Hmmmm

So, I'm not going to try and pretend to be an expert or anything, but since my wonderful Jen is much more knowledgable and much more associated with learning disabilities and that type of thing, I have more of an interest in this than most, which gives me a reason to vent for a minute about Autism. For some reason, it's becoming the new 'thing' with Hollywood. That's all fine and dandy, as long as they're trying to help something, I guess that's all we can ask. The problem is that they're trying to cure Autism. It's not a disease people! You can try to find out why it's increasing in occurrence, which is probably because they now have a better idea of what it is, and people who used to be diagnosed with something else in the past are now labeled as autistic.... and because there is more of it. Find the cause, sure... or find new ways to help autistic people function in society, great, but don't try to 'cure' it, as if there is something wrong with that person. Like Rick says, there can be accidental parents, but no accidental children, you can just as easily say that there are no accidental autistic babies. God made those kids with autism, just like he made me to not be built for professional sports. There's a reason, maybe we won't know what it is in this lifetime, but there's still a reason. It just makes me angry that people treat it as a horrible affliction, like it's something to feel sorry for. I'll tell you what, in my limited exposure to that population, I've seen that people with autism are not looking for us to feel sorry for them, or try to cure them. Sometimes they need our help, sometimes they seek it, which actually doesn't show weakness. Picture this, you, as a "normal" person are having difficulty doing something that 99% of people around you are able to do with ease. You think it would be easy for you to ask one of those people for help? One could actually make a point that people with disabilities are stonger people than the rest of us. If we have kids with learning disabilities, which is somewhat likely since the occurence of it in Southern California is higher than anywhere else in the country, it will be challenging, frustrating, angering, it will make us cry, it will make us want to give up at times, it will make us fight, it will cost us money, it will change our lives more than we can imagine, but it won't make us want to cure them, of fix them.

Now, if they don't have disabilities, I expect them to be professional baseball players, and when they are 2 and 3 years old, and they cry when I drop them off at Sunday school, we'll be ok... we won't have to be in every class they're in, to make ourselves feel better..
but that's for another post.