Listen Up, Bob Wright
April 29, 2006 by Kristina Chew, PhD
Filed under Health
Dave Spicer is the father of a young autistic man and is himself autistic himself. He was the first autistic person to serve on the Board of the Autism Society of North Carolina. Spicer’s son has been in therapeutic foster care for eleven years, and Spicer himself went “through many years of active alcoholism until I started getting help (11 years before I was finally diagnosed with autism).”
Based on that, you’d think Spicer knows plenty about autism.
But reading the Autism Speaks website informed him of a bit more, as he describes in Autism, quality of life are not mutually exclusive in the Asheville Citizen-Times (April 28, 2006):
I knew nothing of this group, so I visited its Web site, and got quite an education. I was told that my way of experiencing life is seen as a “cruel embrace” that needs to be conquered and cured, and that achieving this goal would change my future. It certainly would: the person that I am would cease to exist. The life I live a day at a time, with its rich mixture of challenge and accomplishment, its moments of startling clarity and insight and its times of frustration and exhaustion, its joyous celebration of the simplest things so many others ignore or take for granted — this life would vanish.
Spicer notes the deep irony of the utter absence of any autistic people’s voices on the website of an organization that calls itself “Autism Speaks.”
Even though his views on life with autism are not altogether in accordance with those expressed on Autism Speaks, Dave Spicer has taken the time to read and think about how this organization purports
in all sincerity and with the best of intentions, to speak for what they believe are our best interests.
Bob Wright, I hope you are listening.
Spicer says what autistics say all the time, most notably in “Don’t Mourn For Us”. Despite how many times it’s repeated, I get the impression that people on the outside still don’t get it. They might conclude that since he’s autistic, his perception of reality might be skewed. JBJr would say he doesn’t know what he’s missing. I say NTs don’t know what they’re missing
Argh. I just wish I knew what length of clue-by-four would work on some of these people!
Hi Kristina,
Thanks for blogging on this. Dave Spicer is here on this newsweek magazine page at the middle of the page.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3069769/
(ironic that newsweek is Bob Wright’s baby, too)
If you read that issue (I bet everyone here from the US did) you’ll remember him in a large photograph of him on a motorcycle with his son.
He has this great line in that article: “My favorite story about autism is ‘The Emperor’s New Clothes’,” he says. “The boy didn’t understand social norms, but he spoke the truth. I think society needs us.”