and not succeeding from the looks of things

Personally I find it more irritating when people believe I owe them something by virtue of being a member of some group. For example, some seem to believe that I owe third world countries my help and support by virtue of being born in a first world nation of reasonable wealth - I don't, I accept no responsibility at all.

I will remind everyone by the way (and i'm restraining myself here too) that this kind of discussion could easily drift into politics that belong in the "politics, religion and philosophy" board.

Oops!

Sorry.

Drift?  What drift?  It was openly political/religious/philosophical from the OP.

(... must think ... no politics ... no religion ... no sexuality ...)

So, who else feels that the Lakers have a shot at winning the championship?

Who are the Lakers?


Oh, I get it.  Drift.  Lakers.  Drift wood... oh, never mind.

NBA basketball

Yes, we would have. Hans Asperger tried to convince the Nazis that “different isn’t always inferior” (please don’t moderate this, those are Asperger’s words, not mine) and that the people he called “autistic psychopaths” could be an asset. We’d be picked off same as the Jews and the Gypsies, the gays, the opposition and the mentally ill. We’d be seen as inferior, something not fit for life.

Either here or on WP (can’t remember and it doesn’t matter) I read about how “Autism Speaks” had talked to a room full of parents and their spectrum children. They mentioned how they hoped to find a cure for the ailment and to prevent more children like them from being born. To make matters even worse, it was in front of the children! Can you imagine how these children felt? I couldn’t help being reminded of a picture I once saw in a book. It was of a Jewish child standing in front of his class beside the teacher on a German school in the 1930’s. On the black board was written “The Jew is our enemy. Beware the Jew.” (In German, of course.) Do I alone see a connection between these two? They’re not that far apart, IMO.

And I have thought about it at times lately: It’s not just in the (somewhat) distant past, more than half a century ago. Occasionally I find myself thinking about the images from Romania when the Warsaw pact ended and the Iron curtain fell. Children in orphanages, sitting on their dirty beds, rocking. Would that have been me if I had had the misfortune to be born Romanian?I was 12 when I saw those images on the news, and already labeled a problem child seeing a child psychiatrist once a week. Would I have been sent away under such circumstances? I can’t imagine such a regime bothering to take care of and help someone like me. They’d be way more likely to stow me away somewhere, out of sight of the public. Would I have been one of those children sitting there rocking and staring into the air? Would that have been my fate?

There are a lot of things lacking in the way we are met in contemporary western society. Bullying, wrong diagnoses, being constantly misunderstood, treated condescendingly etc. We have a long way to go and a long battle ahead of us. But despite all that, it could have been so much worse…
    
Anyone else had such thoughts? They’re quite humbling…


OP, the answer to your question is yes, most definitely I have and often do.

Do you know how to find that picture again?  I'd google it, but I don't know those words in German.

And that one, too.

I found the first one.

http://www.trumanlibrary.org/educ/mlagergren.htm

The Jewish one I found in a book about Judaism by Aron Skop. The text says: "Der Jude ist unser grösster Feind! Hütet euch vor den Juden."

The Romanian one was in the TV news, I'll see if I can find it somewhere.

I couldn't find those excact images, but here are some that are similar:

http://www.csuchico.edu/engl/faculty/eng...nages.html

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FWKQNMZa--Y

http://www.jamesnachtwey.com/jn/slides/g14.html this especially


http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/4629589.stm

There was a member here, posting earlier this year, who was one of those children in the Romanian, or other former Soviet bloc, orphanages.  I can't remember her name.


Sorry , I don't have much time right now - have to go out very soon.  Many of the children in those orphanages rocked and banged their heads because of the extreme neglect and/or abuse they experienced.  Some of them may have been autistic from birth, others presented as autistic because of the way they were treated.

Good point

Thanks.

That first link didn't work, but I found it anyway.  I don't know how the "%" sign got dropped from the link.  Curious.
http://www.csuchico.edu/engl/faculty/eng...nages.html

Weird, I wonder why it won't work....