Why do people think autism is bad?

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the veneer of civilization is mighty thin.

I've been asking myself this question for years.

Probably due in no small part to people like those who run the "satire" site "Wyoming Institute of Technology" preying on those with autism for their own cheap laughs. They have an article titled "New Study Shows 92% Of Convicted Murderers Suffer From Aspergers Syndrome", accompanied with pictures of of several well known mass shooters. They're trolling us 'for the lulz', actually no, they're villifying us, and it's dangerous because at least one so called "news" blog has reported it as a factual story.

Why do they? Because they are normocentric, that's why. And they don't see this prejudice in themselves, so they can't see around it either.

Since it's easy for us to forget that we are relatively high functioning here, I'll share an example of why.

Some good friends of mine have a son who is profoundly autistic.

Over a period of a few weeks when he was a toddler he went from having a vocabulary of about 80 words to being completely non-verbal, and no longer responds to verbal or nonverbal communication.

His parents were heartbroken. Their son no longer interacts with them.

Worse than that, one set of grandparents turned out to be the kind of people who think anything wrong is a disease that can somehow be cured. And worse than that, also the kind of people who talk louder and slower to people who don't speak their language at all.

It was hard enough to deal with things without one set of grandparents "helping" so they sold their rental property and moved to san francisco, citing better schools and better medical community for ASD. But really just to get the heck away from stupid people.

Things didn't work out so well in SF. This boy's mother has a business degree and his father is trained as an abstract artist. The mother had been offered a job in SF but when she arrived her prospective employer had changed their minds and hired someone else.

They sold almost all of their liquid assets and rely a great deal on assistance from the grandparents, and still had to move back to Utah, but they have become accustomed to their autistic son. The moronic grandparents are still behaving like morons.

Recently he has begun to interact with people by flicking them with his finger. He thinks this is funny, and starts by flicking your leg and works his way up to flicking his finger right into your eye.

There's a fair chance that he's going to need adult supervision for his entire life. Doctors say that there is a chance he could become verbal in his teen years, but there's no guarantee.

Both of his parents work part time.

It sucks. He's a beautiful and happy child, but it really, really sucks.

yup. nobody knows what this kid is thinking because he doesn't know how to tell us.