Saw those 4 letters on the license plate of an older SUV while driving around Berkeley on Tuesday—–no kidding!

When Charlie was taking piano lessons once a week (from this teacher), he practiced almost every day. In the beginning, when he was just learning to identify the keys and read the notes, practices were 10 to 15 minutes and sometimes less. Charlie’s teacher emphasized that he hoped that Charlie would enjoy playing the piano, and not see it as some chore that he had to do, so we always (well, we always tried) to end on a good note. (I was not trying to pun.)

After about 9 months, when Charlie was clearly learning to read the notes and starting to play with both hands, he often barely had to look at the sheet music to play “Spinning” and “Oh Susanna” and the other short little songs in his book—-it was quite apparent that he’d more or less memorized many of the pieces and looking at the music was just an afterthought. As we practice less now — partially because Charlie’s also got to practice cello and also because he’s not taking piano lessons with a teacher anymore — Charlie has to pause and focus on what the notes say, so in some ways the piano practice has also been a good way to reinforce his reading skills. He can read the treble and bass clefs and a full octave of both starting from middle C.

I started taking piano lessons when I was six years old and played all through high school. I had weekly lessons, daily practice (with summers “off”—there was many a time that I detested nothing so much as practicing the piano), and a few entrances in the tryouts for the Junior Bach Festival in Berkeley. (I never made it past the tryouts; always had a memory block in the middle of the fugue I had so meticulously played a thousand times over.) I also started playing viola in the third grade and played in two youth orchestras.

To be honest, I often wished I had stuck with the violin: Charlie’s hands are already bigger than mine and because I’m 5 feet tall, I couldn’t use a bigger-sized viola that made a bigger, deeper sound. Charlie’s got long, slender fingers. I’ve always had to strain a bit to reach a full octave; Charlie can do this with ease. I figured cello would be a better match for him, plus he wouldn’t have to hold up an instrument on his shoulder. And, he definitely prefers low-pitched and deep sounds, so higher tones and sometimes squeakiness of a violin might not appeal to him at all (and especially as he’s been in a very sound-sensitive phase for the past year).

My goal for the next year is to try to teach Charlie to play sheet music—-to play music from a piano book bought in a store. Right now, we’re still using the songs his old teacher left us with. Those sheets just have the bare essentials on them, the notes of course, the clefs, some rests (though Charlie doesn’t really play them), sharps, maybe a time signature or some slurs. Too many distractions on the page tend to, well, distract; just on Sunday evening, Charlie sight-read a new song which had some measures in which the right and left hands play simultaneously. He paused at those measures and played the right hand part first, and then (following me pointing) the left hand.

And yes, I can’t be more glad that I had to practice piano and viola, every day, for all those years

While out in California last week, I spent some time in Berkeley and saw the site of the tree protest outside the University of California’s Memorial Stadium: Treesitters have been protesting about the University’s plans to cut the trees for the past 18 months and things have gotten volatile.

Nathan Pitts, a “disability rights advocate (particularly for Asperger’s and related conditions) and budding environmental advocate,” wrote about being assaulted by a UCB police officer when he went to see a friend who is a treesitter on January 28th in a letter in the February 1st Berkeley Planet. Today in IndyBay, Pitts notes that an advocate from the Autism Spectrum Liberation Front is considering suing the University of California-Berkeley’s police for the no-coincidental sum of $2.1 Million and links to a  video in which a UCB cop calls a protester with Asperger’s “Forrest Gump.” Like I said, things have gotten volatile or maybe they’re just warming up…….

On Sunday I posted about whether or not Jenny Mccarthy’s son is recovered or not.

In a transcript of McCarthy’s June 6 interview about her “autism crusade,” it’s as hard as ever to get the facts straight about what her son Evan has: Perhaps it is indeed not clear to either McCarthy or the various medical and other professionals who have evaluated her son.

Here’s what McCarthy said in answer to questions by guest host Jamie Kolby and by Greta van Susteren:

VAN SUSTEREN: And in the spectrum, where is Evan?

MCCARTHY: Evan was undiagnosed with autism.

VAN SUSTEREN: So if I met Evan?

MCCARTHY: You would never know in a million years.

VAN SUSTEREN: So how does it manifest itself?

MCCARTHY: Autism?

VAN SUSTEREN: No, Evan’s autism.

MCCARTHY: It doesn’t.

VAN SUSTEREN: I wouldn’t know Evan is autistic?

MCCARTHY: No, when I take him to neurologists - this is another - there’s like two controversies with autism. It’s how they got there and the possibility of recovery. Recovery, the real thing, it’s not a cure, a really great analogy I give is autism is like getting hit by a bus. You can’t be cured but you can recover all those lost things that you once had. [Other examples of the "autism is like a car accident" are here and here.]

VAN SUSTEREN: Relearn the skills?

MCCARTHY: Relearn but also you might have a booboo here and there but Evan, once I looked into how this generation of moms have been healing lots of their kids, there’s thousands and thousands of recovery stories. I follow those people and the reason why the medical community doesn’t support is because us moms aren’t treating autism, we are treating a vaccine injury. And when you treat the vaccine injury, the autism goes away, minimizes or disappears. When Evan goes to a neurologist now because he still has seizures, the main thing they keep saying to me is he never had autism to begin with. He never had autism. [Compare this post, So is this autism?.]

Well, really, he was diagnosed by UCLA and the California state where he had in home therapy for 40 hours a week for an entire year. You’re damn right this kid had autism. This kid had no language, two to three words, and now he’s completely conversational because I detoxed his body, I did the diet, all the things the medical community doesn’t support. [So autism is "no language" and nor being "conversational"?]

Emphases are mine.

Some will remember last week for June 4th and “Green Our Vaccines” rally.

I remember it as Charlie’s last full week of elementary school.

• Low Birth Weight and Preterm Birth: Autism Risk Factors?
  A new study in Pediatrics links low birth weight (less than 5.5 pounds) and preterm birth to an increased risk for autism in infants by about twofold, and more so in girls than in boys.
• “The issue here for me is did our teacher behave as alleged?”
  An editorial in the June 3rd Palm Beach Post about 5-year-old Alex Barton being voted out of his kindergarten class quotes Michael Lannon, Superintendent of Port St. Lucie, along with more details from the police report.
• An Argument about “Difference” and “Deviance”
  Professor Stanley Fish of Florida International University, in Miami and dean emeritus of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Illinois at Chicago, opens a post about “norms and deviations” on his New York Times blog by citing a letter published in Time magazine.
• How Invisible is Autism in Women?
  Is female “invisibility” in the autistic spectrum a feminist issue?
• The Rallying of the Green
  The “green vaccine thing” is but another instance of rebranding.
• No Wonder It’s So Expensive to Be a Parent
  The average mother of a child under 15 spends more on fast food per year than on books, music, movies, and video games combined, the June 2nd New York Times reports.
• Change the Schedule!
  “Change the schedule!” That was apparently the rallying cry of the June 4th Green Our Vaccines rally.
• Boy Dies During Nap, Possibly From Secondary Drowning
  10-year-old Johnny Jackson died last week while taking a nap in his house from “asphyxiation due to drowning”—-according to today’s ABC News, Johnny may have died from secondary drowning.
• Needed: Good Communication Between Parents and Schools
  It’s always struck me as a sad irony that, when it comes to parents trying to make sure that an autistic child succeeds at school, communication can pose some of the greatest obstacles. Too often I’ve found it just very hard to let teachers, therapists, and staff know what is going on with Charlie and what our goals are, and I know the reverse has occurred.
• 1500
  That’s journalist Arthur Allen’s estimate of how many people were at Wednesday’s Green Our Vaccines rally; a bit smaller of a number than the “close to 10,000” elsewhere noted.
• Recovered or Not?
  In article after article about the “Green Our Vaccines” rally, it is said that that her son is “autistic” and “has autism”—contrary to what was said at the publication of her book last September.

When Jenny McCarthy’s book Louder Than Words: A Mother’s Journey in Healing Autism was published last September, all the talk was that she had “recovered” her son from autism.

In article after article about the “Green Our Vaccines” rally, it is said that that her son is “autistic” and “has autism.”

Just trying to get the facts straight.

A couple of years while teaching this poem to an English Literature 101 class at a mid-sized university in New Jersey (it’s not where I teach now), I asked my class what “green” signifies. While we live in New Jersey, I grew up in California (think Berkeley not Los Angeles) and — having started to recycle in the 4th grade, lived through a couple of droughts and a gas shortage, and developed a preference for whole grains in elementary school — “green” to me means nature, plants, leaves, grass, stuff that grows in the ground naturally.

So I was honestly crestfallen when several students answered my question about “the meaning of green” with one word:

Money. At the mention of nature — trees etc. — they shrugged. (I sighed.)

So you’d perhaps think that I’d feel some relief towards the notion of “greening our vaccines,” the name of the rally today, June 4th, in Washington, D.C., with Jenny McCarthy and Jim Carrey, described as a “celeb couple” leading the rally “to raise awareness about autism”—I thought this was a rally about vaccines?

I’m not too clear about what “green vaccines” are but—-based on phrases like “how green is my dream kitchen” and (more generally) “how to go green,” “green thinking” and, too, the greening of the automobile — it would seem that “green vaccines” would be something like “environmentally safe vaccines.” As in non-toxic, non-mercury/thimerosal/non-anything-dangerous containing vaccines of the sort touted by those who call themselves not “antivaxxers” but “pro-vaccine-safety”-ists.

But this “green vaccine thing” is but another instance of rebranding, as in the various different names that Evidence of Harm author David Kirby regularly engages in, to find new biological ways of describing “autism.” Orac has taken a good look about the green- and natural-ness of vaccines (and been called an “idiot” in the very first comment). He also offers a small gallery of signs (”Vaccines = Autism EvidenceofHarm.org“), as well as a selection of signs from the “Power of Truth” rally three years ago.

Starting from Orac’s look at both signage and slogans (and semantics), a few more thoughts on the rallying of the green:

Somwhere in the not too distant past, those who were the “antivaxxers” or “anti-vaccine advocates” started to chararacterize themselves as “pro-vaccine-safety advocates.” As Mike Stanton notes, the organizers of the Green Our Vaccines rally sound like their old anti-vaccine selves. But “pro” has positive overtones: Better to be for something and who can object to making things—vaccines—safe? (In the abortion debate, it’s “pro-choice” and “pro-life”—-who wants to be “anti-life” or “anti-choice”?)

Regarding the “green” theme, very prominently displayed on the logo for the rally. The associations of green—aside from my “nature” one and the “money” response of my former students—also include, of course, green stop lights which mean “go.” The notion of green vaccines suggests that those who espouse these are moving forward and being progressive and pro-active. Certainly “green our vaccines” has a much friendlier ring to it than “mercury poisoning” (suggestive of being poisoned by something burning and volatile); the phrase also suggests that, just as we are greening kitchens, cleaning products, clothing, cars, out very way so thinking, etc., so is there a movement to do so for vaccines.

I’m not sure today’s rally is going to bring more clarity to all of this. I’ve been reading a book, Do Vaccines Cause That?: A Guide For Evaluating Vaccine Safety Concerns by Martin Myers, M.D and Diego Pineda, M.S. that has been helpful in providing some basic clarifications about the science and history behind vaccines and about what is in vaccines. One example is the definitions of “side effect” and “adverse effect” (p. 25). These are key terms in discussions about vaccines and autism; proponents of the hypothesis that vaccines or something in vaccines can be linked to autism hone in on such unintended effects as one of the dangers of vaccines. (This article contains one such story.) However, as Dr. Myers and Pineda write:

Side effect (or Side reaction) are symptoms and signs that occur either locally—such as pain or redness at the injection site—or in other parts of the body—such as headache or fever—because of a particular immunization or dose of a drug. A mild measles-like rash after measles vaccine is fairly common, for example. Serious, life-threatening allergic reactions can be side effects of vaccines, but occur very rarely.
…….
An adverse event is something quite different from a side effect. A side effect is “caused by” the vaccine, whereas an adverse event is something that occurred at about the time. a vaccine was given, but which could have been caused by the vaccine or could have just occurred at that time by coincidence. Although fever is a side effect of many vaccines, not all occurrences of fever after vaccines are caused by the vaccine. This book discusses how scientists determine whether an adverse event is actually a side effect—that is, caused by the vaccine. Thus, when an adverse event occurs after vaccination, it needs to be determined whether the adverse event was caused by the vaccine or whether it was just coincidental—that is, it was going to happen anyway. (p. 25-6)

An “adverse effect” from a vaccine is not something that is “undesirable” or “contrary to expectations”; the term has a specific meaning, as noted above. Do Vaccines Cause That? is a “user-friendly guide” for parents concerned about vaccine safety and it would seem to be a book that a “vaccine greener” might wish to consult. There are numerous other definitions of green and it’s hard to say what a rally about vaccine safety—vaccine awareness, if you will—has to do with the schools, services, and supports that autistic children and autistic individuals need to succeed.

Autism is not about vaccines, it’s about people.

Brooklyn is to Manhattan as California’s East Bay (Oakland, Berkeley) is to San Francisco: Today’s New York Times draws these comparisons:

….there is a young, earnest population that is beating a path between artsy, gentrifying neighborhoods in Brooklyn and their counterparts in the Bay Area, especially East Oakland and the area south of Market Street in San Francisco, or SoMa.

The New York Times describes some 20- and 30- something year olds who, in search of a place with a “messy urbanism”—-a urban, creative vibe of the sort found in edgier city neighborhoods before gentrification sets in—-shuttle between the East and West—the Left—coasts. Maybe this transcontinental connection is now found among “creative people” in search of “alternative art and music scenes” and “a tolerance for diversity,” but mention of the East and West coasts means something more particular to me.

We live, as oft noted here, in what is called north-central New Jersey and frequently cross the Hudson in to New York City. I’m from California and, too, northern California, and Oakland and Berkeley are where I grew up, via Oakland’s Chinatown (just past the shores of Lake Merritt) and Telegraph and Shattuck Avenues in the university town where you’ll still find People’s Park. My husband Jim is from Jersey and the state has been the best place for Charlie to go to school; we left two jobs, financial security, and a lot more when we drove away from the Midwest in 2001 and moved back here. The three of us all like to be near New York, the site of many adventures, and can hardly wait to get back into the Atlantic Ocean down the shore—and we sure like the good education Charlie has had here in Jersey.

While liking the Garden State much—it is a garden spot for us—my mind’s always directed westward to the Golden State I grew up in. I have a large extended family, most of whom lives in northern California; my cousins have children who are just a bit older than Charlie. Jim and I have often talked about possibly moving out west when Charlie is an adult, as there will be many members of my family to support and help him, and include him in the life of the family. Going back and forth between the East and West coasts is a lifestyle choice, one might say: Charlie will most likely end up living in one place or the other, and it’s more than important that he feel at home in both places. With Charlie’s school schedule, we have usually only been going out to California once a year at Christmastime. I’m hoping that we can visit briefly in the summer, to see my numerous relatives (and my 102 year old grandmother, Ngin-Ngin, in particular), to familiarize Charlie with California so that he’s a bicoastal boy, at home in two places, because we just don’t know.

(One thing I do know is that I think the New York Times’s equation of Brooklyn with the East Bay is not entirely accurate: Better to compare the East Bay—-Bezerkley and Oakland where “there is no there there” with New Jersey, a place where you’ll find the Meadowlands, a certain “messy urbanism,” and more than a bit of autism education going on.)