November 25, 2007
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Aspie/Second Life: Autism Speaks
OK, so there’s a whole bunch of controversy among those who are autistic about this group called Autism Speaks. Autism Speaks is a sort of umbrella group for a couple of other organizations, including CAN (Cure Autism Now).
The trouble is that many autistic people don’t want to be ‘cured.’ They just are who they are, and that’s all there is to it. Nothing to ‘cure.’ This is, of course, controversial, because who among the neurotypical want to be autistic? It takes a big leap for most people to see autism as a not-bad thing to be accepted.
But, of course, it was a big leap for white people in the US to see slaves as human beings. OK, OK, hyperbole. But you get the point.
So there’s Autism Speaks and it’s subsidiaries, and against them stands an array of rabble-rousers such as the Autistic Liberation Front and Aspies For Freedom. Both of these groups have a presence on Second Life.
Now to the matter at hand: On Second Life, Autism Speaks has been doing a lot of fundraising. They’ve been organizing charity balls, and distributing kiosks to whoever might be interested. But they’ve distributed these kiosks by joining random autism-related groups and then handing out the kiosks en masse to all members. And guess which two groups were included? Yes, the ALF and AFF.
So clearly, at best Autism Speaks has no clue. But they now have YouTube, where they’re showing crappy videos that send mixed messages (“A world that doesn’t judge an individual with autism…” and then “A world where autism is a word in the history books”….? What?). But the biggest irony is that even though they are a group called ‘autism speaks,’ they have disabled comments on their site.
Now, I have a moderate view of all this. I think Autism Speaks is just a bunch of clueless well-meaning people trying to deal with something difficult. But of course, others have a more hard-line view, especially because there’s a lot of money at stake. Everyone wants to give money to help those poor downtrodden children who are so very, very helpless, and their helpless mothers who are at the end of their emotional ropes… Who wouldn’t want to ‘help autism?’
Anyway. Just my rant for today. I can’t offer any solutions.
Maybe read this all the way through to get a better picture of the issue.
Comments (5)
they’ve had a girl with autism who can type and uses the computer to communicate (rather lucidly at that) to the “normal” world. She explains that autistics are by no means not intelligent and that they communicate in different ways with their surroundings etc.
it was facinating
*looks up at the top of homer’s page….. 9625 …*
where does one draw the line between autistic and neurotypical? wouldn’t it be a continuum, and likely context-dependent in some instances … and someone, (someones?) just sets some threshold, and *whoosh* there’s that line…. true with so many things, too ….
Excellent view… thanks for that. No everyone needs to be “cured”, just accepted and understood.
Maybe I said it before, but I also think the world sees autism as a yes/no, on/off, 0-1, thing, when really it’s a continuum. This sort of thing has been on my mind a lot recently, as (well, almost) all these labels we put on people are continuums–I’ve thought more on post-traumatic stress syndrome, and certainly we’ve all been traumatized at some point.
Still don’t know where I fit in the world.
Hardly care anymore. I’m me.
must get me a second life
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