A MONTH ANEW
Like every autistic person I know, as the clock struck midnight on April 30, I breathed a sigh of relief. The month of April was over for another year. I had avoided wearing blue and one of my quirks is that I won’t wear blue overgarments to drive the Falcon (as Henry Ford was autistic).
One of the reasons why this provided a little relief is that I live in the Southern Hemisphere and June is the start of our winter, and my go to winter garments are jeans. And the most common colour of jeans is blue. Okay, I bought a beige Harrington Jacket and a navy one, too, but apart from a pair of beige chinos, my jeans are various shades of blue.
After seeing people talk about “Light It Up Blue,” I consciously avoided wearing blue as they are about eugenics, and one of the world’s most infamous, albeit lay, eugenicists committed suicide 75 years ago on Thursday, only a day after marrying Eva Braun. One of the main eugenicists in his regime went on the run to South America, but sadly, unlike Eichmann, he was never arrested, tried and hanged.
A cure for autism IS a form of eugenics. Just like Hitler instructed his doctors to perform experiments to figure out why people had different coloured eyes and hair and declared the master race to be blonde haired and blue eyed. Heck, my nephew would be presented with a gold medallion by Hitler, but I know he’d tell him to shove it up his backside.
We don’t need a cure, and nor do we need a month dedicated to awareness of us. What we need is a society that accepts us for who we are. A society that accepts our identity and our right to determine our identity. I had a conversation with a friend last night about identity and how important it is to pronounce a person’s name correctly. If a person wishes to be identified as “autistic” respect that. I used to get angry at school when people used to call me by different names. I say, David can be shortened to Dave, but if a person called David introduces himself to you as David, then you don’t take the liberty of calling him Dave. So if an autistic person calls themselves autistic, or a spectrumite, DON’T say, “Person with autism.”
We have our pride day next month, June 18, to be exact.
So, as a month begins anew, let us remove the abhorrent “It would be wonderful if there was a cure for autism,” and replace it with, “Let’s enjoy the wonderful world of autism.”