It is said in some circles that if you really want to know a person, you should look at the people they call friends.
I do not know any people in the flesh, so to speak, that I would genuinely call friends. This should tell you two things about me. Neither of them good. But it might surprise you to learn that when I was a wee boy, I became fascinated with a cartoon television series called The Transformers. Now, at some point I might go into the subject of how the real Transformers differs from Michael “I Make Movies For Morons And Pretend They Are For Teenage Boys” Bay‘s idiotic conception. But for now, it is sufficient to state that each and every character in The Transformers had a biography of sorts, and therein was often a quote attributed to them that summarised their natures as characters. I forget which Decepticon this quote was attributed to, but it went something like, “Friend is another word for fool”.
We all of us make choices about whom we act in a friendly manner to. That is the point. I do not deal well with people trying to claim to be friends with me. I cannot. I have grown, over the years, too used to people presuming that their proclamations of friendship will excuse their foolish behaviour with me. Friends do not claim “no, you want white / red / blue” when you tell them you want black. Or tell people this and expect them to just take their word for it. Can I stress this enough?
The truth of the matter is, I do not feel the people of the so-called autism civil rights movement are my friend(s), either. They expect us all to follow a model of obedient pleading for our own right to exist. This would be well and fine if we could organise into our own Black Panther-like societies and hide away, but we are scattered across the world in such sprinkles that such an effort is going to take decades at best. We therefore have nothing, and I do mean nothing, to gain from simply pleading for tolerance.
That means I want all of you, passives, to take a good and hard look at yourselves. You are the ones condemning us the most strongly. Not the curebies. Not places like the Judge Rotenberg Centre. Not celebrities who mistake themselves for doing something good by aiding these assholes. You are the ones who are passively sitting by and allowing those with the most power to condemn us. When we are no more, and in the present situation it is a case of when, not if, it will be on your heads.
You have to look at this somewhat logically. All property, whether it is the land we live on, other people, the things in our house, even ourselves, is defended by two things. One is force. The other is the credible threat of force. In the end, whether it is our lives, our homes, or anything that we call ours, our claim to it is only as good as the force backing it up. The main reason we have nations is because large groups are better-able to defend themselves. But that also begs a question. Specifically, how do we defend ourselves? Threats generally come in two categories. Those within, and those without. In our case, the case of the autistic, the threat is mainly without. But it tries to burrow its way within because it recognises something that we do not. Namely, that this is a war not only for the minds of the society we are in at present, but for those of future generations. Every battle to control the way people think is not just a battle for the present generation, but also the next one.
Children today are being told a number of things. One is that being a child forever is somehow a good or even desirable thing. Another is that independent thought, being different, or both, are, to quote the derisive sound I like to make, “baad”. We need to look at previous generations in order to understand this. Whilst I cannot speak too in-depth in the case of prior generations, I remember the messages I received as a child to be in some ways reflective of those my mother’s generation, and that betwixt, received. We were all told that even if our peers did not agree, thinking harder and more than the next guy could take us places. It could bring us things that said next guy would not be privy to. Children today are being encouraged to fit in and be the same as their peers at the expense of all else, especially themselves.
Life also has a way of sneaking away from you. One moment, you are simply sitting in a chair, trying to understand what to do with your life. The next, your sister, the one person you share DNA with and have struggled to understand the most in spite of having the lowest success rate with, is having children.
I have to accept that not only will I never have children (and quite frankly, that pleases me), I feel somewhat sad that I feel it is in my nieces’ and nephew’s best interests to not know me. Ever. Because I fear that if they learned what I think of their grandparents, their mother’s parents, much less why, it would scar them forever. The only thing I fear more than my involvement in their lives having a detrimental effect upon them is the same coming from one of my parents.
No matter how much I try, the fact is that I would give anything to go back to early 1978 and tell my parents-to-be that they should not be parents. That they should, at minimum, put that off for at least several years. Hell, I would have put it off for at least a decade. But that is not the germaine point here. The germaine point here is that trying to change my life to something I can live with has yielded me nothing. Thus, I do not want it anymore. Lives, whether we like it or not, are like cars. When we find that we cannot fix them, or that the price of fixing them is so great that we can no longer pay it, we put it out to pasture. But we are neither efficient nor humane about it. We put lives out in a field to be ignored and forgotten about until they expire. My greatest fear lately is not dying or being killed. My greatest fear is being disabled to the point where I can no longer put the gun to my head and pull the trigger, and having others who can do so refusing. Life without joy, without dreams, without hope… that is not life. That is just… marking time.
I can no longer justify myself and the space I take up. I no longer want to. But I no longer care for the people around me, either. I wonder to myself how they can justify themselves to themselves. When I was in my late teens, I remember one lecturer proclaiming that the welfare system of this country was set up or designed so that no person need starve “if they play by the rules”. That is the biggest load of bullshit I have heard in my lifetime, and not for lack of competition. The Dead Kennedys song Kill The Poor says it best. We live in a culture now where everyone is selfish, and nothing we do is designed with anything other than short-term gain in mind. Given the severe resource depletion that is occurring now, I doubt that we as a species will live through the next economic Depression that hits. I think the next one will hit us in spite of our best efforts otherwise (Keynesian economics have proven very effective at stopping them, but economies cannot continue growing forever), and it just will not stop until we either become extinct or we wake up and understand why it is happening.
I have never wanted to resign from my life so badly.
Do I kill everything that I love? I can never be sure anymore. But if I were shown that I did, then I would solemnly promise to love every Australian until the day that I die.
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