Kwiksnax wrote:
Let's face it, as much as we try to rationalize our condition and make productive lives for ourselves, we AS sufferers are defective people.
There is a genetic component to AS, so any children we have shall carry the genes that cause our affliction. All the awkwardness we've suffered throughout our lives, all the pain of exclusion and confusion, all the unfairness we face in school and work shall be passed on to the next generation(s) should we choose to have kids. So, knowing this, should we thus deliberately inflict our disorder onto our descendants? Or would it be more socially responsible to let our disorder die with us?
In our case, having kids and raising a family would be a selfish act. We would be doing it for ourselves alone. We would be inflicting our disorder onto the next generation to satisfy our parental instincts. How many of us, given the choice, would choose to have AS over being NT? Not many, if we're honest about it. But our children wouldn't have that choice, just as we didn't have that choice.
Most of us fundamentally dislike who and what we are, and with good cause. We have very little to offer society in real terms. Having intelligence is useless if you lack the social skills to share your gifts with others. Now we've all heard the happy-clappy rhetoric about how everyone is special and everyone has something to offer and people should just accept one another for who they are, but we know in our hearts that this is just the mewling of weaklings and freaks, trying desperately to assuage their despair and rage at being the objects of derision and ridicule to all those around them.
Well, fortunately for the human gene pool, our condition severely limits our opportunities to reproduce anyway. Regardless, would any of you say it is socially irresponsible and cruel for AS sufferers to have children?
I have a feeling we could probably work on the Palestinian/Israeli conflict and come up with a unanimous and workable answer about as fast.
From what I understand it seems to be hit and miss - usually though if you have a few kids you'll still have some NTs along with some aspies or auties. The trouble with looking at it sheerly like this though, like gwen pointed out in a sense, there's hardly anyone out there who doesn't have some sort of health defect and its a gamble no matter what. When you really look at it though, no matter who you are or in what part of our red-taped social cast system we have in this world, I don't think anyone's really free. The sorts of happy clappy illusions that a lot of people broadcast about uniquness (which makes me want to gag half the time as well) really don't seem to be too far off from what people do in general and the fact that we'd put ego over the idea of spreading something that really is in far more cases than not a disability seems right in line with what any other group of people would do. Bringing kids into this world period is a weird choice when you think about it and really comes down to needs - after all its not such a great place to be in general, some people are able to gloss that over or are able to see around it and still have a rosy outlook but then again that's almost the sort of distortion people need to procreate at all.
To address your question more directly though - I think we'd do best if we were able to find the right NT partners, just to keep the AS genes from being too concentrated; they're helpful in small doses but rather caustic when pooled too intensely. Our whole society's "like meets like" idea where anything else would just fall apart and people can't make things work or grow to understand each other any other way - that's a cultural problem that's really causing people with the same genes to get together just because, whether its an NT subgroup or us, the natural inclination is to go that way because its the easiest. If we could, as a society, see what we're doing to ourselves with that we'd probably be much more apt to fix the whole "alpha is god" thing in our romance world - we've learned enough from breeding dogs to see what happens when you start making purebreds. Whether its people who's neurology keeps them socially crippled or its people who are in jail for life just because they're too badass for their own good to be on the outside, I think both of those particular ends like many others were created much in the same manner.
16 Dec 2007, 4:55 am
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