I used to be a lot closer than I am now to the family with the little boy named Colin, and he was diagnosed with "pervasive developmental delay with atypical autism." He used to play with water like Amanda does in the video! I don't know first hand how he's turned out--when I knew him he talked in sound bytes,seemingly random riffs he'd picked up from TV. You couldn't really have a conversation with him. Oh--and he was just nuts about the Creature From the Black Lagoon! It's all he ever wanted to be for Hallowe'en. I do know he's in Middle School or High School now and I've heard he's becoming a talented artist like his dad and his uncle, but I don't know how equipped he is becoming for ever living on his own.

I used to manage the Subway sandwich shop here in town (for an Introvert, just about as awful a kind of job as you can imagine! but that's another story) and there was a mother who used to come in with her autistic adult son. He had a fascination with trains and knew endless technical railroad information, and he had all the local freight train runs pegged and was always badgering his mother to drive him to the tracks at this time or that time to watch trains and identify where the cars came from, and what they were carrying, and on and on. (I've since learned train stuff's a classic for people with autism.) Andy had developed language and had this obviously superior aptitude for cataloging data, but he had no social clue why he could not demand "More olives! More olives!" repeatedly and endlessly as I was making his sub, until he'd have a two pound pile of black olives on bread, if his mother would let him; and he was living in a group home. And that's the thing with this kind of brain development, I guess, when it's extreme, and Bill, you hit the nail on the head when you said that sometimes random mutations are not viable in this world.

I'm not a "curebie" (a brain is what it is, once it's developed) and I respect empirical data and don't buy into stuff unsupported or discredited by properly done independent studies. But I am not opposed to continuing efforts to discover causes for these kinds of mutations, because when they are extreme I wonder if the superiority of the intellect is worth the suffering and frustration I imagine some of these people experience--think of how it must feel: just cast adrift without a clue how to make sense of the social world that is the key to being able to live independently. I sense that my suggesting we keep looking for causes makes me suspect, somehow, to some advocates for people with autism. I wonder, if we learn the causes, if we might someday prevent some of these mutations, at least when they are very extreme. But I sense that position puts me in a tug-of-war between people who would consider prevention of autism compassion and those who would consider it invalidating of people with autism. Both sides have a point, but, meaning well, I dread finding myself "beneath contempt." And I think a lot of well-meaning people get put off by polarization, and don't give of themselves to deserving causes because they feel "damned if you do, damned if you don't."

Amanda really intrigues me too. She has concepts to convey and she knows exactly how to convey them, she just happens to communicate better via a keyboard than verbally. She and I are not too different in that I need to process and organize my thoughts and much prefer careful composition to trying to speak on the spot. How we do differ is that Amanda's interaction with her environment is direct, overt and flamboyant, and I don't pick up phones and stuff and taste them (although I do like to smell books!) Amanda's self awareness and her use of language to explain her environmental interaction makes me suspect that she also understands when she can get away with picking up stuff and tasting it, and when she can't expect to. Because she conceives a need to explain herself, I think she has learned how to adopt alternative perspective, in other words has a theory of mind. I may be wrong, but I'm under the impression the video was a demonstration of her *preferred* mode of interaction, not necessarily how she behaves when she's trying to get by among neurotypicals. And bridging that gap has been the big focus of most programs for people with autism, at least as I understand the situation.

What has taken me aback is how politicized autism has become. Well, I guess it shouldn't surprise me, should it--because everything gets like that. But you have on the one hand people advocating to push communication and linguistic development because they see it as key to autistic people getting their needs met in our society. And on the other hand you have people who are down on the emphasis on language because they're afraid the use of language will shut autistic people out of
getting further services they may need--ie, by making them seem "cured," thereby no longer in need of services. And yet the whole purpose for the services is so people with autism can live up to their potential in a neurotypical society, and being conversant in that society is, for better or worse, the key to that. So if both sides could try and work together to educate policy makers and help create policy, maybe people with autism could have language AND access to the further services they need. Because on the one hand ideology is all very well, but there are practical concerns, and people have to live, and equip themselves to do it the best they can.

So practicality is telling me it's not bad or unforgivably invalidating to keep gently trying to open up our world to people with autism, because it's just not realistic to expect that it's going to go very much in the opposite way. Say you woke up in a foreign country--the culture you wake up in has keys you don't have, and the better you want to function, the more of those keys you need to get copies of. It's always nice if there's a Chinatown or an American quarter to retreat to when you need to just relax into the communication you're used to, without having to think about it, and it's nice when other people try to learn your language some too, and certainly the effort might enrich them--but they're not going to phase shift their culture en masse to your language, that's just the way it is.

So I guess what I'm saying is, there are advocates on both sides of the controversy who are motivated by genuine compassion, and if both sides could give each other a little more benefit of the doubt and try to work together, both the neurotypical world and the world of autism would feel a little friendlier. And in friendly territory, people get more stuff done.