Phil, that was a powerful comment—I had the same reaction as you when I first read the words about putting autism “in the history books”—-implying a simultaneous wiping out and rewriting of history.

VAB, thank you for the link—and for your words.

In regards to the new AS video, it looks like a pretty superficial marketing piece. It is not powerful, it doesn’t change people’s perspectives on anything in particular.

As I see it, autistic people are just as likely to be cool, engaging people as non-autistic people. Sooner or later the rest of the world in going to catch on to that fact. If enough people look at it, they will figure it out. Any time now there will be a sitcom with an autistic character. From that point on, things should start getting easier.

That visceral reaction — and don’t immediately roll your eyes at what you *think* is gratuitous, overblown, or unwarranted — is in part because of who I am.

I am a first-generation American Jew whose parents’ families were lucky enough to get out of Germany and Austria, respectively, in 1938 and 1939 (but most of whose great-aunts and -uncles and their families, and two of whose great-grandparents, were not so lucky and were murdered by the Nazis).

I am also the third of at least four generations of neurologically atypical individuals in my family. My father’s father was an arithmetic savant; my father, a retired English professor, was a hyperlexic child; I have Asperger’s syndrome; and I have an autistic son and a daughter in the broader phenotype.

What bothers me about the notions of “A World Where…” is, as Kristina identified, the absolutism. Autism as 100% bad. Four legs good, two legs baaaad.

If it were “A world where…” we have eliminated the *handicaps* faced by autistic people, I could be — and *would* be — totally supportive.

The problem is the tacit assumption in this, and so much cure-autism rhetoric, that autism is *only* impairment and defect, that autism and *handicaps due to autism* are one and the same thing.

When you are in the midst of dealing with severe handicaps, it’s very hard to see anything else. Many parents whose families’ lives are turned upside down by their autistic child’s handicaps feel validated by “Autism Every Day”.

But what they will discover, as their children’s handicaps are mitigated and circumvented, is that there is more to autism than smeared poop and meltdowns brought on by inability to communicate.

And more and more of them will see such improvements, as our understanding of autism *and our ability to identify and solve specific problems within autism, rather than treat it as a monolithic “enemy”*, improves.

Educational approaches are improving. And parents, and increasing numbers of clinicians (even if not the most virulent crusaders for one or another single cause or “cure”) are coming to realize that legitimate biomedical interventions that address physiological disorders *secondary* to autism, such as gastrointestinal disorders, are just that: reasonable medical countermeasures to specific physiological disorders. If your kid’s gut hurts and he can’t tell you and he can’t get relief from it, hell yes it’s going to be a contributing factor to maladaptive behavior or to thwarted ability to attend or to learn.

The net result is that more and more kids are going to arrive at a stage where they are *able and yet still autistic*. The gross handicaps they were faced with earlier in life will have been dealt with. But as their parents will discover, the way they think, feel, sense, and relate to others is *still* different. Not different in a bad way, intrinsically, but different.

They will discover the parts of autism for which it is morally incumbent upon the *society* to change, rather than upon the individual.

And they will join — and *are* joining — autistic self-advocates in pushing for the necessary changes in societal attitudes and expectations.

If you follow the “conventional wisdom” on this, you might conclude that it’s only parents of so-called “high functioning” kids who think that way, and that this whole line of thought is irrelevant for parents of more severely handicapped kids.

That couldn’t be more wrong — precisely because the odds are increasingly greater that those severely handicapped kids will grow up into significantly less handicapped outcomes. As unlikely as that may seem at present in one’s own individual case.

It just makes sense to realize that working to mitigate handicaps, and working to secure rights and respect, are not mutually exclusive, *and that over the progression of an autistic lifespan, it is likely that both kinds of activism will be necessary*.

They shouldn’t be placed at odds with one another.

The key is to “think in parts” (like the DSM says folks like us do anyway ). Autism is *not* a monolith. It is not a monolithic “enemy”. It’s not going to turn out to have a blanket, silver-bullet “cure”. Its different parts require different responses.

We can work to mitigate and circumvent the handicaps *and at the same time* appreciate and support — and force the society to make way for — the subtler differences that will remain after the obvious handicaps are dealt with, and that are disadvantageous only because the society does not accommodate them and acknowledge their validity.

*That* is what autistic self-advocacy and pro-neurodiversity are all about.

laurentius, that would be some footage to see…..