There is nothing “wrong” with anyone, and…

I saw a post recently arguing that RFK Jr. is a Nazi for sounding an alarm about rising autism rates, and calling to make prevention and treatment a high priority. The argument is that by labeling autism a disease (autism spectrum “disorder”), we pathologize and shame people who are not sick, but merely different. We make them wrong when there is nothing wrong. It is but a short step from there to classic Nazi eugenics to cleanse society of the people it deems inferior or who deviate from social norms.

Indeed, many autistic people say things like, “There is nothing wrong with me. I like myself the way I am.”

On one level that rings true, and it is important to say. I remember when I was in elementary school, one of the classrooms was “special education.” It contained the children who were politely known at the time as “mentally retarded.” Today the term is regarded as nearly a slur, but then it was considered a compassionate euphemism—perhaps these children were merely slower to develop than the rest. In any case, the compassionate motivation was lost on my classmates, who quickly adopted “retard” and “sped” (short for special ed) as epithets to direct at those kids and each other.

I felt uncomfortable in the presence of the ridicule of the special ed kids, but I was too much a coward to speak up about it.

So there is truth in “there is nothing wrong with the autistic.” But I would like to hold that truth side by side with perspectives like the following, starting with this Facebook post. I will refrain from linking to it, as the poster wants to remain relatively private.

This [photo of the poster’s bruised face] was taken 4 years ago. We were in the midst of the worst crisis we'd ever been in with our son.

I don't recall what he was raging about that day. Dale was at work. I was home waiting on a large delivery. Just as the driver showed up, he started his daily violent meltdown. Normally I'd lock myself out in the garpartment for safety, but this always drove him outside into the yard and that day the delivery driver was a woman.

I ran outside to warn her and to get her to come back later. He chased me outside, grabbed me by the hair and yanked me to the ground. He got one hand in my mouth and tried to rip my cheek open. He went for my eyes to gouge them out. As I fought him off, I felt a great peace. I thought "I'm gonna lose my eye but it's ok." I was able to sweep his legs out from under him and he went down. As I sat in the safety of the delivery truck with the gracious, understanding driver, I watched my son rip the front door off our house.

I don't dwell on this or any of the other times like this. They are not who my son is. He's a wonderful, loving, funny person. I adore him with all my heart. He has severe autism. He is verbal but he can't have a normal conversation. He can't tie his shoes, make his own dinner, or hold a job. He will never live independently. When Dale and I are gone, he will likely live in some type of institutionalized care facility. It breaks my heart just thinking about it.

When he is on any type of anti-inflammatory type drug, he gets better. This is because one of his diagnoses is encephalopathy. He has extensive brain damage from the shots he was given when he was 3 years old, including his first MMR and Varicella. He began showing signs of brain swelling and seizures two days later.

I don't like anyone to know the extreme struggles we've had with him over the years. I've talked here and there about it but don't share the worst of it. I'm a pretty private person, so talking about this is very hard for me. And I don't want people to get the wrong impression of my precious son.

The reason I'm sharing this now is because I hope that when you see people talking bad about RFKjr (who has long been a hero in our house), you will know that he was referring to cases like my son's. This type of autism absolutely devastates families with the financial, emotional, physical, and psychological toll it takes on you. It isolates you. The stress undoes you and shortens your life expectancy. When Dale had a heart attack two years ago, it drove home how difficult this would be without him.

I love each of you and take a lot of comfort in knowing that you care about our family and Micah. Thank you for that!

This is not an isolated story. At least a quarter of people on the autism spectrum are classified as “profoundly autistic”; many others have severe disabilities. I began to pay attention to autism back in the late 1990s. Based on a gut feeling and a general sense of a pervasive wrongness in civilization, or maybe because I am mentally ill with opposition defiant disorder, I refused to vaccinate our first child and received a lot of pushback, incredulous reactions from friends, family, and pretty much everyone else. So, in a classic exercise of confirmation bias, I started looking to see whether there was anything to confirm my suspicions. I got on mailing lists run by people like Anne Dachel and Barbara Loe Fisher, and read story after heartbreaking story, hundreds of them, from parents, especially mothers, who coalesced into the movement that eventually got RFK Jr.’s attention. Here is a typical one:

Hi, my name is Ashley, I’m here to tell my son’s story of vaccine-induced autism. My son was taken into his well-baby visit at almost five months old for his four-month-old well baby shots. We took him in, he received eight vaccines, and he’s never been the same since that day. He went in a happy, healthy, chubby baby boy, and came out one we could barely recognize, shaking his head violently back and forth, no longer able to look at us, no longer wanting to be touched or held, not able to even latch on to breastfeed, falling off the weight chart, blood-streaked diarrhea so acidic it was burning his butt and legs and had to be hosed off in the sink. Most importantly, he’s never returned to that same baby boy that we had.

Ashley’s testimony is part of this compilation. More stories here and here. Often the response from pediatricians is to say that the reaction was a coincidence, or to blame the mothers for being hysterical. I don’t think anyone could read or listen to hundreds of stories like that and not be radicalized.

Here is an excerpt from another all-too-typical story. (Worth reading the whole thing, but this gives the flavor.)

When he got his MMR at 12 months we had a serious reaction. 104 fever, and a horrible rash all over his body. He was sick for 10 days. We were told that this was normal. Then, he started hand flapping and his eyes started crossing. Again, another sign — and more assurance that “this is normal, many kids hand flap, his eyes look normal— it’s a phase.” He also slowed down in terms of language. We continued to listen to our doctor that vaccines were safe, and effective. And that there are virtually no side effects. So, we continued to vaccinate.

It gets worse from there.

I understand that these anecdotes won’t convince anyone that vaccine injury is real. Maybe if you read hundreds such stories, you would change your mind, especially when you really examine the science that supposedly debunks the vaccine-autism link. Following a pattern that is by no means limited to the pharmaceutical industry, corporations and captured government agencies wage a campaign of propaganda, tendentious science, persecution of whistleblowers and dissidents, and cover-ups. Read this overview of the persecution of Dr. Andrew Wakefield to get a sense of the machinery that keeps reigning paradigms and profits in place. If you want to also look him up on Wikipedia, I’ll save you the trouble. His bio starts with: “Andrew Jeremy Wakefield is a British fraudster, anti-vaccine activist, and disgraced former physician.” Then, if you dare, read Vax-Unvax or Dissolving Illusions and observe how the critiques of those books touch very little of the substance of their arguments.

That will take a lot of work. Why would you do that if you already know they must be wrong? Why must they be wrong? Because if they are right then the whole edifice of modern society — its systems of knowledge production, its public institutions, academia, government, and the ideology of progress — must be unsound, for the core medical practice of vaccination is embedded within them. You can’t believe “We got this one item wrong” without impugning the rest of the edifice along with it.

I don’t understand (well actually I kinda do) how vaccine skepticism has been labeled these days as “far-right,” or how those who listen to moms instead of corporate-funded science are deemed fascists. I thought it was the Left that challenged corporate power and establishment narratives, and championed the citizen in her struggle against oppressive institutions.

Anyway, hopefully the foregoing makes it clear that those who advocate for the prevention and treatment of autism are not intolerant Nazis with a secret eugenics agenda.

To name something as an illness is not to shame the ill. The same argument that to pathologize autism is to shame the autistic is also applied to obesity—to mention it as a problem is to engage in “fat-shaming.” Indeed, there is nothing intrinsically wrong on a moral or spiritual level with obese people. Those who judge them do not understand what it is like to have a metabolic disorder, or an addiction-generating trauma, or to be too impoverished and busy to buy and cook healthy food, or to grow up deskilled in a ruined food culture, or to spend a childhood mostly indoors, or to be desperately lonely with only food to maintain an experience of connection, or to be bereft of intimacy’s sweetness with only sugar’s available instead. There are many causes for obesity, and few if any are the fault of the obese. But that does not mean we should ignore the causes or celebrate the condition.

Is it “poor-shaming” to critique predatory neoliberal capitalism for its impoverishment of the Global South? Is it “addict-shaming” to point out that addiction is destroying people’s health? Such arguments would be very convenient for those profiting from the poor or the addicts. The functional medicine practitioner Mel Koppelman makes the point emphatically:

Autism is a developmental disorder characterized by the stunted growth of the right cerebral hemisphere. This hemisphere gives rise to embodiment, emotional connection, empathy, and most types of attention.

But these data [autism diagnosis in 1 in 31 children] don’t include the exponential rise in the stunted growth of the left side of the brain, characterized by dyslexia, dyscalculia and emotional regulation disorders, which is actually more common.

Both of these conditions give rise to Functional Disconnection Syndrome, where the two halves of the brain don’t operate as a functional unit, resulting in all kinds of emotional, cognitive, neurological and biological symptoms and diseases. Other examples of symptoms or diagnoses in this category, in addition to autism and dyslexia, include Tourette’s and tics, OCD, sensory processing disorders, and ADHD.

This includes the majority of all children in the United States.

We have literally poisoned and brain-damaged an entire generation of kids.

And then those doing the poisoning told parents and children to celebrate it.

And to be angry and distrustful of anyone trying to help them.

But we could do something else. We could stop poisoning the kids. We could look for the causes and collectively insist that they stop.

There is, however, a deeper level to what is happening through the autism phenomenon. In adapting to their condition, autistic people often develop gifts, both mental and emotional, that society needs right now; for example, the abilities of the Spellers described in the podcast the Telepathy Tapes. More generally, in adapting to the specific challenges of each stage of civilization, human beings develop the capabilities necessary for humanity to move to the next stage.

Each one of us is soul made flesh; Life made human. If a tree grows in rocky soil, shaded by other trees, and it twists and reaches for the light, we do not say it is a bad tree for being misshapen. It is doing what life does. Life wants to live. Life adapts to overcome all difficulties. Life evolves because of its difficulties.

Anyone who thinks that their own virtue and willpower distinguishes them from the obese, the depressed, the addicted, the poor, the lazy, the ignorant, the unjust, or the violent has a humbling lesson in front of them.

When a child is injured by vaccines or other environmental insults, and the life within him takes a form different from the rest of us, this is cause for celebration — life lives! — not shame. Yet that does not justify the injury.

The autistic are not the only ones who’ve suffered injury from the world-destroying life-destroying Machine. The modern way of life, birth, child-rearing, and death, its sundering of ties to community and nature, its entrenched cycles of trauma, its denial of spirit, its relentless artificial scarcity, and its pollution of the body and the environment with toxic chemicals compose the rocky soil and occluded sunlight in which we have all grown. The life in each of us adapts to these conditions as best it can.

We call this basic truth compassion. “But for the grace of God, I too would be autistic. I too would be obese. I too would be addicted.” Or, “I too would be a migrant. I too would be on welfare. I too would drop out of school.” And even, “I too would be a criminal. I too would be greedy. I too would cheat and lie and steal and do others harm.” Not only would I, but surely I have, in some way and form. As Thich Nhat Hanh said, “I am the pirate.” What is in you, is in me, some echo of it, some holographic trace of it. Let he who be without sin cast the first stone.

Those we stone with our insults and shaming and denunciation are ourselves. Understand a person’s backstory, and you will realize, “That could have been me.” None of us are made of better or worse stuff than the rest. We all are life, doing what life does in the circumstances it is in. Yet neither is anyone a helpless victim of circumstance. That’s because life is not static. We grow new capacities in evolving within and against trying conditions, until they no longer imprison us but become the material for creative choice. That is the moment when the truth of “It is not your fault; you are victim of forces beyond your control” gives way to a new truth: “Stop feeling sorry for yourself. You are no longer a prisoner of your past, you the author of your future.” The former had been true, but no longer. From the victim, comes the master. From the illness comes the medicine.

So, when I meet someone profoundly challenged by injury, illness, tragedy, or persecution, I am always curious. What capacities have been forged in the crucible of your suffering? Again and again, I discover generosity among the impoverished, inner freedom among the incarcerated, compassion among the judged, kindness among the brutalized, joy among the bereft. Sometimes it is hard to see, just a glint of something still forming. Sometimes it is radiant like the sun.

It is by those who have grown strong by overcoming the injuries dealt to them by civilization that a new kind of civilization will be born.