From CAN's newsletter:
mental_floss Features Autism Awareness in Four New Trivia Books
mental_floss, the irreverent Birmingham-based magazine, and Harper Collins are releasing four new trivia books this year, each featuring a Cure Autism Now ad to help raise awareness about autism. mental_floss and Harper Collins will also be donating proceeds from sales of the books to CAN in support of our research and treatment programs. The first book is titled Cocktail Party Cheat Sheets, and is available now nationwide. For more information and to purchase books, visit www. mentalfloss.com.
Mental Floss Contact: melanie@ mentalfloss.com or 440.338.1816
Harper Collins Contact:
HarperCollins Publishers
10 East 53rd Street
New York, NY 10022
Phone: 212-207-7000
I'd like to see the ads.
Awareness could be a good thing, if it would focus on the challenges the community faces in being understood, instead of the challanges parents face in trying to raise a child they can't figure out.
Guess I can't hope for that from CAN, but I still want to see!
You really don't want what CAN are selling, which is our eradication as a group through eugenics (it's a nightmare vision dears, so stay with me).
CAN mean well (I'm being generous here) but their solution to the autism issue is to cure a headache by cutting off the head.
If they took the time to ask US instead of misinformed parents or shrinks that think we will never amount to anything in life (I have a moderately autistic friend who actually had that said to him, he is now well on his way to a degree in military history, he wants to be the curator of the british war museum).
If they did this, they wouldnt be trying to cure us, they would be supporting us.
Any publicity from them is negative, it's insidious and plays on fear.
The kind of message we want is one of hope, that auts and aspies dont have to be treated like rejects or patients, but as a group that has produced some of the most gifted and influential people the human race has ever known.
To summarise.
Cure Autism Now?
No thanks.
Conrad
"Let me tell you a story to chill the bones, bout a thing that I saw..."
Dance of death, Iron Maiden
Umm... I just checked out the Cure Autism Now website (Please don't ban me) because I wanted to check their perspective. (Again, Please don't ban me.)
I wanted to write to somebody from CAN to see if they could answer some of the criticisms posted here, but in the end I didn't because it's an American based organisation and I am not American.
I confess to having what I would think is a moderate view on such matters. I would have liked to hear from the "other side".
(Please don't ban me)
nyanchan, nobody is going to ban you for asking questions fairly.
Most of us have formed out views of people like CAN through experience. Those who haven't have been told exactly what CAN supports, looked at how that would fit into their own lives, and rejected CAN out of hand. I am in the latter group in case you are wondering.
CAN has caused nothing but fear and misery in my life. If their entire membership were to suddenly die tomorrow, I would do backflips.
I hadn't heard about CAN until joining this forum but they seemed to me like very bad news right from the very first. Too bad so many other respectable people are naive and swallow their message and give support.
Yeah, it's a shame how CAN doesn't actually speak for us, or help us out at all, with stuff like living on our own, finding places to hang out, or maybe get us some psychiatric help for problems that thrive in the Autism/Spectrum disorders, like depression, etc.
Because of AS, I grew up nearly friendless, shunned, reviled, and abused by a soceity I can't easily identify with. If that won't f*** you up, what will!?
They need to get off their high horse, stop complaining about what's wrong with us, and HELP us. What they're doing is working backwards against us. WE should be forming our own Autism groups, and be out there for the world to see! We're the people affected by Autism, affected by Aspergers. Who do you think knows more? Us or them?
CAN seems to feel so sorry for the parents that they entirely forget/disregard how it must feel for the children with autism who are being poked and prodded, fed all sorts of weird nostrums, put on strange diets and subject to mind control.
Indeed. I can think of a few people here right now in fact who could stand to be locked away in some of the reeducation camps that CAN doubtlessly now support. The "you're not good if you don't write good feelings" attitude that some human filth write here would soon disappear quicksmart.
CAN mean well (I'm being generous here) but their solution to the autism issue is to cure a headache by cutting off the head.
That reminds me of a faux ad I saw on Glen Beck the other night. He parodied that God awful annoying Head-On ad. It was an ad for Head-Off, it was a axe in a box.
I know this is off-topic, but this is such a gloomy topic I thought a little humour wouldn't hurt.
i haven't seem CAN but i have seen DAN and it made me want to throw something or be sick.