Complexity

Simplistic thinking always surprises me. It's shocking when I read the comments on various news items--how can people be so... so... (I'm trying to think of a word that describes this and that is not horribly judgmental--without success)?

So, having been warned by blogs I can't read for lack of spelling skills (I can be flexible on this--it doesn't need to be perfect--just comprehensible) and news comments from people who apparently haven't achieved formal operations (Piaget), I guess it should come as no surprise that there is simple-minded thinking about autism and what it means to be on the spectrum (or to not be on the spectrum).

It seems on one end of the simple-minded thinking (SMT) spectrum there are the folks who say that autism is something to be cured. The goal of therapy is to make apparent the "normal" person who is trapped inside of autism. On the other end of the SMT spectrum are those who say that autism is just a different way of thinking and y'all need to accept us. And never the twain shall meet.

The fact is, there are coping skills that need to be taught. This includes some form of communication skills, some form of making known the rules other people pick up by osmosis (whether the person ultimately chooses to follow those rules should eventually be one's own decision), some form of education and educational opportunities, etc. In other words, the intellectual equipment necessary to make choices about one's own life.

That said, education in any form needs to be flexible and creative. It used to be that ASL was not recognized as a real language because it was not verbal. That is an example of inflexible education--forcing profoundly deaf people to use and understand speech. In the autism world, if a person can communicate on the computer, to me that seems reasonable when working toward speech is going to create just endless rounds of frustration.

Education also needs to include choices for the person who is being educated. This means that people who work with autistic people need to have a theory of mind about the autistic person--that this person is a human being who wants and needs people to understand and who wants and needs reasonable choices to make.

So, that brings me to the other end of the spectrum--understanding that accepting diversity means accepting different ways of thinking. The road to communication and understanding is a two way street--it's not just about autistic people learning how to pretend to be normal. This means no more laughing at people just because they talk differently or seem to have a different focus in life. This means no more bullying--or standing by while the weird one is bullied. This means finding out what is of God in the autistic person's being, because God made all of us and we were not created randomly.