THE COMMON LANGUAGE BARRIER.
"My son scored a B for Japanese," beamed my father to his friend and workmate, Eddie.
"Get him to come down here. He can speak Japanese to me, and I can speak Yugoslav to him."
Obviously, Eddie meant, he can teach me some Japanese and I'll teach him some Yugoslav, not that he'd expect me to talk to him in Japanese and he'd respond in Yugoslav not knowing what I said. But picture this, you're a neurotypical and you come face to face with an autistic, is it fair to assume that they should be forced to be more like you seeing as how you can't really be like them? An argument put forward by advocates of mono-culturalism is that people who come to a new country should learn to speak the language, but is it fair that they surrender everything about the culture they came from and completely absorb the new? Well, to me, no.
There have been therapies espoused over the years, that result in trauma for us autistic folks of being forced to maintain eye contact, with rewards for compliance and possible punishments for non-compliance, namely ABA and PBS. For an autistic person, being forced to maintain eye contact can be like our eyes are burning into the soul of another and it can become quite painful. Law enforcement people, when being trained to assess body language tend to regard not making eye contact as a sign of not being truthful. What needs to be taught is that if the person is autistic, they can still be telling the truth, but they find looking into your eyes quite confronting.
I can remember, when I was in Grade One, the school principal, who was otherwise a nice man, taking our class for a few Tuesdays in a row as our regular teacher had to attend certain seminars and they couldn't get a supply teacher. He punished me as he accused me of not paying attention. Okay, he didn't know I was autistic (neither did my Grade One teacher, for that matter), but one question I wish I could have answered is, "If he had known I was autistic, would he have seen things differently?" Hopefully, yes. Teachers today, when teaching autistic kids, need not to approach a right-wing ignoramus, but to have better training with how to deal with autistic kids. To understand that if an autistic kid is not watching you, they might still be paying attention. The best gauge is to ask someone you suspect of not paying attention to repeat the last thing you said, and whether or not they can is your answer.
It is also said that us autistic folks use language from television shows that we like. Okay, you can ask any police officer who might know me (okay, I have never been in trouble with the law) and some can become confused because my favourite television show is The Bill and I tend to refer to them as "Old Bill". One woman I knew whose daughter was in the force, said, "I don't know that she likes that term." Okay, that might be the case, but most don't have a problem. Being a fan of that show, I have also memorised the phonetic alphabet (i.e. alpha, bravo, Charlie, Delta, Echo, Foxtrot, Golf, Hotel, and so on) and have picked up some Cockney rhyming slang, like "pen and ink" for stink.
I remember during the last Federal Election Campaign in Australia, there was a young autistic lad who engaged with the Opposition Leader, Bill Shorten, and said, "Keep away from me." Contrary to kids who would scream in terror when the former leader of the Liberal Party made unwelcome appearances, this kid was not frightened of Bill Shorten, rather he was engaging with him as his favourite character from a Sci-Fi series he liked. I find, when my parents friend visits, who used to be a sea captain, that I would call him Captain, but that came not from subservience but from remembering him coming around one day and saying, "We're just returning a parrot," meaning a pruner on an extended pole to cut high level trees, and I associated the two with pirates and parrots, even though he was in the merchant navy.
Us autistics may live in the same country and have a common medium, but we may not speak the same language. Just like you can't force a person who is deaf or hearing impaired to be able to hear and you have to use sign language, and just like you can't force a blind or vision impaired person to see, you shouldn't force an autistic person to maintain eye contact or speak exactly the same way as a neuro-typical. And just like you can't teach a person who doesn't speak your language to speak it without having some concept of their native language, you can't expect an autistic person to understand you or you to understand them without an insight. For example, you can draw the Japanese character for a car, and without the wheels, it looks like a car, but you can't break the ice to teach a Japanese person English if you don't understand some Japanese. Similarly, in Japan, when you meet somebody, you bow, whereas in Western countries, you shake hands. And, if we use Japanese as an example, just like it is customary to exchange money in a small tray in a shop, it is as uncomfortable for an autistic person to be forced to make eye contact as it is for a Japanese person to exchange money with their hands.