Wednesday, April 2, 2008

The First Step Is the One That Altogether Escapes Notice

It must have seemed an obvious choice—not even much of a choice really—to take autism as the sign of something gone horribly wrong. There was the example of schizophrenia after all helping to lay the groundwork, and now the unveiling of all these disconnected children, so clearly different and apparently destroyed.

We have been traversing autism’s geography for more than sixty years now and have visited a veritable tour’s delight of promised lands: Refrigerator Mother Mountain, Blind Mind Alley, Genome Dome, and the Swamp of a Thousand Toxins. Having traveled for so long and having charted a course so wide, surely our much scribbled-upon maps must now be showing great progress.

Except, of course, that first step was in the wrong direction.

No comments: