CNN on autism.
I have followed partially the CNN programs aired yesterday about autism. Having not seen everything I may have lost some important statements. But, on the whole, I think I may say this:
1) Too much talking about “treating” or, worse, “curing”, about considering autism as an illness to be fought like AIDS or malaria. Autism is a difference not a malady (as also the NYT has called it, “the new malady of the century”). One must pose the question if autism is not a symptom of a profound incompatibility between a sick society and the souls of men. All the stress about professional integration, finding jobs for people in the spectrum, solving individual problems of hardship when three quarters of the labor force is assigned to senseless tasks (spinning for consumers, producing useless goods or demented or cynical politics, or, in the end, organizing war).
2) Too much talk about normality. The picture of “normality” resulting from these discussions is an edulcorated picture, a fable for children, for school commencement speeches, for newspaper editorials. The reality of life is, literally, obscene, off scene, embellished with frills, hidden by automatic self censorship. Who talks really in every detail, for example, of one’s own sex life, which, after all dominates our existence and is so “private”, even in the midst of a purportedly liberated climate, that it is excluded from any explicit talk, except when it concern the life of a politicians.
3) Too much talking about good feelings, love of mothers or of well meaning carers. Most mothers love their children, they love them even if they are a terrible hardship, perhaps even more for their absolute dependence. You can reject a “normal” child, you cannot reject a defective one who needs you desperately. And one should pose the question if the love for an autistic child, when this does not requires exhaustion (violence, tantrums, money) is not the love I may have for my little dog, which is real, but which is made largely by the tenderness induced by her absolute dependence.
4) Too much talk about vaccines (Larry King, McCain etc.). There is no basis for link vaccines-autism. But there is a strong need (as for every social calamity) to find a culprit, to identify an evildoer, because this is reassuring. If we fight the culprit (in this case the Pharma business), we can do something. This explains how (as it seems) half of population is convinced of this link.
Last edited by paolo on 03 Apr 2008, 1:59 am, edited 1 time in total.
The problem I have with much of the acceptance and understanding people expound is that it still revolves around finding better ways to fit us in to society; some of us don't care for your society, and we don't want to fit into it.
I couldn't care less if I had a job, a degree; all I care for is obsessing and doing what I want to do, which is what "autism" means to me.
I don't want your acceptance/understanding if all it entails is trying to make me as normal as possible by helping me to emulate what everyone else does; I'd rather be left alone if that's what acceptance/understanding means.
I couldn't care less if I had a job, a degree; all I care for is obsessing and doing what I want to do, which is what "autism" means to me.
I don't want your acceptance/understanding if all it entails is trying to make me as normal as possible by helping me to emulate what everyone else does; I'd rather be left alone if that's what acceptance/understanding means.
If you were ****100%**** truthful about that, you could stop ******NOW*****! They still don't like it, but it HAS been done before. Of course, if you left society 100%, that means you are REALLY ON YOUR OWN!
BTW your stated attitude is the EPITOME of what they would expect.
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