Getting a hearing

You see something wrong and you call it out. What you’re saying is true, so why don’t people listen? The world is full of injustice and that hurts and needs to stop. Unfortunately, telling people what they’re doing wrong can make them double down on it. Challenging people can make them lash out in their own defence, hardening their position. It may take a more (hopefully) Christian approach to get things done.

As an autistic person I have great difficulty navigating the world of neurotypical communication at the best of times. It’s like speaking a foreign language and I sometimes get it wrong. It’s particularly difficult when I want people to listen to something I feel passionate about and my autistic instinct is to worry away at it like a dog at a bone. Because I suspect that to achieve autistic equality of esteem, respect and treatment, I need to advocate in a different way. In order to treat autistic people equally, a lot of people will have to give up some long held beliefs about autistic people being less worthy, children, deluded, mentally ill and many more. Giving up your deeply held beliefs is hard. And while I might want to shout that someone treating me as a child is an offensive [epithets redacted for reasons of public decency], that’s not going to change anyone’s mind.

So this is a post about the virtues of restraint. When confronted with people saying stupid and hurtful things, a soft answer may not only turn away wrath, it might also actually lead to a change in thinking. Which is what we’re aiming for. 

Sadly if I, as an autistic person, rant and rage, not only will I probably not persuade anyone, I may well confirm the prejudice some people hold that autistics are not worthy of equality or esteem. If you belong to a minority group, your first task may be to get people to listen to you at all, not hear something difficult. And the only way you can make yourself heard is quite often to be polite, calm, restrained. That’s really hard when you’re furious at how people like you are being treated across the world. But it might be sadly necessary if things are ever to change.

We are now in Lent, which is the period of forty days running up to Easter when Christians try to notice the many things they’re doing wrong in their lives and stop doing some of them. Lent is associated with fasting, and many people nowadays use it as a time to give up chocolate or some such indulgence. It’s equally worthwhile though to give up an intangible indulgence such as (for example) being self-righteous, or preachy. Or indeed bawling people out when they’re wrong, if that’s not the most effective thing to do.