I love the thing about the disabled dog. It made me laugh out loud!

Let me explain a little more about my post.

Stephen King said about how his stories arise that they all started with "What if...?"

My "What if...?" is this: What if someone won the Powerball Lottery four times in a row, and saved the earth from destruction by predicting the orbit of an asteroid, because that person had an extraordinary sense of numbers? That person would be wide open to hatred out of envy, and then adulation for saving the world.

Just as Stephen King, or any good writer, is able to get inside a character, and make people care about that person, so I need to get this character right.

When I was growing up in the 50's and early 60's, the words "spastic" and "retarded" were diagnoses. We never, ever, as children, saw a person in a wheelchair in school.

This grew out of a deep cultural bias against anyone with a physical or mental difference from "normalcy". The dominant notion was that if a person was physically imperfect, they were morally imperfect. That bias stretches back to antiquity.

Things are better today. But there is still a long way to go.

One thing is certain. The more people find out about each other - how much we are alike, the better we are able to not just tolerate, but appreciate the differences.

In reading posts on this board, I have found that many autistics have come to the same sin as NT's. Face it, the world is a mean place. For everybody.

The only help we have in this mean, mean place is from each other. Labels and biases keep us from joining hands in an effort to survive and flourish.

So I ask my first specific question.

How would an autistic person know whether or not his/her parents loved them?