Informed Only Please

Pennsylvania’s POWER Library (https://powerlibrary.org) resource has been featured by certain local Libraries that are awardees of state grants: for the purpose of encouraging young adults in particular to seek only informed sources of literature, whatever the subject matter, from auto mechanics to medicine and other sciences. In the current polluted world of the Internet, it is really difficult for people to distinguish informed from uninformed. You see that with one subject in particular these days, namely neurodiversity, including autism. The proven science on this subject has become awash in undiluted and shameful nonsense by people who know nothing. And it can have very serious, even devastating, consequences.

This is what one young mother of an autistic child wrote to me: “The fact that [autism is being targeted these days] as a problem that needs to be solved frightens me. My daughter is not a problem. Her diagnosis is not a problem. If she is seen as a problem how exactly are they going to solve her? What happens when they can’t solve her? An easy way to solve a problem is to eliminate it. This is the kind of thinking that led to the holocaust.”

If you want to learn about what autism really is, then POWER Library is one good way to get started. My own first experience in learning about the subject was in the book by neurologist Oliver Sachs entitled “An Anthropologist on Mars” (1995). It is comprised of seven chapters, each a case history of a person with a neurological identity. Autism is discussed in more than one chapter, but it is in the last, with the chapter heading that is the same as the title of the book, that the reader meets Temple Grandin, “one of the most remarkable autistic people of all.” She has a PhD from the University of Illinois in animal science, and has been a professor at Colorado State University for many years. She also runs her own business. Hardly a “problem” at all; rather, a wonderful success story.

She did not speak for the first 3 ½ years of childhood, and she was bullied in school, too.

Temple Grandin now is author of animal welfare books such as “Animals in Translation” (2005). She also wrote bestseller “Thinking in Pictures” (1995), a seminal work about autism and neurodiversity. She is world-renowned for both subjects.

As a person who is autistic herself, she has used her personal experiences to inform her writings, in a way that no other person has done. She shares her views at her own web site (https://www.templegrandin.com), which is worth a visit. Perhaps the most striking remarks are these: “The skills that people with autism bring to the table should be nurtured for their benefit and society’s,” Grandin said. “And, if a cure for autism were found, she would choose to stay just the way she is. “I like the really logical way that I think.  I’m totally logical. In fact, it kind of blows my mind how irrational human beings are,” she said. “If you totally get rid of autism, you’d have nobody to fix your computer in the future.” In fact, we all think differently in some regard or other. That is not a reason to discriminate or suggest that others are abnormal. It is a reason to read good books and strive to become more literate by the broader perspective gained from others’ ways of thinking.