Ostracized for Autism

Transcript:

As an Aspie, I am very experienced with being ostracized. I’ve talked about how my autistic symptoms affected the way people have treated me, but I’ve noticed that society will treat you negatively if they even know that you have a disorder. I know this is obvious, but when I looked at how people treat their fellow human beings with Down syndrome, mental retardation, trauma-induced disorders, anger-issues, etc, I found out that autistic individuals are treated like the Devil.
I’ve noticed that more and more children with autism are dying. This is bad enough- any child death regardless what their condition was is tragic- but one of the worst child deaths I’ve seen on the news was when this mother strangled her two kids to death with a wire. When she called the police to turn herself in, she said, “They are autistic! I don’t want my kids to be like that!” What she said sunk into my head, and I was worried if my mom ever thought about killing me to make her life easier. What made this case even worse was how this woman was treated. There was obviously an outrage in her community and the Internet, but there were a number of mothers with autistic children who gave this mom SYMPATHY. They said that they understood how she felt. These women didn’t even seem sad that TWO CHILDREN DIED AT THE HANDS OF THEIR OWN MOTHER! I’ve heard many stories of children being killed on the news, and parents have always been emotional about the fact that such young people died. However, it seems that if the child-or any victim in general- is autistic, people just act like someone fell off of their bike. Heck, I’ve seen deaths of dogs get more emotion from locals than autistics, and I’m not exaggerating.
What I find fascinating is whenever I talk about deaths of autistic people to others, the folks I’m talking to react quite appropriately. They become outraged at the thought of people being killed, and don’t care that the victims were autistic at all. I figured that the ostracism of autistics come from powerful sources, not our neighbors or friends. This worries me, for powerful companies and people have a huge influence on everyday individuals. If companies like Autism Speaks or over-dramatic programs such as Oprah featuring parents relating autism to the cancer and AIDS (that was shown at my school. The teacher turned it off when she saw me getting angry) gain publicity, autistic people will be living in a bigger hellhole than we already live in.
The reason for this article is to spread awareness about why people shouldn’t believe everything they see or hear from powerful people and companies. Respecting authority is great, but believing everything they say may make you a brainwashed, horrible person. Also, this article was written to remind people to treat others how they’d like to be treated, and not act cold to them regardless of how different they are.

By the way, I’m a dog-lover.