(recommended article) Why do we want autistic kids to have superpowers?

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an excerpt from the article...

Why do we want autistic kids to have superpowers?

So why do we want autistic people to have superpowers? I talked to ,

and she says that there are two conflicting things at work. We want

autistic people to want to be like us, like Data from /Star Trek: The

Next Generation/. And secondly, we're " obsessed with exceptionalism, "

says . " People can't handle the fact that some people are just

different without having something fabulously acceptable as balance,

because otherwise we'd just have to accept autistic people on their own

terms, and that's hard and challenging and takes patience and work. "

Partly, it's because we want any disability to be countered by a

contrasting superpower, says Carol Greenburg, a special needs consultant

and the East Coast director of the Autism Women's Network, who's been

diagnosed as autistic herself. She explains, " The difficulties that can

come along with autism are undeniable, but I see neither my life, nor my

minimally verbal son's life as unrelentingly tragic simply because of

our communication impairments. But if you really do believe, as I think

the dominant culture implies, that humans are the sum of their language,

then you damn well want the universe to balance out and compensate for

the lack of it, and all that goes along with it. Reality usually doesn't

provide that compensation, but fiction, especially fiction in this

genre, can. "

more...

http://io9.com/5879242/why-do-we-want-autistic-kids-to-have-superpowers

Enjoy (or not),

~CJ

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The biggest fallacy is that human beings are rational creatures.