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Whose Planet Is It Anyway? has moved to Blogger. To read
this article on the new site, click here.
During China's infamous "Cultural Revolution," intellectuals were
denounced as enemies of the people, as a plague of useless elitists living off the honest sweat of the peasants. Universities
and research laboratories were shut down, professors and scientists were sent off to the countryside to work in the fields,
and the Chinese economy came to a crashing halt. Millions starved. But Chairman Mao was happy, because the intellectuals
and the peasants starved equally together.
A similarly warped view of the autistic population can be found
in today's world. Although many autistic children have strong academic abilities, they are routinely described as mentally
disabled, incapable of a productive future, and a lifelong burden to society. Their existence is called a tragedy and
an epidemic. When they display signs of high intelligence such as early reading and a precocious vocabulary, the psychologists
are quick to pathologize these abilities as symptoms of a disorder, hyperlexia. Instead of encouraging autistic children's natural intellectual
aptitude, parents are urged to take drastic measures to force the children to become indistinguishable from their peers. The message to parents is clear: Forget about your child's potential
future contributions to science, technology, and the arts. Just give him a straw hat, teach him to be a good little
peasant, and send him out to the rice paddies.
Modern business managers also routinely devalue the intellectual
capabilities of autistic professionals. An aspie student can graduate at the top of his class, adept in highly specialized
skills desperately needed by our technology-dependent economy, but he will struggle to get a job because of the
hiring managers' prejudices. Not only do interviewers reject autistic applicants on account of unusual body
language and voice inflection, they often use personality tests to weed out the aspies. Some managers even attend seminars
to learn how to identify various personality types, thus allowing them to discriminate more effectively against the unpopular
sorts. In classic blame-the-victim mode, our society tells jobless aspies that it's all their fault because they lack
the social abilities to pass an interview (which is the equivalent of telling a female applicant that she couldn't get a job
because of her failure to look and act like a man at the interview).
Then, after systematically denying employment to large numbers of
qualified university graduates solely on the basis of their neurological type, our jackass captains of industry go braying
to Congress that they can't find enough skilled workers in the United States and need more H-1B visas to bring in foreign
workers before the economy totally collapses.
Chairman Mao would have been proud.
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