There are people who will shout from wherever they can find to shout from that autism isn't a disability. That it should be celebrated. And I have to wonder if those people have ever found themselves so upset they couldn't talk, so frustrated that they couldn't control where their hands went, movements jerky, not even able to prepare a hot breakfast out of the knowledge that they'd burn themselves accidentally if they didn't calm down first. If that's ever happened to them five days out of seven for a month or two. Do they know that floating feeling that comes of too much rage too fast and holding back a meltdown until they're AWAY from everyone? Of having to shove a note into their partner's face to watch the kids while they go to a quiet room to be alone so they can cry undisturbed until their emotions are back to something manageable and words make sense again?
Funny thing is, even with all of that and more, I'm still "high functioning". So, tell me again how I'm not disabled. -- Anon Guest
[AN: Speaking as a "mostly functioning" Autiste, I know the cure for all of these is more education about how to help the Autiste in question.]
When you break down how people talk about a perceived affliction, you get more of an education about it. Disability - from 'dis' - a prefix implying a lack or a broken state of the latter half, 'ability'. The lack of an ability, or a broken state of ability. High or low function. Function, the capability of an item being useful in some way to intelligent beings around it.
True evil begins when you treat people like things, wrote a philosopher of Human nature. He was right, of course. When people talk of other people in terms of their 'use', their 'usefulness', how they could be of profit... those people who are talked about become like things. They are no longer people.
When you treat people like things, those people get angry. It's perfectly natural. Stresses not even given to a "normal"[1] person build up, like drops of water into a pool. Some can handle more. Many handle less. Ridicule, mockery, and other micro-aggressions build up alongside the more "normal" stresses until complete collapse becomes an inevitability.
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