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This article about a debate over “curing” autism includes a line that is perhaps more telling than the reporter realized. In describing what led the chief executive of NBC Universal, Bob Wright and his wife Suzanne, to found the thoroughly repulsive group, Autism Speaks:

Soon they no longer had a grandchild whom they could imagine becoming a world-beater like Wright himself, but a crisis.

The horror for these people was not that their grandchild might find it difficult to do things he himself would like to do or that people might mistreat him because of his unusual appearance or actions; it was the child’s difference, his deviation from the family norm. In this case, because of the label attached to that difference, they have been able to turn their outrage at the child’s difference into a fundraising juggernaut. Their quest to destroy his difference takes place under the banner called cure, which allows Bob Wright to make repeated comparisons to cancer (two in that article alone), never mind that nobody ever died of autism.

Had the child merely grown up to be a communist or an artist of the sort that doesn’t bring in money even during a global art boom, I suppose they would have had to make due with expressing to their friends what disappointment he was and excluding him from their will. That is, of course, unless they could find a diagnosis on which to blame it.

Instead, they have been able to express their disgust with appeals that win sympathy. They should really see autism as a blessing.

Related posts:

1. Yoko Ono and Autism Speaks
2. Autism Speaks Fucks Up Again
3. Autistics Speak, But Will Autism Speaks Listen?
4. On Gender Difference
5. I Am Autism
6. Autism: Disability & The Cure
7. The Marked Case: Autism and Violence
8. Autism as Convenient Receptacle
9. Good Parents?
10. What About Our Stories?

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