This week in bullshit my government told me, RFK Jr made a slate of dangerous claims about the autistic community. Among the claims he made is that autistic people will never know love, will never pay taxes (joke's on him, I pay a larger percentage of my income than he does), never write poetry. It's sad to me how much society castigates the different, whilst going to the movies and crying about the strong minority protagonists who “fought the system and won", “made history", and “persevered despite the challenges". Fuck that. It's like the toxic behavior of praising people who “beat cancer's ass"... what of those people who had it hard, felt their body break, but died with the sickness? We do not fight cancer. We do not all get to fight and beat systems. In fact, the vast majority are paid for their fighting in accusations of being too much, manic, hysterical. People don't like to call bias for what is is... a soft eugenics that ruins life. Because all the things RFK is propososing sounds to me like making a crisis of people being diagnosed with a mental and developmental condition that makes people more sensitive to our current state of affairs.
To be honest, I often aim to ignore headlines, because they hurt and terrify me. They terrify me because I've been bullied in many times of my life, and for a while it seemed that some progress was made to start turning the tide to some amount of equity, ethics and fairness. But companies that hid their bias in culture fit interviews no longer need to hide their toxic practices or their disrespect to diverse voices.
The crazy thing is that this system oppresses me. Yeah, fully being autistic here and calling the truth. I've been bullied, explicitly treated with prejudice, made fun of, ignored and denied opportunities despite being moderately intelligent and being a hard, ethical worker that cares about her company, work, and colleagues. But they'll say my whining is proof I lack grit. But the most painful part is how blind the people that puportedly care about me carry their beliefs about the current administration with no nuance, or a clear view of how the President's agenda hurts me, my daughter, and others like us. My mother in law came to my table yesterday to make a Kamala joke. To be honest, I usually let political jokes slide off my back. I can't control people's thoughts and choose to simply not indulge or reply to this type of humor. But she loves her granddaughter. And it cut me deep that she refuses to castigate at least this eugenics bullshit agenda. Like I'm pretty liberal (I'm country over party but I skew left in the end), but if a Democrat said something about my kid? Fuck them. I don't want them as my leader. It's bonkers to me... it's madness that no one in this damn country looks beyond dogma and thinks... “yo... that's a fucked up and inaccurate thing to say". Nope, they'll watch the Temple Grandin movie, and cry a little because Temple had grit and won. But winning alone is not indicative of grit. Many of us do not beat the system. We observe, give it chance after chance, only to see it worsen. Worst part, I can not agree with it, but who cares? My daughter still will be denied care and dignity. I still will be dismissed as a quirky dumbass. I'm just so done. I draw my lines when people I love are hurt. But it seems many don't want to draw lines or call out fucked up things.
Many might say I am a prototypical outraged minority... but I have ligitimate reasons to be pissed, and with some imagination anyone can see that they'd whine just as much if not world in the awesome alternate universe where ND folk are the majority and the systems were designed for us. A system is designed, most traditions, norms and practices are not necessary to live and can be adapted. We just choose not to to avoid discomfort.
It is useless to attempt to reason a man out of a thing he was never reasoned into.
– Jonathan Swift