Discussing Autism

Right On, Autism Diva, Right On!

There is no epidemic, is there…as a culture we just shoved everything under the rug, holed everyone up in institutions, and ignored that it all ever happened.

One day in 1957, when Jeff Daly was 6 years old, his little sister Molly, disappeared.

Every night at dinner, he would ask his parents the same question, “Where’s Molly?”

Every night, he says, he received the same answer: “Stop asking about Molly.”

Decades later, Daly learned that his parents had sent Molly to a state institution nine days before her third birthday. Nearly 50 years later, Daly found his sister and made a documentary about his search.

Wouldn’t that be nice? To know your parents put your sister away? Woudn’t it be better to know that an entire society did that?

There’s a timeline that explains that in 1967 about 195,000 people, half of whom were children were institutionalized for being disabled, many of them would have been diagnosable as autistic by today’s standards. Many of the were treated brutally and died in those institutions of the actions of drugs and of neglect and disease.

One of the most horrific statements made in one of the video clips was that people in corporate American just did not have retarded kids, so they sent them away and pretended that they didn’t. Another statement was that no one wanted to be known as the mother of a “retard.” These were the peers of Molly’s parents. The unmitigated gall of such thinking! The hardheartedness. Who are these people who thought they were so special? How sad that they ever got caught up in the whole corporate rat race and sold their humanity to it. To give away a child–a baby. Handing over a baby for forever would be most women’s worst nightmare, most father’s too.

The parents of autistic kids today who are demanding a cure for their autistic children (not all are like this) are themselves children of this very generation of people who would callously send their children away to be warehoused and pretend they did not exist any more. It’s just what was done. So, there’s nothing there in the culture, no way to deal with the shame of having a autism spectrum child, and these days there aren’t so many people who will participate in such a sham as to pretend a disabled child who lived with the family for three years from birth on, did not exist.

So it really is possible that there is no epidemic…that it has been there all along.

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