Holocaust Memorial Day

I wasn’t going to write anything specifically about Holocaust Memorial Day because I feared intruding on a grief that isn’t really mine. (So far as I know I have no Jewish or Gypsy, Roma or Traveller heritage, am not gay, and nor has my family been involved in any genocide that I know of.) However, I did know that the Nazis killed a lot of people with disabilities and that let me to some research. And that research led me to a heart-breaking quotation from a talk given by Professor Edith Sheffer on Autism and Disability in Nazi Vienna.

Who will rid me of this turbulent autistic?

There are important people, and less important people, right? There are people you look up to and whose authority you respect, and people you expect to do as you tell them. This is expressed by rank or grade hierarchies (such as we have in the Civil Service) or by some people having power and others not, or indeed by The Class System. Neurotypical brains seem to navigate these hierarchies instinctively – they can calculate the correct level of deference due to (say) someone rich or famous or in charge, and adapt their behaviour accordingly. Autistics not so much. My autistic brain is a bit of an egalitarian absolutist, treating everyone as an equal, which can be great for mixing it up and challenging authority, or can lead me to being a right pain to those whose position leads them to expect respect.

What I want for Christmas

“A dog is for life, not just for Christmas.” Everyone probably knows that slogan discouraging people from giving pets as gifts without preparation. If you’re the kind of person who finds themself in church at this time of year you’ll also have heard “God is for life, not just for Christmas” or similar. That’s encouraging you to build your Christmas religious faith into the whole year rather than just giving it a good go once a year. Special days are hugely important for humanity, but the really powerful things in life – whether caring for a dog or living your beliefs – have to be done every day and not just on the high days and holidays.

What’s this got to do with autism? I wanted to write about something really special for Christmas and the most special thing I can think of is my dream of how I want the world to be. And what I want is for autism to stop being special and rare (like Christmas) and start being boring. I want autism to be accepted as a day-to-day thing in the same way that many other characteristics have come to be over the years. Not interesting at all and certainly not worthy of comment. If I may, I’ll illustrate with some examples.

Holocaust Memorial Day

I wasn’t going to write anything specifically about Holocaust Memorial Day because I feared intruding on a grief that isn’t really mine. (So far as I know I have no Jewish or Gypsy, Roma or Traveller heritage, am not gay, and nor has my family been involved in any genocide that I know of.) However, I did know that the Nazis killed a lot of people with disabilities and that let me to some research. And that research led me to a heart-breaking quotation from a talk given by Professor Edith Sheffer on Autism and Disability in Nazi Vienna.

Who will rid me of this turbulent autistic?

There are important people, and less important people, right? There are people you look up to and whose authority you respect, and people you expect to do as you tell them. This is expressed by rank or grade hierarchies (such as we have in the Civil Service) or by some people having power and others not, or indeed by The Class System. Neurotypical brains seem to navigate these hierarchies instinctively – they can calculate the correct level of deference due to (say) someone rich or famous or in charge, and adapt their behaviour accordingly. Autistics not so much. My autistic brain is a bit of an egalitarian absolutist, treating everyone as an equal, which can be great for mixing it up and challenging authority, or can lead me to being a right pain to those whose position leads them to expect respect.

Suffer the little children

In the days before Christmas, I wrote posts based on the seven O Antiphons which gave a nice structure, and the days after Christmas are mostly Saints’ Days so I’m bouncing off them, but today’s a tricky one. The 28 December is the feast of The Holy Innocents; this is the little boys of Bethlehem who were killed by King Herod in his attempts to kill Jesus as a baby. There are a number of autism-related subjects I could dip into here and they all come with a trigger warning because there aren’t very many positive places one can go from mass toddler murder, even if it was 2000 years ago. And there are some nasty things in the world today. I’m going to do this as carefully and briefly as possible but even so some may prefer to skip.

Teacher’s pet

Is a teacher’s pet a good thing to be? It depends on your attitude to life. If you value independence and rebellion, you probably regard conformity and trying to please authority with horror. So do I – intellectually – at least some of the time. But suppose you have to deduce the rules the world works by; you might cling on to them as a fixed point in a confusing wilderness of sensory overloads and social slips. As a child at school, you might have come to realise that you’ll always be rejected by your peer group, so the best thing is to try to follow the “rules” as precisely as possible in the hope of at least the teacher liking you.

I’ve written that rather starkly, but there is definitely a tendency for autistic children – particularly girls possibly – to attempt to be perfect as a strategy to be liked. I certainly tried to do that through childhood, admittedly with muted success.

Speak up for what is right

It’s easy to intend to be an ally to a minority group, but not quite so easy to put your money (or words) where your mouth is, because there will be consequences. It’s a cheap kind of allyship if there aren’t. It costs nothing to say “I stand with autistic people” but what actually will you do if you hear prejudiced language against autistic people like me? If Uncle Kevin has, for example, just observed that his neighbour’s kid’s autistic and you’re nothing like them so you can’t be autistic and it’s a made-up disability really anyway, who will speak up?

Not one day but every day

“A dog is for life, not just for Christmas.” Everyone probably knows that slogan discouraging people from giving pets as gifts without preparation. If you’re the kind of person who finds themself in church at this time of year you’ll also have heard “God is for life, not just for Christmas” or similar. That’s encouraging you to build your Christmas religious faith into the whole year rather than just giving it a good go once a year. Special days are hugely important for humanity, but the really powerful things in life – whether caring for a dog or living your beliefs – have to be done every day and not just on the high days and holidays.

What’s this got to do with autism? I wanted to write about something really special for Christmas and the most special thing I can think of is my dream of how I want the world to be. And what I want is for autism to stop being special and rare (like Christmas) and start being boring. I want autism to be accepted as a day-to-day thing in the same way that many other characteristics have come to be over the years. Not interesting at all and certainly not worthy of comment. If I may, I’ll illustrate with some examples.