Interesting!
This kind of bugged me:
Q: True. But not everyone with autism grows up to be a computer genius. What about those who are too impaired to live on their own, or go to college?
A: The biggest lesson I’ve learned from studying 80 years of autism history is: Don’t underestimate kids on the spectrum when they’re young. People point to [animal behaviour expert] Temple Grandin, who is perhaps the most famous autistic person in the world, and say, ‘My kid is not like Temple Grandin.’ Well, if you’d seen her when she [was] a preschooler who was very destructive and thrown out of all these schools, you might not have thought she was Grandin herself.
So he basically answered "what about non-genius/non-amazing autistic people?" with an example of a genius/amazing autistic person who has achieved fame and notoriety for inventing something amazing - IOW, it's not "well, those people deserve to live too," it's, "don't give up hope, maybe your child will miraculously become well above the average in achievement. If not, well...dunno." Kind of solidifies the "it's okay that there's autism as long as something totally above the norm is involved"-type thinking. How come it's never okay to just be autistic, even if (like me, for example) you're some average idiot just like the overwhelming majority of the NT population consists of average idiots - or to be kinder, of average people who eat, sleep, use the lavatory, work some mundane job and then go home to watch Meet the Kardashians? It's okay for THEM to exist while never, ever doing a single amazing thing. Sorry, just a pet peeve of mine. I must be in a bad mood this morning, I'm in High Horse-ville.
But that's only one question and one answer in one single interview. Probably I'm overreacting and the idea was more just "don't underestimate autistic people" and the rest may be my own personal outlook on the response. I am interested and may read this book.
21 Sep 2015, 9:38 am
