the way we are conditioned to look at things.

This is the documentary:

Autism - Made in the U S A - Gary Null's Remarkable Document

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fwuyxyBUmwY

The part about how data is slanted is from 39.40 min in to 60 minutes.This is the portion of the video I will be focusing on here. I have not watched past 60 minutes yet, but the last part is about nutrition and I have already seen another video I think put out by this same group on this. My reason for posting this here is that it shows an extreme slanting of data and omission of relevant data...really quite shocking, I know 20 minutes is kind of long, but I recommend for everyone to watch the entire 20 minutes, and if you want to read something really fascinating, look at the comments on YouTube:-)! I have only read some of them, but wow! I will be commenting on the various general gists of these comments.

I have to watch this 20 min segment again and I guess watch the last part, but the point is that all kinds of data are being slanted and almost surely from both ends.

If you want to read an interesting message which is talking about this tape, go to this thread called "regressive autism."
http://www.wrongplanet.net/postp6017239.html#6017239

Again, the point is that all kinds of data are being slanted and almost surely from both ends. so how does a person sort this kind of thing out, if it is even possible to do so?