United Stand for Autistics

I belong to the Aspie Underground group on Facebook, and today is the United Stand for Autistics.

From the event page on Facebook:

What can you do to help?

Print out the campaign ads, which are available as the group photos, and post them in your general area.

If you are a college student, post them around your school.


The short version:

Scheduled to start a week or two after colleges resume sessions, this campaign consists of the following:

Raising awareness that anti-autism propaganda exists and is bad

Raising awareness of the search for a pre-natal test for autism and raising awareness that this is a problem

Encouraging people and companies to sever ties with organizations proliferating anti-autism propaganda and funding the eugenics threat

Note: This campaign does not take a stance on a cure in general.

Since I can't really do this offline, I thought I would do it online, here in my blog. So, here are the posters I liked the best:





Feel free to share. Hopefully, clicking on the images will take you to a larger image. If not, try going to the events page (linked above); they're all there in the photos section!

Punny, punny, punny...

My boyfriend is an undiagnosed Aspie. He loves puns. He sent me the following this morning:

Veteran Pillsbury spokesman Pop N. Fresh died yesterday of a severe yeast infection. He was 71.
Known to friends as Brown-n-Serve, Fresh was an avid gardener and tennis player. Fresh was buried in one of the largest funeral ceremonies in recent years. Dozens of celebrities turned out including Mrs. Butterworth, the California Raisins, Hungry Jack, Aunt Jemima, Betty Crocker, the Hostess Twinkies, and Skippy. The graveside was piled high with flours as longtime friend Aunt Jemima delivered the eulogy, describing Fresh as a man who "never knew how much he was kneaded."
Fresh rose quickly in show business, but his later life was filled with many turnovers. He was not considered a very smart cookie, wasting much of his dough on half-baked schemes -- conned by those who buttered him up.
Still, even as a crusty old man, he was a roll model for millions. Fresh is survived by his second wife. They have two children and another bun in the oven. The funeral was held at 350 for about 20 minutes.

No, he didn't write it. But this is his kind of thing, to be sure. Feel free to share this with the autistic person in your life - he or she just might find it as entertaining as I did.

Oversight on the part of the City of Calgary leads to discrimination against individuals with disabilities.

Winter hit Canada hard this year, and temperatures everywhere have been pretty cold. The snow storms just prior to Christmas had everyone in a tizzy, especially in places where it rarely snows, like Vancouver.

I live in Calgary, where we get snow every winter. However, we also get chinooks. A chinook is basically lots of warmth that melts all the snow. Typically, it will snow and get really really cold for a few days, then we'll get a chinook and the snow will all melt. A week later, it will snow again. Rinse and repeat. That is Calgary.

Calgary drivers are, arguably, not the greatest drivers in the world, especially when it comes to snow. I don't know what it is about this city, but every time it snows, most people become complete idiots, driving as though they've never seen snow before in their lives. (Yes, this happens every time it snows after a chinook.)

This year, we had more snow than usual. The city ploughed the main roads, which is all they are required to do due to policy. I think they also ploughed the transit routes, which is a Good Thing.

Well, we've got a chinook that's just started, and the snow in the residential streets has been packed by cars so that the street is at the same level as the sidewalks. That's pretty deep snow. Guess what happens when it starts to melt?

That's right: it gets soft and slushy.

Since some of my readers may not know what slush is, let me explain. You know those drinks with crushed ice and flavouring? 7-Eleven calls them Slurpees. Yeah, well, slush is like that, only it's snow and dirt and salt, and it's on the ground. (Don't eat it!)

Slushy snow is really hard to drive in, especially when it's this deep. If it's too soft, your car sinks right in, and it's difficult to get purchase enough that your vehicle is able to move. I'm lucky, in that I have a Pontiac Sunfire that actually has decent tires. It's pretty low to the ground, though, and it's front-wheel drive; I have to admit that I have gotten stuck once so far this winter.

Now that I've explained the road conditions, allow me to tell the story of my afternoon.

As my regular readers may recall, I spend two hours every Thursday afternoon with an autistic teenager. I function as a Community Aide, and we usually go out into the community, often to the library or the book store. I arrive at four o'clock, which is about the time she arrives home from school. She uses a Handi-Bus for this transportation, which, for those who do not know, is a service used to assist individuals with disabilities to get around the city. Several schools hire them to transport their students, and they are also able to be booked by individuals. The Handi-Bus system is meant for people who, for whatever reason, are unable to access the regular Calgary transit routes, and it provides door-to-door service. However, it is not a taxi service.

Today, I arrived on time for my shift and found three women (one of them the mother of the girl I work with) trying to help the Handi-Bus driver get un-stuck.

Yes, people, that's right, the bus my client takes to and from school every day was stuck in the snow in the middle of the cul de sac.

Of course, I parked in a nearby driveway and went to help. With the bus being rear-wheel drive, I got nicely sprayed by snow more than once throughout the event. And yes, we did eventually get the bus un-stuck, but it took the addition of two men and a lot of maneouvering to do it.

There are two reasons why the bus got stuck: first, the road had four to six inches of softened (melting) snow on it; second, the tires were not very good. Why is this a Bad Thing? Because there were still students with disabilities on the bus. It took half an hour to get it un-stuck. This is a disruption to those students' routines and schedules, and while the bus driver obviously had no control over getting stuck in the snow, the fact that it happened is entirely unacceptable.

My client's mother phoned Access Calgary, her alderman, and the city's infoline. I don't know the details of her conversations, but I know that she talked about the need for winter tires on the Handi-Bus, the need for the Handi-Bus routes to be ploughed, and the need for education in winter driving for Handi-Bus drivers. She had difficulty getting through to the alderman, so she wrote an e-mail. She also took pictures of the street in front of her house, including the ruts that the Handi-Bus dug in the snow.

This woman would never use the word 'discrimination' in her advocacy on this matter, but I will. The fact of the matter is that if the city ploughs the Calgary Transit bus routes, it needs to also plough the Handi-Bus routes. To refuse to do so is discrimination against people with disabilities. It denies these people the ability to get around the city - an ability that everyone else in the city has.

I honestly don't care if my own street never gets ploughed. I have a car, and it's doing quite well in the slush. I'm also just one block away from a ploughed road, so if I'm uncertain, I can drive over there to get out of the slush. And if my car is ever completely immobilized by the slush, there is a major bus route that goes along that ploughed road.

But this girl, and the many others like her who require the Handi-Bus in order to get around the city, needs her street ploughed. Her mother is going to drive her to school tomorrow morning, because she can't risk putting her on a bus that will probably get stuck somewhere.

I hope the City of Calgary chooses to rectify this situation.

A Friend Like Henry: solicited book review

A Friend Like Henry, by Nuala Gardner, is billed on the cover as "The remarkable true story of an autistic boy and the dog that unlocked his world." While I definitely think that the book is worth reading, I don't think the dog unlocked the boy's world.

Nuala Gardner is the mother in this story, so we're reading her version of events. The book is, thankfully, neither overly emotional nor overly descriptive of things that aren't directly applicable to the story (both problems I've noted in parent-books over the years). At the end of the book, just before Nuala's Afterword and the book club discussion questions, Dale (the autistic boy) gives a few explanations for his behaviour.

Nuala is impressive in her ability to recognize that Dale was autistic from the beginning (would that more parents could see this in their children). The struggle she and her husband went through to get their son properly diagnosed is amazing, and I am honestly rather amazed that they stuck with it. In fact, they pushed throughout Dale's childhood to make sure he was in the right school placements and had all the opportunities they felt he should have for socializing, so that he could learn from his same-age peers.

This isn't really a story about a dog who unlocks an autistic boy's world, though. Rather, it's the story of a family that rallied around their autistic child and found ways to harness his interests so that he could learn and participate in activities outside of his home. Dale's perseverative interest in Thomas the Tank Engine got the whole family through a lot, including the death of Nuala's mother; meanwhile, Dale's interest in and ability to relate to the dog (Henry) allowed his parents to teach him hygeine and conversational skills, and even got him eating a varied diet.

Dale's little sister, Amy, was born after much trial and tribulation; she also is autistic, but regressed after a seemingly normal infancy. The siblings are very different in their autistic traits, something which Nuala stresses.

I had difficulty understanding how upset Nuala and her husband, James, were when faced with Amy's diagnosis, but I'm sure that's just my own "Theory of Mind" coming into play. I also had some difficulty with the emphasis Nuala and James placed on Dale stopping things like running in the garden; in Dale's section at the end of the book, he explains that there were some things that he did to feel calm and more himself, but that he stopped doing them to make his parents happy. This is a problem, in my mind, because there could be repercussions later on in Dale's life if he doesn't find other ways to feel calm.

Those two concerns aside, I applaud this book for its honesty and straightforward account of life with Dale. I very much enjoyed reading it and highly recommend it as an account of how a severely autistic child was helped to manage his life without any special programming besides a bit of speech therapy - all else was done by family members, friends, and teachers at school.

One small warning, though: Henry does eventually die (he's old by then), and that whole part of the tale is definitely tear-inducing.

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