Theme
5:16am September 5, 2012

➸ my two cents (or more): josiahd: magickal-autistic-cat: [TW: Eugenics]josiahd replied to your...

josiahd:

magickal-autistic-cat:

[TW: Eugenics]

josiahd replied to your post:Let me tell you all… how sick I am… of…

Is that the one where the dad writes from the perspective of his son, who suspects that his father is planning to kill him, and ponders whether he…

Yes that’s definitely it. I’ve read both of them. It’s terrible. Just terrible. It’s worse knowing this is what people really think of severely disabled people and their/our families. 

What I hated most was how the brother talked. His mother went around telling the world how they loved and accepted their family member with severe CP.  But the brother told the “real story” where they resented him and didn’t even know if he existed.  

I met a woman who makes it her life’s work to tell the world how she and her family loves and accepts her profoundly disabled son, and have gotten him a regular education like any other kid.  He is clearly happy and loved.   I was sickened by the author’s implication – and I’m dead certain this is what he was driving at – that the siblings probably don’t really feel that way. That his book is a realistic account of how siblings would and should feel. That the mother is just living a lie and trying to make everyone else live a lie by putting a good face on something terrible. By acting like she and her kids believe her son is a real person. I can’t believe, seeing what I’ve seen, that he is not implying that on some level.

And that’s what society believes about us in general.  That those of us who are okay with who we are, or people who are okay with disabled people, aren’t realistic.  I once read a book where the author had interviewed (and deliberately mangled the stories to the point one took legal action) a bunch of self-advocates who accepted who they were. I know the interviewees. Some of them. I know they were for real. 

Then the author went and found a couple autistic men who utterly loathe themselves.  And constantly write about how much they loathe themselves and their life. I don’t know one of them but I know the other is a total asshole too. But that’s okay, autistic guys are supposed to be assholes. Or something.

And so the author. He said something on the order of “I suspect that the lives of these men are the much more realistic side of autistic lives.”  And that really made me mad. Because it seems like the entire world has trouble believing anyone, disabled or not, who is not constantly miserable about disability. If you want gritty realism, or any kind of realism, go to the miserable people who hate their lives and spend all their time wallowing in self-pity. 

That’s really what the world believes.  Disabled people and our families can’t be happy. Our families can’t really believe we are real people, especially if we can’t communicate.  It’s normal for us to be suicidal and our families to think we are better off dead. We would be understanding if our families euthanized us.

And those of us who are happy with ourselves or our family members?  Who believe our nonverbal family members are really people in there who can enjoy life?  We must either be deluding ourselves or lying. Happy disabled people must be lying. Either about our happiness or our disability. (Do you really think it’s coincidence that it’s me that people latched onto to claim I’m not really disabled?  There’s a long tradition since the early nineties at least, of stalking, harassing, and questioning the disability of autistic people who are happy the way we are and who stand up for ourselves. They find a new primary target every few years.)

So I find all this crap really disgusting and really dangerous. It panders to and intensifies every screwed up and menacing thing people think about disabled people. I would not be surprised if that books was the author’s subtle contribution to the euthanasia movement without even having to come out and starts his own beliefs.  And if not, it was incredibly irresponsible at the very very best. And I don’t suspect the best.