Click on the title of this post to go to the ABC News story about the burgeoning neurodiversity movement in the U.S. Personally, I'm glad to see that this is beginning to challenge the hundreds and thousands of "cure" advocates that seem to be driving the autism policy agenda in this country. One of the best weeks I had with my "What is Normal" class last year was when we read the X-Men graphic novel "Gifted", the issue that the final X-Men movie was based on, and debated the pros and cons of curing "difference".
We live in a society today that strives for homogenization in modern U.S. society, from our milk to our children we want them all to be clean, sanitized and, above all, normal. Unfortunately, normality is a wholly unrealistic goal and denies the tremendously rich diversity that defines the human experience. As Shakespeare says through Hamlet: "There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so"...we have defined autism,Asperger's,learning disabilities, and any other diverse expression of the human genetic code as bad...but it is only our narrow thinking that has done so. We only think it's bad...we need to open up our minds and consider other alternatives. We need to acknowledge that difference and diversity is good for us, not a threat to our imagined concept of what a man, woman, or child should be.
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