I am generally opposed to “awareness” as a political idea, consequently, as an activist effort. The belief, for instance, that Canadian mining companies poisoning and murdering Mayans in Guatemala can be, in any way, addressed by awareness is pernicious.
However, Autism Awareness Month is a different sort of thing. That is because autism does not have a “solution” per se and those who claim that it has a “cure” are typically either quacks, psychos or both.
What Autism Awareness Month demands of us is not donations (although some well-directed ones can help), a campaign or solutions as much as it demands an optical care. The point is to see autistic people, consider their experiences and think about the ways our society’s structure pushes not just their plight but their talents into the shadows, into the margins.
The idea, for instance, that every job now involves customer service and sales has increased not just the marginalization but the unemployment rate of autistic people. Adding cashier duty to a shelving job can push autistic people from their workplace into a solitary life of collecting disability. Demanding the practice of an haute bourgeois etiquette politics and the faddish social precision that entails from everyone in a desk job can push autistic people into silence, invisibility and eventually unemployment.
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Often, these are people whom we cannot help through our own efforts but at a remove, by supporting their caregivers, their relatives, those who aid and are present with them. It is important, in our efforts to be aware and supportive this month, to reject the neoliberal politics of disease and disability in which atomized individuals are afflicted. Autism afflicts not persons but families; families experience the emotional stress and grief of autism; families are impoverished by autism; families are stigmatized by autism. Some of those effects are from the disability itself but more often than not, they are from how our society interacts with it, the resources we provide, the resources we deny, the social spaces we create and those we fail to create. So our awareness, and our care must extend not simply to persons managing autism but to families managing autism.
And that includes giving space and support to people who have been pushed to their wits’ end and are mismanaging it. Not every anti-vaxer is a black-hatted villain; some are just people who are taking refuge in a conspiracy theory because they have been overwhelmed by guilt, stigma, powerlessness to help their child and the total exhaustion that comes from carrying more of a burden of emotional and physical care than any individual can. That includes giving space to people whose emotions seem out of control. We must remember that the body autism disables is the family.
Finally, let us remember that we are sliding into the greatest extinction event in four billion years. Every species, every population, including our own, faces the likelihood of extinction. Those that survive such events are those with the most diverse mutations, the widest spectrum of kinds of members. We must remember that just as anorexic people have pulled average people through famines, just as those with restless leg syndrome guarded our primate groups while the rest of us slept, just as schizophrenics stepped forward and helped to lead the resistance to Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge when neurologically average people were paralyzed, we do not know what role our autistic brothers and sisters may have to play in our survival in the future because only God can see all ends. In this way, we must also reject the idea that autistic people are a population-level illness to be extirpated from the human population. They are not; they are a precious part of the human family to whom we should direct a little more care and attention this month.
