as small as a world and as large as alone

I’m ambivalent about most of the autistic organizations I’ve seen out there.  With ASAN, I’ve seen a tendency to push their agenda onto self-advocacy groups that may not have similar agendas.  For instance, I remember them at one point proposing that anyone who worked with them on… something or other (can’t remember if they were trying to form a larger self-advocacy ally network or something else)… had to sign something that included that they had to agree to “support neurodiversity”.  

Which, didn’t make sense to me at the time, because neurodiversity is first off an abstraction that not everyone can understand (I barely understand it myself, even though I use the word sometimes), and second off, I didn’t think it was a good idea to force people to conform to an ideology in order to work with them or be part of their extended network or whatever it was at the time.

And it’s been little things, like that.  Little things that are signs of bigger things.  I work with ASAN members regularly, and may even join ASAN someday, but I will always be ambivalent about it, as an organization, at best.  I can’t even put into words my hesitations, unfortunately, but I know that for instance my friend shares them.  Ze backed out of a project once because ze was afraid that ze would be somehow outed as not supporting ASAN and that this would prove to be a problem.  (The project was not run by ASAN itself, but practically everyone but me and a couple others were ASAN members.)

There’s just… a feeling of ideology to it that I can’t put my finger on but I can’t shake it either.  I believe they do a lot of good work and I fully support them in that.  I can support an organization, and work with an organization, and even work inside of an organization, that I am ambivalent about, even one that I dislike more than I’ve ever disliked ASAN.  Hell, I’ve gone to FEAT meetings to educate parents, and FEAT is worse than anything ASAN could ever be – and I got along with them and was well-accepted by all but a tiny minority.

But there are things I just don’t trust about it.  And most of them are on the sensing level, so I can’t put my finger on them.

I really, really don’t want to influence you one way or the other, though.  If you feel that starting an ASAN chapter in your area is something you should do, then you should do it.  It could do a lot of good.  It could be that individual chapters have a lot of freedom to do whatever they want – which is what I found with FEAT, which is not an organization I’d support even on the chapter level, but was still way better in the chapter I worked with than, say, the one that involved Lenny Schafer.

I also get the sense that ASAN is… it… thinks it knows more than it knows, it thinks it is more than it is, it rapidly, too-rapidly, adapts itself to expectation and observation and criticism, it makes me really fucking nervous.

But there are amazing people in ASAN doing amazing work and I do not want to separate you from that if that is what you want to be involved in.  Please don’t take my word for any of this.  Make your own observations.  Make your own decisions.  Don’t put too much weight on me, because not only could I be wrong, but it could be dangerous to act on my words as if they have more meaning than they do.  Because these are decisions that could impact a lot more people than just me and you.  And I would hate for my offhand remarks and vague feelings about an organization to decide whether a chapter got started that may well be sorely needed and do a lot of good.

I can tell you I trust ASAN far more than I trust GRASP.  And about equally with ANI and AutCom, which I am also heavily ambivalent about, yet have participated in for years, often happily.  I’m not much of a joiner.  I prefer to do my own thing, and then work alongside or with an organization when we have goals in common.  And that comes out in my attitudes towards organizations – I tend to be more critical of them than most people are, even when I like them.  ASAN I do remain deeply ambivalent about though, meaning I see deeply good things about them and deeply disturbing things about them, and I can’t work out what I think overall.

Do what you think is best.  Do what YOU think is best.  Not me, not ASAN, not anyone else, YOU.

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