The Standard Review

Don't the Privileged Deserve Privileges Too?

There seems to be a theme in many of what are considered life's most important questions. The discussions and debates which focus on those questions seem to be whether or not we are striving for perfection and sophistication at the expense of our humanity.

What doesn't seem to be discussed enough is who is benefiting most from our desire to become better and more sophisticated and in what ways is the general public manipulated into chasing an ideal in a way that will ultimately lead to our demise.

There is no longer any way to track what is considered knowledge about most subjects and what isn't by anything other than popularity. Popular opinion is what gets written about most and therefore, the exposure defines its validity. The subjects that matter to the people with the most power are what gets written about. However, what this population is concerned with is mainly privilege and therefore, basic human rights are ignored by default.

The best way to protect this privilege and keep the focus on privilege rather than what will best provide basic human rights for everyone is for privileged people to use their resources to persuade the belief in whatever they claim is true and to get people to strive for the unattainable in a way that they exclude and even abuse the basic human rights of their neighbor. Once a standard is set that the majority of people don't have the resources to achieve the people with the resources to manipulate the standards can manipulate and enslave this population.

The way to create discourse among these people is to teach them that privilege is just normal (which means they are abnormal) and to focus their attention on the claim that society is overly concerned with providing for the poor and disadvantaged who are unworthy due to their bad character. As long as people believe the advantages are earned those who have them are enabled to believe in and abuse their authority over those who don't.

I often hear from people who won't acknowledge what I write, unless I validate it in their eyes by borrowing credibility from someone who has written the same thing. Thinking is considered mysterious and dangerous to many people. This is how many serious issues concerning human rights are treated as nothing more than a superfluous game.

Unfortunately, due to people with the experiences I write about being so discouraged from feeling that they will have any impact on changing things and due to them not having the knowledge of how to speak in a way that people are accustomed to hearing so-called credible people talk/write, they are silenced. The association of people with these experiences creates a force that society can easily be attacked and broken.

This means that no culture can be established, no pride in that culture empowers them, and ultimately no progress is made in establishing the respect that people look for when determining who has rights.

Education is not only a privilege, but it is the privilege of knowing how to sell particular knowledge so that you and the people you learned it from are accredited and revered for salesmanship skills. The freedom of information has been hijacked by people who decide what is and isn't information.

Although most educational pursuits may have been liberating to others in the past it is now too often nothing more than an industry (as well as a part of and beholden to many other industries) who use their product as a means of oppression.

Many types of intellectual disability as well as other labels that describe how people are excluded from education are associated with ugly stereotypes and this population is silenced in a multitude of ways.

Neurodiversity as a movement cannot build and sustain momentum by showing how some autistics are able to achieve an education thereby separating themselves from the plight of the intellectually disabled. People showing how they can meet standards that are exclusionary is fine for individuals but true liberation of a group cannot come at the expense of other groups.

Education is also not just a road to academic pursuits. Many other vocations and achievements that socially validate people are based on the same exclusionary standards.

Too many subcultures are describing their oppression based on specific means that target their specific groups rather than accepting a broader systematized attitude and by doing so they often unknowingly adopt the same attitude. Of course people can change and of course humans are very resilient and able to overcome great obstacles. However, if the standards don't change for how standards are arbitrarily made and changed due to privileged whims  then whether or not any of us are liberated will be decided by the view of those with the resources who do not need to be concerned with our welfare.

Conflict of Interest

One myth that causes a lot of confusion and upset is that people are either competitive or lazy, or they are instead being passive/aggressive. Such motivations can only be attributed to people based on their behaviors and behaviors are too often narrowly judged by too few comparisons.

Once these judgments have been made in error they are too often accompanied by undue punishment. This is one reason that behavioral therapy can be so destructive even when it is described as constructive.

Due to the way that society is taught to chase trends based on emotion and impulse, independent thinking and the liberation it encourages is greatly discouraged. The ways we are taught to be consumers is heavily influenced by behavior modification methods.


Once people who for whatever reason are otherwise unable to determine their circumstances has their motivation judged by a narrow set of standards the ways they can be controlled and manipulated have few limitations.

It is very inconvenient to not be chasing what someone else claims that the majority wants (which is typically motivated by commercialism) or to want something so extravagant as safety and individual expression. It is typically fine for people to join in and advocate with others to attain something so that everyone can be judged by the same standard but to individually express what no one else seems to be in control of, even an expression that is an essential need such as safety or human rights, it is seen as aberrant and dangerous.

At the same time, evidence is growing to show the mental health industry as serving as the protectors of the public rather than wanting to provide therapy and rehabilitation to the population they label. The education that psychology provides is also meant to provide a standard of normal behavior that they know will exclude many people who society wants to dispose of. What are described as learning disorders can exclude people for racing thoughts, attention deficit, being overly excitable, and for generally not being able follow directions.

Thinking in specific ways and the ability to chase trends is very important in today's society. It not only determines what we buy and when we buy it, but it also impacts what products are chosen for international trade, what employers are looking for, and therefore, how we judge intelligence and even character.

The combination of quick prejudicial and unreasonable judgments about what people think along with a growing demand for a mainstream consciousness allows autistic people to be very vulnerable to abuse and neglect along with warehousing for the disenfranchised or for when all else seems to fail.

The best way I know for including more people and changing the thinking that leads to so much oppression is encouraging people to think independently and express independent thoughts. The narrower our judgments become about what people want and what their motivations are the more dependent we are on people who can make our decisions for us. Including more people who think different things or think in different ways is an important part of what will turn that around.

Incomplete Assignment

The judgment of how people think as in good vs. bad and smart vs. not smart is how the terms high vs. low functioning are justified.

When it comes to types of thinking (in three divisions of intelligence, pathology, and neurology) all labels are assigned in terms of severity by the amount which is determined that someone's thinking deviates from the norm.There is no diversity but instead only hierarchy.

People who are with the least resources will ultimately have all these divisions disappear and will be classified as simply having their thinking to be wrong and bad. The only reason the divisions exist in the first place is so that supposedly there will be therapy and/or accommodations but once someone has reached a level of convenient isolation from the public, they are all placed in one group who are simply seen as bad and a drain on public resources.

Sometimes that includes warehousing with walls and sometimes the warehousing that is isolating and abusive by the same institutional methods is without the walls.

Advocates often dismiss this population in the same way as public programs do. People who have attempted to create advocacy movements or a culture who speaks on a behalf of a group that includes this population have been every bit as exclusive.

Debates are held within a realm that discounts every statement made by them and demeans them as much and sometimes more than those who were considered their oppressors.

One of the ways people in the United States declare a democracy is by those who have the power to do so assigning a false label of power to oppress populations so that they will seem justified in further oppressing them.

It's sort of like planting a weapon on someone after they've been killed by someone else with a weapon. The weapon really never did them any good, but now it can be seen as though the killers aggression was justified by needing to protect themselves.

This is the largest group of people and yet those who claim to be helping them never encourage them to have independent thoughts or to share what they have learned from their experience.

For whatever reason they have become isolated, they are now seen as the craziest, the dumbest, or those with the greatest impairment in thinking for whatever reason in order to justify the original false hierarchy of judgments that divided them in the first place. My experience is that these judgments are due only to their circumstances and resources and serve only to "protect" the public from having to acknowledge their existence by conveniently making them invisible.

The moral justification for excluding this group has no basis in fact. Yet they are further labeled as having rights and being empowered in places where they are not. The claim is that the standards are the same for everyone, but it is not factored in how most people who have no way of determining our fate do not have anything like the level of resources as those who speak on our behalf.

The claims I have seen of creating an autistic community have not accepted any responsibility for avoiding this injustice as they move forward. Instead I see political pragmatism as being a guide for all decisions made on behalf of the autistic population. I sincerely hope this will change.

I have never seen a political effort to liberate this group. I have never seen a culture who aspired to include them. Many who are part of this group at this point will tell you that they don't care. Many are also accepting of the value judgments of others who see them as unworthy of encouragement. For this group to be encouraged the standards that exclude them need to be reviewed. The walls created by privileged peoples attitudes need to be torn down and then people will see this otherwise invisible group and hear from them as to what they want and need for true inclusion to occur.

Chasing Validity

Chasing the valid opinion or trying to determine how others will decide what is the most popular opinion is such an exercise in futility. As long as the unreasonably justified methods of such determinations are not honestly evaluated and a fairer and more honest system of equal justice is demanded so much of what we do becomes useless.

Relativity is usually just an excuse for drama and games of better than less than. It needs to be understood by more people that being in the right place at the right time and absorbing the most popular view typically creates nothing more than delusions of grandeur.

Having what you say be seen as valid often has very little to do with being right or saying what is true. It's usually more of a political game or an arbitrary declaration of what events are historical and what is judged as hearsay due to not enough important people declaring it worthy of their attention. The objective of these games is for enough people to join the group for whatever reason in order to overpower the another group they oppose. Once the total focus of a group is to discount what another group says or even one person whose focus is to discount what another person says often the other views that need to be discussed are similarly discounted due to the blindness which comes from seeking the thrill of victory at all costs. Within such an environment, all variations of opinion along with all efforts dissolve into the wave of the mainstream consciousness.

This mainstream consciousness is encouraged by ugly stereotypes that polarize people's opinions
 so that the standards and the people who are already in positions of power as a result of those standards doesn't change. This begins by people being defined as either for or against something or someone. The fate of an idea or even the person who brings up the idea is validated based on the personality of the presenter. To whatever degree this is inappropriate and harmful to other groups having to fight for their civil rights, it is crucially detrimental to autistics who have to do so.

What is unpopular and uncomfortable about autistic people did not only come from the label itself. Instead it is how the characteristics themselves have traditionally made people uncomfortable that created societies need to create a label in the first place. Trying to give credit to the functioning levels of autistic people will continue to isolate and hurt rather than help everyone's cause as long as functioning remains an arbitrary value judgment attributed to the people themselves.

When people try hard to not qualify their statements in an effort to allow an idea to either be seen as valid or invalid based on nothing more than the merit of the idea itself, often people are prone to not be able to suspend their typical and unfair methods of judgment.

An experience demands ownership. There are as many different ways of describing the very same experience as there are people who have the experience. Because no two people can have the same experience the experience itself becomes relative. The trouble is therefore, in the judgment of how others determine the validity of the experience. Because societal rules demand certain types of evaluations of a person's validity based on the unreasonable and unfair classifications and assumptions, fighting against those rules is really the only way to liberate an otherwise marginalized group of people. Attempting to do that by any other means is just a part of the same typical cycle of oppression, which unfairly gives more to those who already have power at the continued expense of those who don't.

However the societal rules that are now in place came into existence it was not done fairly.  It was also not done without giving power to people due to nothing more than their name, social status, or how their particular set of skills (often a matter of personable and personality skill) were arbitrarily given status that would be undue to them in another place and time.

Autistics are an oppressed group. Not just because some are less capable than others or just because some can pass societal standards when others can't. It's also not necessarily because some are employed and others are described as dependents. The main reason is that what autism represents is something that makes people uncomfortable. It doesn't need to make people uncomfortable and all that would be needed to overcome this discomfort is by the same means of understanding and liberating any oppressed group.

This understanding comes from evaluating why the discomfort and therefore, the disrespect exists. It is because people don't ask why certain aspects of people make them uncomfortable that people are marginalized and disrespected due to unrealistic assumptions. That is where opinions are truly made valid or invalid because taking on honest inventory of those discomforts and adjusting ourselves accordingly is what makes people whole and makes us a whole society rather than fragmented by unrealistic and unfair judgments. With fair unprejudiced evaluations, people would naturally be accommodated without all the unfair treatment that typically goes along with that.

The way the United States has traditionally learned to expediently and conveniently deal with unwanted populations is by a method of warehousing. Warehousing (or institutionalizing) provides a way of categorizing people similar to the franchising principles of McDonald's, the auto industry in the way that Henry Ford designed, or the construction practices of the Hoover dam, the interstates, the railroads, and some of our largest bridges. Much of the surviving population who was on this land before the European invasion is today warehoused on land that is sometimes glamorously referred to as "reservations". Many of the surviving populations who were enslaved are warehoused in what are glamorously referred to as ghettos and housing projects. If you look at the way the residents of New Orleans were treated by what was glamorously described as a natural disaster, you will further see an example of the methods the United States uses to herd its most unwelcome citizens.

Every time a decision is made in the United States that does not factor in the well-being of everyone who is affected by that decision, the warehousing principles are again reinforced as to how we do things. I can't think of a phrase that I find more offensive than "that's just the way things are". Every bit of the way things are would change tomorrow if everyone were given a vote. The problem is that this opportunity at this point can only come with encouragement. Without this it is no opportunity at all.

If all opinions were judged equally based on their own merit with personalities not be the deciding factor we would have freedom of thought. Until that happens, we don't have the right to free thinking.

The part of the autism community who is judging expressions based on how they assess which is the most important expression are the ones who are ultimately creating more marginalization, more institutionalizing, and more oppression of autistic people.

When people claim that we as the autistic community should try harder to get along, they often reinforce the validity of the already bad typical standards which create the biggest division of all. The attitude expressed in this validation is ablism. Ablism is the pathway to warehousing. Warehousing for autistics will come in the form of mental institutions and the public programs (including behavioral programs) designed for people who have supposedly been "freed" from institutional living. These opinions are as oppressive as the forces that result from them. Encouraging those opinions is how people have been oppressed all along.

The Allure of the Dragon

One of the most important ways to empower yourself and others who are categorized in the same way as you is to avoid being defined by people in authority who are not looking out for your best interest.

When someone you don't know does not appreciate you because of your style or lack of it, and you change in order to impress them, they have often taught you to appreciate a standard that makes them look better at your expense rather than encouraging mutual respect. When they then decide to change their style based on what is considered the new trend, and you again change yours to show yourself worthy of their pointless attention you have reinforced a standard of trend chasing where any relationship (however casual) of mutual respect and honor are ultimately impossible.

When someone says you are not as valuable as this other person who does or has something (which is a relative and fleeting standard designed only for exclusionary purposes), and you respond by attempting to show that you are more valuable because you do or do have that something, you are reinforcing that standard and aiding in the oppression of all those who will never be able to meet it.

When people fight viciously about an issue that they really aren't too concerned about they reinforce the standards of unattainable debating success which associates peoples worth so closely with what they think that it will ultimately consume and break everyone involved. Also, the back-stabbing, innuendo, and undefinable subtle attacks associated with many debates will never promote fairness or empowerment. These methods can only be used to tear people down.

All this is not just how people lose their individuality and their right to be individuals but this is how exclusive standards are praised and oppressive methods are reinforced for entire categories of people.

The people who wrote the criteria for the DSM-IV which defines autism had little or no experience in diagnosing people for better educational opportunities and more inclusion in their community. They are closely associated with the treatment industry. The dominant current standards this industry adheres to discourage products and services that are attainable and promote security along with a sense self-worth because they are seen as the enemy of economic stimulation. It is thought that we have to keep chasing the carrot and therefore, the carrot cannot ever become too attainable.

Based on the credit that is given to the typical ways of stimulating the economy, what do you think would happen if autistic people were empowered and given more educational and training opportunities? What if the dominant view that autistics need to be put in normalizing programs and classrooms was accepted as false and degrading.? Some very large financial investors would no longer be able to define autistics so that we can be exploited. They would have to find someone new to exploit. People need to be careful of how their views are influenced by elaborate ad campaigns.

It would be good for autistics and those who advocate on our behalf to be careful of personality entanglements that show the principles we believe in to be less worthy of respect. It's important to be careful of exclusive standards that alienate some autistic people for the glorification of other autistic people. In whatever ways we need to get involved politically, it's important to (as individuals or as a group) be careful of blind loyalty to political predators who will chew us up and spit us out.It's good to encourage diverse forms of involvement among ourselves and protect our right to question what is done in our name above all else.

Impulsively chasing dragons is how people who deserve respect lose their human rights. People who think they won't get burned are underestimating the beast and its fury along with the abundant resources it can afford to use against us.

Enemies of Autism Speaks

Autism Speaks new video

It's very clear that the intent of Autism Speak's latest video is to create fear and hatred of autism. Unfortunately there is little if any attempt to separate autism from autistics. They even went so far with their attempt to put a face on autism by using a horrifying voice to represent autism that sounds like the devil himself.

The people making this video are not overcommers at all. The focus of what they claim is so difficult to contend with are autistic people and an attack on someone (or even something) that you don't try to understand is a cowardice act.

They are not breaking down any walls but instead are creating them. This video shows the harsh realities of how charitable organizations promote their cause at the expense of those they claim their cause is supposed to serve. The act of people being assigned worth based on what is seen as their capabilities is the real enemy of all civilization. People who don't recognize this are making enemies of disabled people rather than encouraging them or providing them any aid.

Just Like Everyone

Claiming that everyone is unique has always been a bit troubling to me. This is probably due to the way the claim is presented and for what reasons it is presented.

If the statement is expressed with the goal of encouraging people not to claim that their particular abilities which glorify normality rank them as more worthy of respect then certainly the expression serves a worthy cause.

Unfortunately, equalizers are too often used as methods of oppression rather than tools of empowerment. Inclusion is often used as a way to highlight what are judged as inappropriate motivations of misfits when the standardized tests of intelligence and ability have failed to exclude them.

Solidarity to promote inclusion when inclusive standards don't change often promotes exclusion instead. When everyone's abilities and circumstances are falsely described as being given the same consideration it opens the door for misinterpreted attitudes, (which are considered poor) to be the deciding factor for a misfit's exclusion.

People whose abilities are most respected and who attain the luxuries which that affords them aren't really doing as much to promote elitism as many others who don't have the same resources. For example, driving a Mercedes doesn't promote elitism nearly as much as choosing to drive a Mazda simply because it is designed to look like a Mercedes.

                          

Also, failure to do your best by popular standards of what's best rather than showing how best and worst is unfairly evaluated doesn't empower others who can't do as well at all. What that does is reinforce the standard by which those others are oppressed. Unnecessarily exhibiting failure and weakness in the ways they are unfairly defined doesn't align you with the struggle of those who are less capable so that you can help with that struggle as much as it does ultimately put you in a position to compete with them for resources in oppressive ways. This is how a chaotic rebellion of oppression too often ultimately supports the goals of oppression. Only supporting fairer evaluations will truly empower people.

There are a number of ways (both subtle and not-so-subtle) which we unfairly judge people without knowing much if anything about their background, their abilities, or their circumstances. Unfortunately there are many ways (both subtle and not-so-subtle) we are culturally taught to do this. This causes many of our evaluations of people to lead to life being seen as a privilege rather than a right.

In the US, the special Olympics displays how exclusion is accomplished by encouraging many people who may not otherwise have any athletic aspirations into athletic competition. The competitors are divided based on what the organizers see as their apparent handicap and their level of handicap, and then they compete in events that glorify physical ability. This leads to people who are disabled (and seen as dependent) actually supporting hierarchical judgments that encourage those resources to be exclusively given to differently-abled others.

The limitations of many current public policies demand that they be evaluated as either the support of a competitive market or socialism. There is little room for changing these policies so that they encourage a fairer distribution of resources. If more people were recognized for having diverse types of abilities, those resources would be an agent for empowering them. A hierarchical system that glorifies only a strict few types of abilities will naturally encourage public policies to be seen as either the encouragement of a free market or giving something away.The reformation of the national healthcare plan in the United States won't produce lasting positive results until this problem is addressed.

There isn't enough encouragement of free speech for unique expressions to have much direct effect on political decisions. At this point, so many of our evaluations of each other are taught to us by the government and the corporate enterprises the government encourages. Our commonalities along with our individual uniqueness CAN both be honored when we start thinking and caring in ways that are independent and empowering.

The terms of politics demand answers to questions that are strictly defined by the people asking them. This is encouraging us to not think outside the box and ultimately to have our worth determined by unfair categorizations. This method of categorizing ultimately only empowers a few people. If we want this to change, we need to be careful of our prejudices and think more creatively.

In Your Dreams

The struggle for autistic rights is often dismissed as unimportant or as a just another diversion from the "real" autism "crisis".

Of course it is those involved with the autism hysteria that are diverting attention from the practical matters and there is some perverse need for some of them to blame advocates of neurodiversity for the chaos in their lives.

I personally am quite accustomed to having my disability advocacy be used by differently-minded others as the catalyst for the problematic issues they are dealing with but individual responses to those who require me to validate my every expression seems to be futile at best.

The easiest way to dismiss human rights is by promoting the necessity of aggression and the validation of one group of people or type of person ruling supreme over another. While it may seem completely impractical that anyone needs to battle over human rights, unfortunately too many privileged people are too driven to recognize other peoples needs.

Even more important than educating everyone on how to survive is the need to teach people the value of human existence and the futility of war. Instead, unfortunately, the importance of war is subtly taught in numerous ways.

Drama is too often the way that people define their role in society as being sophisticated. There is some twisted logic that encourages the belief that if we can complain that we don't have certain luxuries it at least it goes to show we deserve them.

The problems with this stem from how our self esteem is affected when we can't get what we have been taught that we need or what "worthy" people deserve.

When these values are projected on to others a cycle of disrespect is created. When public policies are designed based on market-based views of who a person should be, what they should be able to do to honor marketing based aspirations, and what they should own to increase profit and encourage the demand for particular products, it's sure to follow that this is how peoples worth is decided.This of course leads to some people being seen as disposable.

The main reason people are disenfranchised from the basic resources they need to survive is because the people who have an abundance of those resources use them to design a society that only profits themselves.When people accept consumerism and the myth of ownership as reality it ultimately leads to determining human worth by the arbitrary standards of characteristics which of course then leads to objectifying people, usery, and dependency issues.

Neurodiversity is basically just about acceptance. The trolls who stalk neurodiversity blogs (whose comments are deleted on this blog) seem to be terrified of acceptance.

They seem to never really experience any reality because they attempt to eliminate (by whatever means necessary) any characteristics in others (or the others themselves) that make them uncomfortable. When their unrealistic expectations are not met and their fantasy world is further compromised, they tend to repeat the behavior that created their trap to begin with.

These trolls deny themselves the quality experiences that include being with autistic people because they mentally block or attack these human traits that upset their fantasy. Their fantasy world is where their fleeting insecurities demand the perfection which they change the standards for whenever they are uncomfortable. It may seem to them that this protects them from dealing with what they don't like but the shield also prevents them from truly experiencing any kind of quality interaction with anyone.

They are continually betrayed by their fantasy because their obsession for perfection causes them to focus only on what they hate. It continually consumes all of who they were which was once kind and generous as the reality of how they can't meet their own strict standards closes in on them more every day.

The key to remember for people who are exposed to these trolls is that this form of escapism was once sold to them as a way to avoid  having to deal with their own imperfections, the imperfections they saw in other people, and the problems that cause them to be interdependent with others. It's important for people to remember this so they don't fall into the same trap.

The allure of this fantasy is that more people buying this illusion will lead to a more perfect society. That won't happen because when people seek perfect performances in themselves and others, they inhibit the emotions that help them enjoy life. If people aren't enjoying life no one's performance will mean anything to them.

Intensely Coexisting

The best ways to evaluate human behavior begin with seeing different people as having different motivations. One reason that there are so many problems within a hierarchical system is that the different ways that people are motivated are not given enough consideration.

Accepting different types of neurological configuration demands a broad view of how talents and abilities are evaluated as well as what diverse types of motivations individuals may have.

In today's society social Darwinism plays a vital role in how someones worth is evaluated. There are too many risks involved with being overly competitive in all that we do for us to accept how compassion as it relates to civil rights is evolving at such a slow rate.

We can't accept the ways that politicians teach us to only strive for what they define as practical within what they decide to be a practical time frame. It also won't work to keep evaluating our ability to influence public policy by the hierarchal standards that provides security for the present political system and the people who are employed by it.

Too often standards aren't reevaluated critically enough due to an abrupt radical change making the majority of people uncomfortable and afraid. Often the biggest problem this creates is that people don't see how critical the problem is until it directly affects the majority of people, and it is very difficult to alter its course.

Speaking critically of public policy without clearly stating an alternative is too often seen as either as a poor attempt at political leadership or the result of irresponsibility and a bitter attitude. This results in many good ideas not being considered and further defines leadership as an act of puppetry.

A leader can only establish respect by seeing others as having a broad diversity of abilities and experiences which are vital contributions. Otherwise a so-called leader establishes themselves as a player who plays (negotiations and compromises) for what becomes nothing more than a position on a wheel that ultimately goes nowhere.

Autism is a set of characteristics that show how people respond to their environment. The disrespectful ways the industry designed to treat or combat autism is responding to autistic people is defining how the media, the politicians, and ultimately the public evaluates autistic people.

Autistics cannot afford to be normalized by the autism treatment industry anymore than we can afford to allow the ambitions of those who want to cure autism, which is leading to eugenics. Institutionalized methods of normalization by means ABA treatments etc. are only part of how we are being threatened in that way.

In the same way that the broader disability community has worked to show the harmful nature of how the worth of humans is typically evaluated, autistic people need to be encouraged to express themselves in many unique ways that present society may be very uncomfortable with.

None of the public policies that are now in place are encouraging this diversity at all.

Autistics vulnerability to the elements of nature doesn't negatively affect us nearly as much as how we are inappropriately evaluated and therefore treated. Our reaction to that at this point will indeed seem very radical. Before that evaluation of our behavior can be used as an accurate way to judge a someone's character a lot more needs to be done to change how we are being inappropriately evaluated. Without that change, it may be more productive to evaluate our reactions as being the same as anyone else's in the same circumstances.

Individual unique expressions from autistic people are much more important to our empowerment than setting up a new set of hierarchical and exclusionary standards. Many autistics have already been subjected to enough of those standards where a lower ranking defines our expressions as less valuable.

The standard methods of evaluation are what we need to be working to change. A unified vote of how autistics and their families respond to either public policy or more general societal demands won't mean anything if we are all seen to have the same motivations and the same type of means for reaching our individual goals.

Too often the government attempts to satisfy the public's desire for inclusion by using the only methods they understand, which are exclusionary. Sacrificing diverse viewpoints for the sake of solidarity can only create a solid following of the same old ways of doing things that have already been shown to be inappropriate and ineffective. People who are trying to make life better for autistic people can use this as an example of what to avoid so that we can be more successful at reaching our goals.

The Others

Anyone with the potential for influencing our environment who isn't readily factored into how we govern our lives can create within us a heightened sense of awareness. This can inspire creativity or cause fear depending on whether we are more motivated to empower people or control them instead.

A government which uses oppression to control more than it attempts to empower the majority of citizens will of course be afraid of the unrecognized creative abilities of the majority of the population.

Autism is one way of identifying people that is based on their characteristics that aren't typical. Due to autism being seen as a set of deficits and that view being used to exclude people, to truly campaign for autistics to have a better life means working to change the predominate view of what autism is.

That reminds me of the need to be even more diligent in expressing the fundamentals of neurodiversity rather than just incorporating it into more awareness of autism. Real inclusion for autistics is too often compromised due to people not acknowledging or not accepting how the methods of exclusion are extreme.

If people are only interested in advocating for the few who are already being served by the present system of government then there isn't much need for radical change. The problem is that getting temporary votes for providing temporary solutions has been adding to the problems in the U.S. for sometime. The political system itself is empowered at the expense of those it is supposed to serve.

Historically nations with empirical aspirations haven't been as interested in empowering their own citizens as they are interested in making demands of other nations using brute force.

While reforming health care in the United States (in the way that it's being presented now) will make some positive changes, it won't provide health care to the entire nation's population. There are too many policies firmly woven into the fabric of the political system that would prevent that from happening at this point. (There is a great post by Lindsay here that illustrates some excellent points about that.)

The way that our economic structure has been designed has not provided the majority of people with the means to secure our own future. What individuals or individual groups have or don't have in terms of financial resources has been turned into a government run floating crap game.

Whatever we do or don't do to secure our nation needs to come through empowering more people in the US rather than the domination of other nations. The views of domination promote unworthy, unfair, and old hierarchies.

The idea that economic progress can be created by a trickling down of financial resources has proven to be false. Unless economic stimulus packages are designed with the acknowledgment of the other obstacles for people who receive them, they won't help much more than forgiving corporate greed helps.

The people outside of the realm that mainstream society has chosen to recognize have a great deal of creativity and ability that are being deliberately ignored. This population of people cannot be drastically reduced without severe consequences.

Ultimately, fewer educated people, fewer trained workers, and fewer people who are recognized as worthy of contributing to the nations future will create a revolution. A government can only do so much to oppress their own people before the creativity of the oppressed populations becomes undeniable to everyone. The question that remains isn't if this revolution will occur but how much peace can be maintained while the needed changes are made.

Sometimes people who are working to make society more inclusive are met with those who oppose their efforts by describing inclusion in relative ways so the power of the hierarchy that dictates public policy can be dismissed from the discussion and make their position seem more credible.

To oppose policies in government that unfairly and prejudicially exclude people, the opposition needs to encourage solidarity based on fundamental principles rather than personalities. Glorifying personalities is at the root of what causes prejudicial treatment and divisions.

The lack of fair and just principles in public policy has led many people to have less control over their own destiny. One person being able to overcome these obstacles and another person not being able to do that can't be used as a proper method of evaluating someones character as long as unfair methods of government have so much influence over how we are divided and categorized.

There is only so much that we "the others" who have been excluded from influence can do within the current system of government that has been unfairly designed. Once we understand how the principles of our political system are used for division and oppression, we can learn to have more confidence in our opposing views. With these views we can promote fundamental principals of unity and empowerment in our lives and encourage those principals in the lives of others.