Learning different perspectives of American history reminds me that much of the leadership problem in the past century resulted from a distorted view of community. The philosophy involved seems to liken a community to a chain and the metaphor that describes the philosophy is: "a chain is only as strong as the weakest link."
Such thought designs are contrary to creative and innovative thinking. In a chain, each link serves the same purpose and can therefor be appropriately judged by the standardized test for strength and ranked accordingly. However, it's not natural for people to provide this convenience, and it's dangerous to attempt to demand it.
Unfortunately, many aspects of society are influenced by this type of thinking.
When the goal of a community is for individuals to have no other value than the way they serve it, it will either seek to be efficient, which leads to extreme and unreasonable methods of exclusion, or it will seek to be inclusive in convienient/pitiful-based charity ways, which ultimately lead to the same conclusion.
If you give people something to do that is seen as having no particular value, that value judgment will ultimately extend to how people themselves are seen and societies exclusion and elimination of them, which will simply be more covert and nuanced. When the community doesn't recognize this exercise in futility it can be much worse than if they did, and were seeing the need to address it.
This thinking is particularly detrimental to the respect and dignity of persons with disabilities, and it lends itself very conveniently to unnecessary behavioral standards and their strict enforcement.
The absurdity is never so clear as when this affects advocacy related to autism. Some have even suggested that there is an autism community which of course is impossible. The way to ensure that negative stereotypes about autistics continue and that the political system remains unchallenged so that educational and vocational opportunities are unattainable to the majority is by keeping advocates involved in club activities and meaningless personality-based debates.
When one person exploits their advantage for deciding public policy by using the claim that whatever a publicly recognized authority presumes is someone's severity of symptoms (or lack of them) is the way to distinguish their right to voice their view rather than evaluate what the view is, and someone else argues, the environment is effectively stagnant and progress is impossible.
It's the same with someone who describes causation and another who refutes the scientific evidence or someone who suggests that regulating an abuse of persons with disabilities in jails, mental institutions, and schools with federally mandated behavioral programs is an appropriate compromise. There's no way to judge scientific evidence or the sincere concern for individual welfare of the people involved in policymaking if people are aware of the corruption that tends to rule how these systems operate. Even so, these personality/popularity contests are what often pass for Internet autism discussions.
I can't imagine how anyone could trust the compromises and incremental alterations that are made by policymakers with regard to the rights of persons with a disability when the negotiation chambers for policymakers are patterned identically to the way of our judicial system.
The two party system defines much of how people debate issues. It presupposes that compromise is imperative and limits our choices. As long as each idea can only be ranked by the narrow context of how it compares with another, which can be influenced in an unlimited number of unfair advantages which we're forbidden to discuss, we are hostage to the stagnation and exclusion that the leadership defines as progressive.
The idea that the United States operates with three separate branches of government is misleading. Our judicial system in all its forms is a futile exercise in a political debate, and it's rare that an idea which isn't presented by someone who has been identified as a player/compromiser within the system is ever considered.
Of course intelligence is judged by standardized test, which was designed by people who were mainly interested in population control/eugenics. Of course there is a streamlining of the labeled schoolchildren to expedite class divisions, institutionalization and disenfranchisement and prevent challenges to the top-down elitist control. Of course the US medical system is completely chaotic and harmful to most of the public. Of course that medical system is primarily funded by the sale and distribution of mind altering drugs that are introduced to schoolchildren at an early age to provide teachers with more control.... we aren't taught that we can trust the average public citizen like we do the policymakers. Therefore, if we can't trust the public they will have to be controlled rather than risk any challenges to the status quo (which were taught is progressive).
We can't make all our decisions with convenience being the top priority and expect to maintain any type of security. People act more chaotically when they have less encouragement to think and when thinking is suppressed through intimidation, exclusion, and a constant barrage of images that encourage immediate gratification and hopelessness for the sake of community and solidarity, there will of course less trust and more attempts to regain a sense of control through violence.
People can't keep feeding the monster they want to destroy. Effective change requires that we radically broaden our acceptance of diversity in order to strengthen the community rather than continuing to be unfairly exclusive for the sake of protection and security. It's important that more people understand how few people are actually represented in the policy decisions that are made, which govern their lives and how wide the realm of disenfranchisement extends.
If people are thinking, they will find more ways to be compassionate and inclusive but if convenience and distrust are more important we will recognize more types of uselessness, and the only creative thinking will be used to find methods for exterminating the excess. These danger affects everyone and thinking for solutions is imperative.
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