lauren asked:
How can a person relate to autism if they have never been touched by it, and does it remind you of a situation, event, idea, or an issue in the news or from history?
How can a person relate to autism if they have never been touched by it, and does it remind you of a situation, event, idea, or an issue in the news or from history?
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I find The Sonrise Program very helpful for helping me connect to my friend’s son who has autism. I found joining particularly fascinating.
“Kyle’s Treehouse” is a great forum for parents who have children with autism – it might be worth asking there too.
Best wishes.
There’s the essential problem. You have a lot of people who think they’ve been touched by autism, like the parents of autistic people, and then you have people who are actually autistic. Right now, everyone trusts the non-autistic self-appointed spokespeople of all autistic people (actually, Autism Speaks has been recognized by the UN as a spokesperson of autistic issues, which is ridiculous, seeing as how they have essentially no autistic members and have repeatedly tried to shut up the autistic pride movement and prevent autistics from actually speaking). The essential truth is that if you are not autistic, and have not experienced life through an autistic person’s perspectives, with all the hardships, both natural and constructed, that accompany that, you cannot understand autistics, any more than we can easily understand you. For all that is said about autistics lacking empathy, we find that the neurotypical world lacks any empathy whatsoever for us (additionally, we seem to empathize with one another fairly well).
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