A reflection on diagnosis and teaching

I doubt that anyone who knows me as a person will find it surprising that I am autistic or that I learned such at a relatively late stage in life. But there are things about this that need to be thought about or reflected upon. Sides, issues, and all that hoohah. So for the next page or more, I am going to pour my brains out onto the page and see if you learn anything from it.

Ah, Sydney, I have missed you so. But no matter how you try to push me away again, I am not leaving.

So, as I wrote that I would do in the last entry that I completed before I went quiet, I moved back to the place in Australia where I grew up. (This is a totally separate discussion, but do not ever call me Australian. I am autistic. If you do not understand the distinction, please go and read something else.) Western Sydney, or Central Western Sydney as the transit authority and its contractors are calling it nowadays, has always been a puzzle of contradictions. There are problems with it, some of them enormous, but the thing that has made me anxious to return to it since long before I began to experience serious respiration problems remains the same. As bad as it sometimes seems, it is often by a long road the best part of the “commonwealth” of Australia.

Yes, I am really fukking angry. Your point is…?

Normally, when I receive comments on this journal, I moderate the bulk of them. In act, I would guesstimate that for every comment that has made it into this journal since it was first begun three months and change ago, at least a dozen have either been discarded as unwanted or filtered out as spam. One of the reasons I will delete rather than approve a comment is because the person posting it seems to believe that since I am using this journal to add some of my own point of view to the horrible miasma of bullshit that curebies keep up around autism, they have some kind of right to use my journal as a sounding board for their bullshit.

“Just what did I fight for?”

Recently on Fudgebook, I posted an outlet of my anger towards certain aspects of the society I am still stuck living in. This has prompted commentary from one of the few individuals in this country that I would lift a finger to save. What they have said and what I have said in response is not important here. What is important is the sentiment in the post.

Tomorrow, April 25, is being celebrated this year as Anzac Day, a day commemorating soldiers who risked everything, and in many cases lost it, in the wars that Australia and New Zealand have participated in. But the rub here is that to a great degree, the day has been co-opted by a contingent of asshole moron retards whose political philosophy can be summed up with the quote “love it or leave it”. Their belief is that if one feels critically about the society that they are living in, they can just leave.

There are a number of problems with this moronic, utterly retarded way of looking at this society. The first of these is to compare the society and the country to a child. A psychological phenon that is not talked about nearly enough is when a mother fails to form or feel an emotional bond with their young child. Abandoning or putting the child up for adoption is frequently not considered to be an option. In cases where this problem occurs, such a mother is usually referred to someone for counselling or other help.

Secondly, a society or a country, and especially a government, is only an idea. It is a collective of people who have agreed to unite within certain boundaries to live together for mutual benefit, as a collective. There is a name for the kind of people who demand love for such an entity, a couple of them, in fact. Sociopaths, or complete and utter psychopaths. Which brings me to another point. It is not the society itself that a person should feel any kind of love for. It is the people within it. When numerous soldiers in the English-speaking world made their way to the Pacific or into Europe to fight an enemy, they did not do so for a country, a flag, or a head of state. They did it for the people that they hoped to come back and share a society with. As I have intimated, my paternal grandfather served during World War II, and I can guarantee you that he did not do it because he loved Australia, the country. He did it because he loved the people around him. He loved the woman he would later meet and marry, the children he would have shortly after that, and the few of his grandchildren that he would live long enough to meet.

But something must have happened to him during that war that I do not know about. His service in the war was kept from my knowledge, and apart from the fact that he did in fact serve, I still know nothing about it. But people do not come home from wars and go through a cycle of drinking, falling down, getting up, and starting the process over again unless something either happened to them during that war or at a prior point in their life.

And that is kind of my point. I have mentioned elsewhere that during my first viewing of TRON: Legacy, the ghost of the little boy I was came to me and told me he finally understood why we are the person we are today. I think that if my grandfather saw TRON: Legacy and was told that the character I see the most of myself in was not Sam, or Kevin, or Clu, or Rinzler, but Quorra, he would start to ask questions about why. And when he got back the answers that painted enough of a picture to see what was wrong, he would take a look at both his son, my male parental unit, and this country. And he would ask both, “what the fukk is wrong with you?”.

But this is all speculation on my part, bear in mind. Unlike my other three grandparents, I have never been allowed to know much of anything about this one. My grandmother on that side died in 2010 from complications of strokes. The subsequent funeral was the first time I even heard his name mentioned aloud. For reasons I can only speculate have something to do with his alcoholism, he is basically the name you do not mention at any gatherings of the Western Sydney branch of Clan McIntosh.

Now, I am not going to mince words this time. My male parental unit, one Thomas Edwin McIntosh, is a fukking prick. He is an absolute coward, a self-congratulating asshole, and an abuser. Probably his biggest character defect, the one that makes me want to take a hammer and hit him in the head with it just hard enough to leave him needing the NDIS more badly than I do at present, is the manner in which he responds to any input he dislikes. I often mockingly speak of him to others, including my mother, saying things like “waaaah Dean said something I didn’t like!” in a manner that sounds sort of like I am trying to imitate a child. Given that my normal speaking voice is about halfway between Michael Ironside and Ted Cassidy, you can imagine how me trying to sound like my balls have yet to drop must sound. But the point here is that after years of suffering the effects of him being all about getting me “treated” when what was on offer was abusive and then helping cause massive delays when the actual facts were known, tolerance has dissolved to antipathy to outrage to anger to outright hatred. It is not me that should be lying in the dark, unable to have a normal relationship with another Human being, whilst having segments of skin chopped out every so many months. It is him. In fact, if I may be allowed to share an opinion here, if this world were more like the one described in my fictions, he would be deemed unworthy of being considered a member of this clan. In fact, let me be even more blunt. He, not (almost) anyone I have encountered in the past ten years, is the reason I frequently utter the word “cuntslander”.

Which brings me back to the essential point about my grandfather. Drinking oneself to death is now recognised as being a possible sign of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, or PTSD as I will refer to it going forward. Again, I do not know what the man himself would think or feel, but I know that if I were in his place and lived to see what is inarguably the smartest of my grandsons living with a psychological problem that is often considered exclusive to veterans, I would not like that at all. I would be asking myself what kind of society I live in that it is considered acceptable to mistreat a child to the point where he will deliberately injure himself in order to avoid formal schooling. I would be asking myself what kind of society I live in where it is considered acceptable to leave a young man with such cognitive capabilities to sit and rot until he basically has no desire to participate in that society anymore.

One of my friends on Fudgebook, Heather, I need to ask you something. Now, none of my writings here are meant to imply that Scotland, or indeed any part of the United Kingdom, is without problems. Indeed, from what I hear, Scotland’s level of relative poverty is the worst in the United Kingdom. But I have a strong suspicion that if one were to walk into a pub in Scotland and start saying things like “love it or leave it” in reference to the United Kingdom, they would be walking out with a large portion of a broom handle shoved in their arse. Am I guessing right in this instance? Because in case nobody has guessed from this stream of text so far, my anger has nothing to do with the veterans, their associations, or even the use of their sacrifices to promote the silence of dissension within the country’s ranks. Rather, it is with the people that say the veterans fought on their behalf, or for their cause.

My grandfather may well ask what it is that he fought for, or fought to protect. The people, of course, and the people are always worth fighting for to various degrees. But I think every veteran, whether they agree with this whole “love it or leave it” bullshit or not, should be asking themselves whether the country they see around them can be reconciled with the country that they fought on the behalf of. Because a country where people unlucky enough to suffer from serious disabilities can be left to wallow in their own filth for days on end, where the level of poverty among all people living with disabilities is the worst of all the 34 OECD countries in spite of that list including America, seems such a very long way from the kind of society I would want to fight to protect if I were not 4-F.

As far as I am concerned, you can either be autistic or Australian, never both. If you are Australian and still do not understand why I have just said this, try thinking. It will be a new experience. If you do understand what I am trying to tell you here, then thank you and may we look back on writings like this in ten years, then say we are glad we do not live like this anymore.

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A new first time post…

Allow us to get the introductory stuff out of the way. My name is Dean McIntosh (more on this anon), I was born in the late 1970s, and I am autistic.