The Standard Review

Uncommon Characters

Unfortunately, it is too often the case that we act in ways which are defined by our group's categorization rather than how we are uniquely motivated. Populations prone to patterns, intense focus, and profound difference or impairment are often the target of inappropriate and oppressive behavior modifications.

When categorizations motivate us to strive to treat others better as others like us are said to do, they serve an important function. However, within particular contexts where people have less than honorable intentions, a group mentality can be formed in harmful ways to program individuals to be more compliant with the common goals of their leadership (that may be harmful) rather than inspired by their personal and more honorable inclination.

What is now considered the popular meaning for term "autism awareness" is too widely accepted with too much commercial and political spin. Unfortunately, the goals of liberating and supporting autistic people are lacking in what is considered "awareness".

Any number of things can affect a unique individual which can impact how they do things which are either positive or negative. The question that most needs to be asked is: "How do we encourage and support the positive with empathy as well as respect for the struggle."

Anyone whose style of communication is different, impaired, and less understood is a potential victim of their environment when not enough effort is made to recognize and attempt to accommodate that. However, even if someone is born with or contracted a deadly disease, or even if someone has little in the way of cognitive skills, it's important that victimization is always considered an individual choice in order to discourage the further impairments of attitude. Otherwise we are training victims to be that way with the same discouraging type of tools as those of fear mongers and pitiful charities.

The best and most profound statement from mainstream disability advocates has been that pity is most often used as a tool for promoting condescending and demeaning attitudes rather than promoting the encouragement, support, and respect that we deserve. Such categorizations of us as needy and dependent are both common and destructive.

Compassion comes from wanting to relieve someones suffering as well as showing them they are wanted, needed and valuable. When someone is hurting, a compassionate person will show concern, empathy, and a desire to comfort. To instead create or encourage their beliefs that they are victims is a type of victimization itself.

Every bully was not only first victimized but the belief that they were victimized was reinforced by their environment. This is an ugly cycle. It is often difficult for me to understand why people suffer when there is no reason that I can see or understand but more importantly I believe that the best anyone can do for an individual person is to encourage the positive feelings they can have about themselves which includes empathy for themselves and others. People who believe themselves to be victims don't show personal respect within that mind frame which creates a lack of understanding for how they can encourage others to do so....which further isolates them and promotes exclusion.

True compassion requires boundaries. The expression of unregulated emotion creates emotional turmoil and ultimately emotional baggage.

When it is known that a person will have a shorter life, will suffer due to injury or illness, or whether someone has been abused by others, our support and encouragement will be best expressed by how we help them to feel respect and empathy for themselves.

Unfortunately, many autistics have often been treated in condescending and pitiful ways which accompany marketing strategies for inappropriate treatments which have been insufficiently explored and accompany negative stereotypes which do nothing to empower us individually or as a group.

Many autistics have been taught to view our impairments in relation to ourselves in discouraging methods to a disempowering end. Of all that people are subjected to or been burdened with, the attitudes we've been taught to believe about ourselves can be the most oppressive impairment of all.

Support individuals and the trials that they face along with how they as a group are mistreated but do that by a show of respect which enables and encourages respect *by* them as well. A bit of respect will go a long way in turning around inappropriate and false beliefs about who someone is and what is to be expected of them.

Rather than supporting the claim of autism creates less appealing personalities or supporting the victimization of any type of advocacy that has oppressed the autistic population and suppressed the individual spirit of autistic people for so long, there needs to be a continued focus on denying the false claims of autism opportunists and their manipulative prejudiced methods of promoting what they consider "awareness".

The Fixing Forces

Because my experience with structured environment has been more apart of governmental systems and programs, what I have seen there influences how I see social dynamics occurring in a more broader context.

How we as a society assign value to behaviors, abilities, and the abilities to perform and behave in what we call "normal" ways are often in response to the faulty structure or justification for chaos we would like to have in our lives but isn't there. While Neurodiversity as a movement or a cause can be critiqued and even attacked based on individuals and their beliefs or notions (or too often what those beliefs and notions are claimed to be by opponents), neurodiversity was the original response to overly structured reactions to difference. Over structuring is often an environment that allows for or even encourages inappropriate judgments, rulings, and treatments.

If aggression was the only element of power that was recognized by humans, we as a species would have annihilated our own along time ago. However, today power is often only described in ways it is used aggressively because unfortunately, protection seems to be requiring stronger means than we are wanting to use and the allure of the majority vote is deceptively strong.

First and foremost looking at individuals and helping them to realize appropriate goals can encourage them and allow them to be more competent at realizing more difficult goals. However, once individuals are categorized, there are two elements of societal power that will affect that category.

1) There is a great deal of sustainable effective power in striving to understand and meet the needs of the aspects that categorize these individuals, as well as looking at what other categories they may fit into, and how they may be unique in ways other than what the patterning of the prescribed programs the categorizers have designed will typically recognize. This was always been the natural powerful element that preserves us and makes us stronger.

2) The second element of power(that opposes preservation and strength) is aggressive and primal and attempts to use categorizations as a means to inhibit and subdue broader definitions of acceptable living that people are afraid would lessen the respect of the attributes and skills that THEY themselves have developed.

The second is based on the idea of scarcity. Scarcity many years ago would have meant that there are no resources beyond our small community and therefore how we decide to see things and what resources we ourselves are able to produce or secure for ourselves is all that is available and therefore any outside concepts are a threat to what we have developed and therefore those resources can't be acknowleged or given respect. This creates an enemy and an offensive approach to the "different" people.

Trade with other communities is partially discouraged due to our mistrust in their differences and their different lifestyles. It is further discouraged due to the illusions we have about the validity and sustainability of our independence. To survive with different cultures and people with different types of expressions at home, we too often mistakenly believe we must have dominance over them. The power of peaceful negotiations and peaceful trade falls prey to our suspicions and fuels our discontent.

This is the basis for social Darwinism. It does not acknowledge nature, but instead it determines what is and what is not natural by excluding what selective humans decide we don't like. It goes against nature when it is necessary to do so in order to preserve and promote established norms and hierarchies.

When nature is taxed in this way in order to justify human whims and inappropriate appetites, nature has no way to fight back, but just as it is there for us, once we abuse it, is less able to provide for our real needs.

The harmony of humans is also a very powerful and natural occurrence as well as a natural resource. When we abuse this harmony for our own temporary gain, we will pay a price.

When we do so in the name of compassion, we cloud our own judgment as to what compassion really is and promote the emotions that are contrary to compassion.

Neurodiversity, diversity of race, diversity of culture, and diversity of beliefs are natural. When we decide that diversity is a threat, we challenge nature. Nature charges for these challenges to it and no matter what advances humans seem to be making in our ability to design natural forces, this is not an enemy that we want to contend with, and we are not the ultimate authority over it.

Public services come in packages rather than based on individual needs because that's the way we have decided to see people and who they are. We do this based on convenience thinking rather than resources that are available. What we provide in terms of the resources we have available show how much we respect the people who need them rather than just what the need is. We make inappropriate value judgments about those who receive public services because we have inappropriate values.

It's a very bad sign when we have to fight our medical providers and the public accommodation providers who often define us in disrespectful ways. It's even a worse sign when other members of our society support the inappropriate and degrading notions that these establishments have falsely created and are protecting, and our efforts to oppose this degradation is described as the offensive threat rather than the noble protection of humanity.

Exclusionary Disguises

In whatever ways humans have developed throughout the years our ability to create tools and learn to use them has needed to be tempered with the understanding that our sophistication can create along with it a lot of danger. Those dangers are often cleverly disguised.

When our technical advances are moving forward at a faster rate than we are getting rid of our negative attitudes, those technical advances will be tainted with those negative attitudes.

Words are tools and the more words we know along with knowing the history behind them the better we CAN become at communicating with others by using those words and the better we can learn to be more accepting of different cultures. However, this sophistication of becoming educated can bring with it the subtle acceptance of the school of thought that once one is seen as archiving this status they are then entitled to belittle, ignore, and isolate a less formally educated group that isn't seen worthy of their acceptance.

When this happens, formal education becomes a tool created by the elite to make the elite feel and appear to others as more sophisticated rather than it being any real type of advancement for the human race to be better able to be more accepting of different cultures.

One of the issues I've heard discussed in recent years is whether Ebonics should be taught in the U.S. public schools. My initial thoughts on the matter and how I still think about that is, "Of course Ebonics should be taught in school!!!!" I can't understand why anyone other than the culture who speaks this way could feel that they have the right to even vote on such matters except to decide if how the language may be more widely used and accepted in more diverse public environments.

All significantly sized subcultures with a public presence need to have the opportunity to express how they speak as well as have that be taught with in their own public schools so that the students there may have a better way of communicating with fellow students and other members of their community. This also teaches them more about their history and gives them a sense of belonging to a subculture that is validated within their larger culture.

Having one rigid definition of education and the use of the dominate language in the United States doesn't seem practical as even an aide to any kind of integration as it was once thought. The people I've known in this country who actually want to obtain citizenship often have the most difficult time with learning the English language.

My wife knows many different languages and worked for the US military as a linguist. She says that English is the most difficult and least logically based language there is to learn as a second language.

My sister speaks French and lived in a small village in a west African country for several years. She says that most villages within walking distance of where she lived spoke the French language in a different dialect yet each had little difficulty with understanding their neighbors who spoke differently. It would seem to me that part of their acceptance of difference (while at the same time maintaining their personal identity) came from growing up in a culture where that was demanded of them.

The American language (which was originally the English language) was created in the U.S. with a great deal of bigotry woven in to many of our words and expressions and there are continually words added that suggest even worse.

There are many different cultures within the U.S. that have fought for dominance against another culture with a similar status. However, the more isolated and visible dominant culture continues to have an oppressive influence on the educational process, and they continue to reserve this process for those whose families have already attained their status. The educational process is then used to oppress rather than empower.

When people are new to language with so many bigoted influences against so many cultures, there are many ways that one can speak in words and ideas and not even realize that those words and ideas have connotations toward minorities that we ourselves belong to.

Most of the population of people within the United States at this point in time won't have the option of learning a lot of the subtly and nuances woven into the American language within our educational system but to call that more widely used way of learning as being ignorant is a completely irresponsible judgment.

Few people are provided the right to a mainstream education in the United States. To call something that people are not given the right to as being the result of their own ignorance is in itself a very ignorant thinking .

What is described as the autistic (including we who are more visible as well as able to learn from others who have this advantage) may know the least (in comparison to other minority cultures) about all the different ways that others who are autistic and how the many autistic subcultures have adapted to their environment throughout the years.

Just as every oppressed or marginalized group of individuals or group cultures throughout time has been in danger of falling into the trap of neglecting and oppressing our own, the autistic culture is vulnerable to that as well.

The most visible people in the United States have little understanding of what the nation looks like, who is in it, or what we have and don't have. The ignorant views aren't on the bottom of the influential ladder. They are at the top because they neglect, abuse, and avoid looking at a larger percentage of their resources.

The world outside of the United States may also know what the most visible people in the United States look like but the most visible are in no way representative of the majority. The reasons the majority does not have a widely visible culture that reflects how they see things is due in part to the way they see things being thought of as not being worthy of visibility by those who can control their exposure.

To claim that the teaching within our mainstream educational system provides us with an understanding of more cultures may be true in part. However, it is often not done in a way that truly teaches how we can be accepting of more cultures that we live next to. This intellectual knowledge is too often used as a way for the more visible and more socially acceptable learners to distance themselves from having to understand the differences in people better that are often right in front of them.

The current use of formal mainstream education in the United States is very new. Certainly some of the so-called advances that have been made to our educational system during this short time have actually moved us backwards in terms of being more equipped to do those more practical things that the educational system was originally designed to teach.

The questions that I don't feel have adequate answers to how well the educational system is serving us are:

Why is the US workforce continuing to shrink in proportion to it's number of citizens? When people are prepared by our educational systems to enter the workplace, why are the jobs they are qualified for considered entry-level jobs when they aren't entry level jobs at all?
If they *were* entry-level jobs, why are the majority of people who enter them never moving beyond them to better jobs that these jobs claim to help them to be more qualified for.

The societal problems of a more centralized government that don't affect the most influential and visible people are too often thought of as not needing to be understood. So many advances in so many areas are being made today that I don't think enough time is spent looking at some of our mistakes.

Exclusionary methods described as inclusion are a very cleverly disguised. Too often this prevents people with truly ignorant views that too often truly lack compassion from attaining the best things in life and obtaining access to their most valuable resources.