I’ve read a couple of posts today, both from people I respect a lot, that really made me stop and think about the nature of my own blogging and what I’m doing.
The first was a post from Susan in which she talked about the Autism Club:
I believe that an even better cause for the planet would be teaching tolerance for difference, whether it means tolerance for a different opinion from your own, or tolerance for the full spectrum of people we come across. Tolerance/inclusion is not about hitting people over the head with your viewpoint, but by providing gentle example. At any rate, if we’re all doing the best we can, which I assume we all are, that should be the bottom line. Autism should not be the club we use against each other.
I am conflicted about this. Let me explain – I think Susan is a great role model for parents of autistic kids and I think in the broader implications of what she says here (and I urge you to follow the link and read the whole piece) she’s spot on – we _should_ all be working together. However, in the three plus years I’ve been blogging about autism I’ve grown more and more saddened by the realisation that this doesn’t seem to be possible. I used to want to provide gentle example but as time progresses and viewpoints become more entrenched I find myself firing off a volley rather than providing calm reflection.
My problem is this: there are people ‘out there’ who want to make money or prestige from autism. There are other people who seem to genuinely hate autistics and the whole idea of autism – some of these people are parents. Some are grandparents, some are friends, brothers, cousins. Some are autistic themselves.
I cannot seem to find a way within myself to accept that these people merely have a differing opinion than mine. Different opinions are for things like what taste in music someone has. The things this group of people espouse revolve around the viewpoint of autism being something abhorrent. I find myself unable to let the things they say go unaddressed.
I _want_ to be able to say that it doesn’t matter so ‘each to their own’. But it does matter to me. It matter when people start using utterly untested treatments. It matters when children die. It matters when adults are dismissed for the ludicrous viewpoint that because they can talk or type they have no insight. It matters that science is hijacked by ignorance.
None of this is to have a go at Susan who as I say I respect deeply. I know she feels these things deeply too. Her post merely helped coalesce my thoughts.
The second post I read was from Estee who talked today about the lonliness, struggle and profound joy of parenting an autistic child. Its a great title and a great post, just like Susan’s. Estee says:
Some people take these debates, points of view, so personally (a hazard of religion as it involves so much emotion), that I have discovered a very dark side of autism. I discovered that parents with autistic children are so divided that the support I was seeking is hard to find. Instead of a journey to discovery, it is starting to look more like a war out there.
Depressingly true.
When I first started blogging about autism I have the distinct impression I was pretty much alone. I’m someone who makes their living from the web so I know how to tweak the technology to find things. I didn’t find anybody. I determined that in order to raise the wall of societal ignorance about autism I would talk about Megan. I would document our lives – the loneliness, the struggles and the profound joys as Estee describes it.
Somewhere along the line, as our family increasingly realised more about Megan and about autism and as we read more and more from autistic people themselves our views about things changed. I started to realise to my horror that there was a whole subculture ‘out there’ that wanted nothing less than the total eradication of my daughter and everyone like her. Defeat Autism Now. Cure Autism Now. Defeat Autism Yesterday.
Against such large, highly mobilised, politically aware organisations what chance did my daughter have to be viewed as someone worthy of respect? If she was seen as someone to defeat, how could she ever win at anything?
So I started to fight back. I don’t want to fight. I want these people to accept our children, both young and grown, up as _different_ – with _different strengths_ because my daughter and everyone like her shouldn’t be a prize to fight over. She should just….be….and be respected and allowed to just be. Nobody’s drowning in a tsunami over here. Nobody’s disappeared into the maw of a holocaust.
This is an emotive subject we all talk about. It goes right to the heart of what it is to value and be valued. I believe those who wish to ‘cure’ their children love them deeply in the vast majority of cases. However, I also believe that they are mistaken about the risk to benefits ratio that such treatments can offer. I further cannot understand how one can wish to remove something and also claim to value it.
My choice is that I will do my utmost to change the world for the good of my children. I will not see them dismissed as a collection of medical ailments to be treated with dangerous things. There is no respect in that position. There is no chance for a child to feel positively about themselves.
It shouldn’t have to be that way. In an ideal world it wouldn’t be. But in a world that contains people like John Best Jr – a racist, homophobic parent of an autistic child who runs a blog entitled ‘hating autism’ and who claims to know his child is mercury poisoned despite that child never having *even been tested* for any form of metal poisoning then I cannot stand by and let these things go unaddressed and uncommented on. My daughter needs a daddy who’ll fight for her when the need arises. That that is a necessity is, as both Susan and Estee intimate, a tragedy.
But sadly, it seems it is a necessity.
Left Brain Right Brain 
I had a similar reaction to those two entries, but have not known how to say it.
All points of view are not equally valid. All people are equally valid, but not all opinions are. Sometimes there are several opinions that all work in a given situation, but that does not mean that all opinions work, or that all opinions work equally well. All of us will have opinions that are wrong at some point. That does not mean all opinions themselves are equally right, or equally wrong.
There are people in the world who have told me, unasked and totally unprovoked, that I should be sterilized to prevent the future births of people like me. There are people in the world who would rather I be dead than autistic. I have heard these opinions and they are not conjectures. Where is the validity in these points of view? I dare anyone to say it to my face. People have, but there are occasions when I can make eye contact too, and I do not believe they are unharmed or harmless or right by saying these things.
I know where the “all choices of therapy are equally valid” approach leads. It leads to impunity for some of the worst kinds of abuse disguised as therapy. I always thought that “all choices of therapy are equally valid” people should spend some time trying out a wide range of “therapies” on themselves and see if they have that opinion by the end of it. I do not think that most people if being honest with themselves, and if truly capable of performing the experiment, would find this to be true. I think some people would find “therapies” that they would realize they did not wish on anyone and that “Everyone is different” is an utter joke when confronted with torture and cattle prods.
Perhaps people who do not have to literally live the end results can afford more to avoid open confrontation with the people who do these things.
I could not avoid open confrontation with the people who do these things. I am not a parent. I am an autistic person. I had no choice as to whether many of these things were done. The only choice I had was how much of a fight I put up first and how much I got punished and labeled violent for doing so.
If I was an isolated instance I would chalk this all up to history — contrary to some people’s opinions I do not simply live in the past nor base my opinions upon my own experiences alone — but dangerous and unethical things of this nature are happening right now to people all over.
Some people cannot afford to get into this. That is fine with me. I wish that people who could not afford to get into these things, though, would say that. Just say it. And not make things worse by claiming that all “therapies” are the same ethically (or at least parents should not be chastised at all for what they do or say) because we must validate the feelings of the parents or something and all parents are together in this. The parental togetherness thing seems huge for some reason.
There are people planning the extinction of autistic people. Some of them, as Kev said, are parents and relatives, some are autistics, some are neither. I may understand why they think they have to do it, I may understand that some — not all — do not have awful motivations, but damn if I will stand by and let it happen without comment or with murmured platitudes to validate their feelings. Meaning well is not enough and a whole lot of them don’t even mean well.
And I see people lulled into a sense that if they just pretend that everything is peaceful, it will be peaceful. People have died because of this philosophy. I am not exaggerating or being melodramatic. I have been there.
For autistic people, it is not always going to be an immediate matter of life and death. But often it is. And often the less immediate things can turn into that eventually. I have seen people claim they don’t care if their child is a horribly depressed unhappy adult as long as they can speak like a normal person, and it tears me apart. I cannot believe this is love, or if it is love it is love so misguided that it has been warped out of all recognition.
I am, right now, trying to read through a bunch of stuff by autistic people. My purpose is to find out what we say about our parents. So far, we seem to say the same things most people say about our parents — everything from obvious love to obvious and stated hate. Everything from constant abuse to no abuse. All combinations of things like this. The standard range of parenthood.
And yet I am supposed to believe that all these parents have something in common, some solidarity, some goodness that makes it wrong to question their decisions.
Gunilla Gerland writes in A Real Person of a father who played cruel tricks on her and on animals, who beat his wife and left her for another woman without even telling the kids, a mother who routinely got drunk and screamed at her about what a horrible worthless person she was.
I used to know an autistic person whose mother deliberately tortured her and laughed as she went into overload. Another one whose parents burned her hands on the stove on purpose. Another one whose father threw him across the room and slammed him into a wall for stimming.
Everyone has heard of parents like this. But in the autism world they vanish into people who surely must be making what they believe are the right decisions for their children.
It seems like so many people are afraid of the return of the refrigerator parent accusations, that they neglect the obvious, which is that there is a whole range of parenting in the world.
Now just as nobody achieves sainthood by having an autistic kid, nobody achieves total sub-humanness by doing wrong things to their kid. But there’s a difference between seeing someone, even someone who has done something awful, as a person, and believing that that person’s opinions or actions need to be “validated” in order to accept their personhood.
(This is not theoretical to me. I am on fairly good terms with a relative who has abused me. He would never accept someone trying to “validate” his actions and would probably jump on them harder than I would for attempting to do so.)
I also know, of course, a lot of autistic people whose families would have never dreamed of doing those things. And I know autistic people whose families did things to them that they thought were right but they learned were wrong. And so forth.
The funny thing is, most of them look identically loving and caring in public to most people’s eyes. Whether they’re people who’ve done horrendous things and told their children they hate them, or people who’ve always loved their children. Who is going to admit to the awfulness in public? Very few, and I actually have a lot of respect for those who do (provided they’re not bragging about it).
(Dave Hingsburger, for example, is a staff person who has done horrible things to disabled people, up to and including authorizing the use of cattle prods, knows there is no excusing what he has done, but writes about it anyway, with brutal honesty and an attempt to become more ethical, without casting himself as a saint. And he’s really worth reading not just in the context of disability but in the context of people in general.)
But, basically, the autistic people most likely to be harmed by various “therapies” and “philosophies of autism,” are not likely to be helped by the “let’s respect the opinions of those who are doing this to me” thing. By all means respect people as people, but opinions are something different, and some opinions, some actions (and actions start with opinions), are just not excusable.
Frankly, when I see people talking about how all parents of autistic kids should have this kind of solidarity, it frightens me. It frightens me because I have seen the results of both parental hatred and parental well-meaning bad things directed towards autistic people, and this is so rarely acknowledged, that good intentions aren’t enough and that some parents do not love their children and that some parents who do love their children still horribly mistreat them.
It frightens me because parents have all the power in all the big organizations and stuff and making this about “quiet example” and stuff means who will be standing up for the autistic people’s rights when some of these “parental choices” harm or kill us?
Isn’t it possible to both be an example of acceptance and celebration, and at the same time say “No, some things just are not okay”? Isn’t it possible to be both loving and taking a stand? When people believe that peace is the absence of apparent conflict (while meanwhile the conflict all continues under the surface and harms people and kills people and so forth) bad things happen. And most autistic people can’t escape those bad things without allies, and where are the allies if they’re all going into “sweep it under the carpet mode”, if nobody’s willing to confront anyone because it wouldn’t be polite or validating or parent-solidarity or whatever?
Israel’s Holocaust remembrance museum, Yad Vashem, honors the Righteous Gentiles (non-Jews who sheltered Jews during the Holocaust) with a Talmudic quote, “Whoever saves a single soul, it is as if he had saved the entire world.”
You are saving children with your blog, Kev. And yes, it is a tragedy that the world has come to this.
http://en.thinkexist.com/quotation/all_that-s_necessary_for_the_forces_of_evil_to/13223.html
“All that’s necessary for the forces of evil to win in the world is for enough good men to do nothing.â€
Sitting on the sidelines in not necessarily a good option here where a group of extremists have seized the imaginations of various media personalities and spread a totally false and terribly dangerous view of autism.
How can one sit there and watch people recommend DAN! doctors once one knows that they have very nearly killed children with their “alternative” “cutting edge” “treatments” for autism.
When the children are being harmed needlessly how can anyone just sit there and merely wish for it to be different?
I’m not advocating anything but for parents to get all the facts and they are not getting all the facts from the DAN! folks or the Generation Rescue folks (see John Best Jr.’s blog for a good example of a Generation Rescue “Rescue Angel”. He advocates against parents taking their kids to any doctors. He says that he wouldn’t take his child to an MD because they are all “snakes”.
What happens when people get influence by bizarre people like that? Children will die. Just as 7 babies died in California not long ago from pertussis because the kids near them were not vaccinated.
Sure, everyone can just be polite, but how do you politely tell someone that they are so wrong that their statements could kill someone?
We don’t allow people to yell “fire!” in a crowded theater for fun. If people were making money off of yelling “fire!” in a crowded theater, those yelling for personal profit would get locked up and the judge would throw away the key, but that’s what these DAN! types are doing. Yelling, “fire” in a crowded theater, and many of them, Bradstreet and Buttar and Kirby for three are making more money every time they yell, “fire.”
I am anonymous because people like John Best are frightening. People who oppose these mercury parents as a group get their own lives and their children’s lives threatened. Kevin’s family has been threatened!
Susan and Estee are great women, and they have big hearts, but it’s not right to say that we should sit quietly and not fight against lies. Not when the lies can and do kill.
Once more:
“All that’s necessary for the forces of evil to win in the world is for enough good men to do nothing.â€
But in a world that contains people like John Best Jr – a racist, homophobic parent of an autistic child who runs a blog entitled ‘hating autism’ and who claims to know his child is mercury poisoned despite that child never having even been tested for any form of metal poisoning then I cannot stand by and let these things go unaddressed and uncommented on.
The worst part about that is that John is putting all his eggs on the chelation basket. He has said that if chelation does not work (and he basically means “cure” in the traditional sense) Sam will be put in an institution. I think we do need to beat him over the head until he gives up that stupid course of action.
I also often wonder, why is this considered the path of most resistance?
To me, it can feel awful, but it doesn’t feel awful as the feeling of pretending it’s all not there, but knowing deep down that it is, knowing that some of the things you’re saying may even be contributing to the bad stuff.
The constant, day and night, inward abrasion of denial feels like much more “resistance” to me than the near-constant outward abrasion involved in saying these things. Denial, complicity, and all those things burn really deep. The outward stuff is awful, and scary sometimes, and stressful, but it never feels as bad to me as complicity would.
So I’m not totally sure this is the “path of most resistance”. I think it can just look that way.
I was raised by parents who… let’s just say that there’s a good reason I haven’t seen them since 1994 and haven’t spoken to them since 1997.
I was raised under the mantle of being “worthless” and “useless” and “good for nothing”, and was pressured to conform to utterly unrealistic expectations (in my case, it was “perfection” pretty much).
It was very, very clear to me, that my “differentness” was not going to be tolerated, let alone respected. I’m not autistic, although as a child I had some very distinct autistic type signs (more in the Asperger’s area than classic Kanners Autism). I was, however, sufficiently different that it was “a problem” and my inability (which was seen as unwillingnesses) to conform to unrealistic expectations was seen as defiance.
I don’t think my parents hated me, especially. I’m very sure they didn’t like me much.
This is precisely why it bothers me when I see parents who “hate” their autistic children. I believe completely, based on a great deal of observation and the fact that our family is chock full of autistics of one sort or another going back for several generations (in previous generations they were just known as “eccentric” or “a bit odd” but the patterns are all there), my daughter is just the way she is because that’s the way she is.
At first, I was upset by the diagnosis, of course. I didn’t have any idea what to expect or how to proceed. I was in denial at first, and then angry, but eventually I progressed through the stages of grief to reach acceptance and I’ve been working from that place ever since. She is who she is, and the best we can do for her is get her the (valid) therapy she needs and do our best to love her for WHO SHE IS, and not try to force her to be someone else, to be some other child.
There’s nothing more painful than knowing your parents hate who you are, or wish you were someone different, or wish they had a different child. This is something that never, never, ever leaves you. No amount of therapy or good will or growth will fix that place in your heart where you know that your parents really didn’t want you, and maybe didn’t love you.
I could never be what my parents wanted me to be. The fact that I’m smart, funny, capable, quick-witted, a good student, and a genuine survivor means nothing to them. They know nothing about who I really am, and they never did. All they knew was that I wasn’t what they wanted.
This is the legacy being passed on to children whose parents hate them, or hate who they are, or want them to be someone else. “We’ll love you when/if you conform to our idea of who you should be, and if you don’t…”
Well, who knows. Institutionalization, perhaps. Placement in the foster care system. Murder, even (possibly under the guise of “medical treatment”). At the very least, a lifelong scar of knowing that your parents didn’t like you and didn’t want you, and never accepted you.
No, I can’t stand back and say “Oh, they mean well,” when I see that going on. Parents who hate their children and make their children feel inadequate and teach them that until they’re “normal” they’re not good enough are guilty of emotional abuse, plain and simple, and child abuse of any kind is just plain wrong, no matter what form it takes.
“You are saving children with your blog, Kev. And yes, it is a tragedy that the world has come to this”
Kevin, you and many many of your readers/commenters are doing more than saving children, you are also contributing to family/parental sanity!
If you have the time Kevin, go back and read my Post about the “Doers”. It’s less than a 10-minute read, and I wrote it with many of you in mind.
Although everyone is entitled to have their own opinion from a democratic/free speech standpoint, that is not the same thing as saying that all perspectives are valid from the aspects of accuracy or social justice.
Another example of this kind of fuzzy thinking about validity is the whole flapdoodle about allowing “Intelligent Design” into science classrooms to make it “fair” by allowing “both sides of the debate”. There are literally hundreds of creation stories out there. They make for fascinating literature, as poetic metaphors and cultural icons. But they do not make for accurate biological science. In the same regard, unsupported ideas about causality in the origins or the “treatment” of autism are not good, accurate biological or medical science. It’s not a matter of making it “fair” by allowing “both sides of the debate”.
Not only are various ideas neither all real nor all useful, they are not all appropriate, no matter how earnest or how good the underlying intentions are. (The figurative road to hell is well-paved, indeed.)
JUST BECAUSE YOU CAN, DOESN’T MEAN YOU SHOULD. (Can we go carve this in a stone monument somewhere?!) Hence the famous example about shouting “Fire!” in a crowded theatre. Free speech rights do not extend into endangerment. Nor do definitions of the rights of care-givers (parents, teachers, social workers, medical personal, institutional workers, et cetera) allow them to treat others however so they may please, to the point of endangerment. It doesn’t matter if they assert that they’re doing whatever “for someone else’s own good”. It is NOT appropriate treatment when basic human rights are ignored, through abuse or neglect or righteous violence.
Denying someone’s essential human rights* because of who or what they are is essential xenophobia, which goes way deeper than outright or covert chauvinism or mere “tolerance”. It denies that all people are human, and therefore like one’s self, for all that people are individually different.
Fair is not about treating everyone the same, or about saying that all viewpoints are equally useful and good. Fair is about giving people the things they need, and that includes humans rights for all humans, be they autistics or children.
andrea
* that’s human rights, not necessarily civil rights — one does not extend full civil rights to people who commit atrocious crimes against fellow humans and society
It does amaze me that people seem to routinely confuse:
1. “I have a right to my opinion.”
2. “I have a right to say my opinion.”
3. “I have a right to act on my opinion.”
4. “I have a right to my opinion being treated as having the same level of ethics as every other opinion.”
5. “I have a right to have my feelings validated at all times above all other concerns.”
6. “I have a right to be considered a person.”
These are all separate things to me, but a lot of these arguments seem to come down to people confusing two or more of them.
For instance, to pick an extreme example that I’ve actually seen, some people choose to have their children “treated” for autism with a device that delivers strong and frequent enough electric shocks to leave burn marks. (One of the ones a lot of us refer to as a cattle prod.)
I have said that this is not ethical before, only to be told that I am trampling all over their feelings and that it is wrong for me to trample on their feelings as devoted parents doing the best they can for their child. I have been told that they are people too, that they have a right to their opinion, a right to make any and all “treatment decisions” including those that amount to torture, and that they deserve special consideration for the hell they have to endure by having an autistic child to begin with.
(I have at times been given self-injury statistics, as “justification,” that I was stunned to find were much less “severe” than mine at certain times in my life.)
Anyway, none of those things have a thing to do with the ethics of using cattle prods on children. I’m supposed to somehow feel sorry for the parents when their child is the one being tortured at their decision? I’m supposed to refrain from commenting on torture just because the decision to do so was hard for them?
I’ll acknowledge the role of professionals (but I don’t think this totally exonerates parents) in convincing parents to do things like this, but I won’t call the “things like this” right just because some people feel bad about having done them, and confuse all those six things all over the place.
Martin Luther King, Jr. said that the two most dangerous things in the world were sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity. “The road to hell is paved with good intentions” is a very old proverb. But as of late, a pernicious doctrine has gained hold, one that says that one’s feelings are all that really matter, and that if you have the Right Feelings, your actions are always justified. Passion is seen as a Good Thing regardless of what you’re passionate about.
For example, when Eminem came under fire for writing and rapping anti-gay lyrics, much of the discussion focussed on what he personally felt about gay people. The argument went that if he didn’t personally hate gay people and was just insulting them to commercially appeal to his teenage male audience’s prejudices, it was OK and no big deal. But that was completely irrelevant; all mattered was that he was knowingly stirring up resentment toward others.
“Sincere” does not mean “correct.” The most passionately and deeply held beliefs are those of bigots, zealots, and fanatics, the people who have the least hold on the truth. Believing that you’re right is not the same thing as being right.
_”Susan and Estee are great women, and they have big hearts, but it’s not right to say that we should sit quietly and not fight against lies.”_
Well, I don’t think they are saying that :o)
What I got from their posts was that it would be really great if everyone could support each other and try and see things from a opint of view of respect first and foremost and they also said how depressing it was this didn’t happen.
I can’t disagree with any of that – my point was that I felt I had to extend beyond simpy not agreeing with other people and also acknowledging the unhappy fact that we have lots of conflict but that that conflict was inevitable.
I have said that this is not ethical before, only to be told that I am trampling all over their feelings and that it is wrong for me to trample on their feelings as devoted parents doing the best they can for their child.
Child abusers’ feelings don’t deserve respect.
Jennifer – that may well be a good idea. For a start-off, this is the forum that will (probably) be recommended in the Scotland-wide autism information booklet:
http://www.asd-forum.org.uk/forum/
There is already some anti-vax sentiment on those boards.
Jennifer – I think you’d probably find most of that stuff indexed at Kathleen’s place.
JBJr is really not happy with me, but why should I care?! Someone who knows me has posted to his blog, and he’s gotten really upset. He’s whinging about it… at length.
Poor JBJr.
I feel sorry for him now, I really do.
Of course, I know he’ll trawl here and try to pick this up entirely out of context, the way he always does, but that’s okay. I know it’s purely because he can’t help it. His brain doesn’t work properly. Deserves our pity more than our disgust, I think.
This I don’t understand:
JBJr elsewhere… :”I beg to differ with your opinion of yourself. If I had a friend like Andrews, I’d tell him to stand up for himself instead of threatening people. How is he going to learn to act like a man if you don’t let him fight his own battles? ”
I am not threatening JBJr. Someone else standing up for me is being seen as me not acting like a man? What is the logic here? How’s JBJr’s son going to learn how to be a man if JBJr doesn’t stop…? Answer… people defend others if they see an injustice. The person posting may well have seen that. Unless JBJr is *not* having a laugh with his funnies about me (which, incidentally are making me quite famous around where I live….), and is in fact being offensive, then what’s JBJr’s issue here? I don’t need to be “defended”, although if someone sticks up for me once in a while, I don’t have any issue myself….
JBJr needs to be pitied, I think.
Sorry Kev, I didn’t explain myself well. I meant a list of permalinks to the individual blog entries that cover a certain topic, e.g. Orac on the Salon article, Kev on Geier and Geier(2006), Kathleen Seidel and Orac on Lupron, etc.
Oh I see what you mean.
Yes that would be useful – it would require a fair bit of time to collate though. I’ll have a think about a technical implementation to make things easier to manage.
Dad of Cameron, how is it that Kevin is saving children? He’s against treatments… and doesn’t seem to advocate anything. He just spends his time on countless blogs complaining about what others are doing. (In fact, he spends so much time online I wonder if he ever sees his daughter… but that’s just speculation.)
How does that save a single child?
_”Dad of Cameron, how is it that Kevin is saving children? He’s against treatments… “_
I am? I’m against _quacky_ treatments, yes.
_”and doesn’t seem to advocate anything. He just spends his time on countless blogs complaining about what others are doing. (In fact, he spends so much time online I wonder if he ever sees his daughter… but that’s just speculation.)”_
Or how about this? I’m really a Pharma shill!!!! I don’t really have a daughter!!!! BWHAHAHAHAHAHA!
My advocacy activities are spent in ways you would no doubt consider a waste of time Erik. I created a CD-ROM for some local Health Authority employees to hand out to parents of autistic children that contains some information and a small presentation on how to approach the LEA about getting a statement, I provide technical help to people who are trying to write web based software/apps to help their autistic kids harness the power of the web, I speak to numerous parents on numerous subject relating to autism and at the moment we part home-school our daughter.
Of course I don’t do what you do and talk desperate people into trying things like chelation and Lupron.
Erik,
“how is it that Kevin is saving children? He’s against treatments”
For autism yes, not for physical illnesses. There is a difference. Would you like me to explain it?
“doesn’t seem to advocate anything. He just spends his time on countless blogs complaining about what others are doing.”
Please read Kev’s justification for this blog. He seems to be advocating something to me. Also don’t pull the “you are only critical and have nothing to really offer” gambit, it is fallacy due to the fact that it distracts from kev’s points and assumes an unknown. Or, I should say, that you certainly can use it, but doing so doesn’t look like very Fair autism media to me.
“(In fact, he spends so much time online I wonder if he ever sees his daughter… but that’s just speculation.)”
What is not speculation is that your comment was a red herring which fallaciously distracts from any real points Kev made.
If one was to be crass, they could ask Erik if his long, hard hours at (un)FAIR cause him to never see his child.
Kev,
I didn’t know you were doing those other things like creating the DVD. Thank you for your efforts.
Erik will always hate you because he doesn’t agree. He’s a true believer, to the point of subjecting his daughter to the Geiers and their phony sheets of testosterone theory.
He’s trolling.
What is it that Erik does to help kids? As far as I can tell, he’s busy producing web based infomercials, promoting quacks and lawyers and I don’t think he’s smart enough to charge them for his services. He helps a lot of DAN! doctors but he isn’t helping any kids. Some kids have been harmed as a matter of fact.
Amanda, that was an eloquent post. I do think it is possible to both be loving and to take a stand, as you are and do. It’s especially necessary in circumstances where people are experiencing a crisis and have to make hard decisions. Even a consummate fence-sitter like Wake Rankin acknowledges that the line must be drawn somewhere. But he draws it a lot lower down than you do.
David, as far as John Best and his homegirl Sue Misiaszek (they live in the same town) are concerned, they appear to be so enmeshed in hatred that they have become irrational. It is unfortunate, but they are not unique in this.
Anne
Hi Anne: “David, as far as John Best and his homegirl Sue Misiaszek (they live in the same town) are concerned, they appear to be so enmeshed in hatred that they have become irrational. It is unfortunate, but they are not unique in this.”
I think that they should get together, you know, hitch up… maybe they could be a source of comfort to one another on those lonely nights when the very thought of thimerosal wreaks havok in their minds….
Maybe they already did…. 🙂
The main thing for me is that we talking and discussing even if we have to agree to disagree and even to exchange harsh words—-one thing we’ll always agree on is how much autism is part of our lives, and how we love our kids (with apologies for sounding overly sappy).
And special thanks to Kev for creating this community. More joins us than we know.
Kristina
The thing about what Kristina just said is this:
1. “Autism being a big part of our lives” is not actually a whole lot to have in common, in and of itself, so I can’t see why emphasizing it changes anything.
2. “Loving our kids”… some of us don’t have children at all. And of those who do, only some love them. (I don’t mean “only some treat them well” — many parents who do not treat their children well still love them, and it’s possible to treat children well without loving them. I mean that, just as not all parents of NTs like their kids, not all parents of autistics like their kids either. I know this is hard for genuinely loving parents to believe, but some parents do hate their children and will say so, either to their children or to other people. All having children takes is having had sex, it doesn’t take or always create an attachment.)
So between some not having kids, and some (just statistically, this has to be true) not liking their kids, that really only leaves one universal thing in common, which is autism being in all of our lives, which is not a lot to have in common and certainly nothing that getting sentimental over helps much about.
Anne wrote:
” David, as far as John Best and his homegirl Sue Misiaszek (they live in the same town) are concerned, they appear to be so enmeshed in hatred that they have become irrational. It is unfortunate, but they are not unique in this”.
– Where is all my hatred, Anne? Show me…
– Sue M.