Consider the way, as a people group, society treats autistic people. Think about some of the stories you've heard on this website over the years. What does society subject us to?
- Our children taken away by the government.
- As children locked in prisons called schools that fail both to educate and protect us.
- As adults denied the chance to participate in important parts of public life such as military service.
- The right to marry or decide whats best for their own bodies striped from so many.
- Pushed out of the workplace not for a lack of skill but for not speaking the same unspoken language as the rest of society.
- Criminalised or excluded because the way we talk and act alarms those around us who are afraid of anything different or weird.
- Institutionalised with minimal recourse to the law.
If this was happening to a race, an ethnicity, a skin colour, there would be riots. Blood would flow just as it did last year when floyd was killed. Whether you espouse the pacifism of MLK or the 'self defence' of Malcom X the question remains why are we as a group so dossal? Is it because there is no common tongue, no common culture to unite us in our feelings of persecution? To remind us that they are not just persecuting me, myself and I but us collectively as a group? Is that why we do not reach out to each other and unite in activism? Or are we the the infantilised beings they claim us to be, unable to speak for ourselves?
Doing things together in unison perhaps does not come easily to us but isn't it time we rose up together with one voice to say 'this has to end?'
