Society's War on Asperger's/Autism

Post Reply New Topic

I'm hating the 1% (rich, powerful people) more and more.

The people who want a cure just want us to be happy. They find great pleasure being with other people and they want us to experience that too. To them, we're really missing out on some of life's greatest pleasures and that makes them sad. It's really self-absorbed to think that they all just want end you and that they all just hate your guts for being different. If someone hates you for being different, it's not because they're NT. Hell, I come from an area where most NT's embrace differences. No one looks twice at the guy who dresses like a wizard (he's real).

Not to mention that Autism is a spectrum. Some people are in more favorable places on the spectrum than others. Should we deny treatment and a possibility of a cure to those worst off on the spectrum just because some higher functioning people have chips on their shoulder?

I posted a comment that got deleted on this board for its offensive nature, but it's true that people on the spectrum are treated like blacks were treated prior to the Civil Rights movement.

What would a cure mean for autistic people?
would they all of a sudden change the way they think and feel? ,would they turn into a so called normal person..i think not! it would never change the years of hell that some people with aspergers went through...i don't think there is a magical cure that can wipe out the past and all of a sudden you are a diffrent person...but maybe by accepting we are all diffrent in the spectrum and trying to put money into getting support and help for everyone with autisim might be the better cure.

We do not play the social games that NTs play. Our inability to not play the game and speak our minds and act independently makes us a threat to them. Even if we knew how to play the social game we probably would not play along and do our own thing any way.

Sometimes, and I was reading this on another board, society seems to have a problem with people who are introverted. We all have to be cheerleaders and social butterflies and and team players and if we are not, then something is wrong with us. For example, as part of my "treatment" when I was a child, I was supposed to shake the hand of the priest after mass - after he just semi-yelled at the congregation and I am supposed to act like everything is fine? For some reason, America (maybe Europe is less extroverted?) wants everybody playing softball and going out to the bar and you're weird if you want to read a book or play with a dog. Where this comes from, I don't know. I was sent to a psychiatrist because I was "too quiet" and he messed me up more than the original issue.

Meanwhile, I have my brother-in-law Gary (not his real name). Gary talks so loud it is painful, talks all the time, has issues with hygiene (skid marks!) and smells, dresses badly, but he is an extrovert and a doctor and people worship him. Meanwhile, I take showers all the time, wash my clothes, buy new clothes and I am quiet and no one worships me. What's wrong with this picture?

Look, I completely sympathize. Really. I spend days hiding in my house and nights crying myself never-quite-to-sleep over this.

And, yes, it is eugenics. In soft-serve form, but eugenics none the less. How else do you explain the number of times I've been told by professionals that I should not have been permitted to breed or to retain custody of my children despite the fact that they are clean, healthy, decently educated for their ages, and reasonably well-behaved?? No, I'm not perfect as a mom-- but I haven't seen anyone who is. I am just imperfect is ways that differ from the mass majority-- less likely to fail to explain a a concept or teach my children to be bullies, more likely to forget a snack of a piece of paperwork or to fail to see a problem with a child having an emotional meltdown or speaking their mind-- and are therefore less likely to be tolerated.

Perfection is the ideal everyone strives for. Demands of themselves and of others too, whether they admit it or not. Our imperfections are not greater or lesser-- they are simply different, and therefore less likely to be politely overlooked by people who cannot see themselves in them.

I end up spending so much energy trying to blend in that I don't have any left for dealing with the memory issues, the executive functioning problems, and the frustration tolerance that are real issues for me. Don't even get me started on what it does to the anxiety levels my overgrown amygdala is already prone to produce.

It makes me sick.

But what you are talking about is changing human nature. Homo sapiens are herd animals in the extreme-- embracing that which is the same on a conditional basis and rejecting that which is different outright. That is never going to change.

At least, not for one to three percent of the population. And you have to dig that those of us who are high-functioning enough to get by within the rules set by the other 97 percent are the minority within the minority.

Ranting and railing doesn't help. Hating wastes only your own energy.

Your best bet is to cultivate sympathy for the majority within yourself-- poor them, they can't see outside their box any better than we can, and at least we get to define the parameters of our boxes (as long as we're in private, anyway) instead of having them defined by everyone else's boxes.

Then you can something like smile and be friendly as you gently suggest to other people that differences are there to be embraced and appreciated, that everyone has strengths and weaknesses and our job as human beings is to learn from each others' strengths even as we are tolerant and understanding of each others' weaknesses (as opposed to our current system of maximizing our strengths while exploiting others' weaknesses-- the holdover of a colonial culture that has got us into this global mess we're in). That, as we have been struggling to accept for decades now, perfection isn't possible, or reasonable, or even really desirable. That we've been sold a bill of s**t by authorites and advertisers to leave us laboring under the delusion that it is or should be.

All the while, you keep your own diagnosis to yourself as much as possible. You never let yourself believe in the reality of what you are teaching, even as you must believe in the possibility all the time. Because there are predators out there, and the world is full of stupid people, and even though changing that is the whole objective, there will always be some and the fact that those are still the people our culture idolizes isn't going to change over night.

Or, for that matter, change much over the course of a lifetime. This is a cause that might benefit folks three or four generations from now, The only benefit we're ever going to get from it is the satisfaction of knowing we tried.

Have patience. Human beings are not all we've cracked ourselves up to be. Really, we're not much more than bald monkeys who have become exceptionally aggressive to make up for the fact that we're not strong enough to brachiate effectively. This is such a frightening state that we've created thermonuclear weapons and a whole host of cultural devices, just to make ourselves feel better.

We're still fighting with racial diversity. Struggling to wrap our minds around cultural diversity. Utterly failing with religious diversity. Neurodiversity is an idea that's going to be a looooooooong time coming.