A NJ Republican Jewish family, headed by Lee Solomon, finds their class privilege threatened by one autistic son with questionable ability to support himself and younger son with opioid addiction starting with father inadequately securing his painkillers from son.
(Read part of image of article under sub-headline "I really liked them")
Father, and New Jersey Republican party candidate supporter, Lee Solomon intervenes with opioid addicted son by reminding him who will care for (support financially in the absence of intergovernmental partnerships appropriating and authorizing tax receipts to pay for a social safety net) AJ’s brother on the autism spectrum.
More DEA-paid for and locally-administered unused prescription drug take back days like these
could have helped Lee Solomon dispose of his unwanted 360 Oxycontin (opioid) pills (180 pills each with two different dosages) and prevented son A.J. from taking them recreationally and becoming addicted. Family economic security for the Solomon family could have been strengthened to support A.J.'s brother diagnosed (before the 2013 erasure of the diagnosis) with Asperger's Syndrome now diagnosed as autism spectrum disorder ASD.
ADAPT (Americans Disabled for Attendant Programs Today and Americans Disabled for Accessible Public Transportation two names same acronym) was less inclusive in effect than intent in building support for the 1990 ADA. The Independent Living movement started in Berkeley, CA by the late Ed Roberts used similarly inclusive rhetoric for exclusive benefit to demand passage of the 1974 Rehab Act that pays for over 2,000 Centers for Independent Living CILs. Expand the funding structure already in place to help more PwDs more quickly.
Both organizations and the Independent Living movement should support a reintroduced Disability Integration Act
in future Congresses and expansion of 1974 Rehabilitation Act funding as rustedaspie wrote last year
(quoted text in brackets to prevent reader confusion and make sentence in the current post comprehensible)
[ Demands for social change were always more exclusive
There now exists over 2,000 Centers for Independent Living in the United States alone. The core Service provided under the Rehab Act include, transition for people leaving nursing homes and youth, information and referral, independent living skills training, peer counseling, and advocacy.
than the inclusivity of the rhetoric, used to organize people, by groups like the Berkeley, CA CIL, and ADAPT (Americans Disabled for Accessible Public Transportation and Americans Disabled for Attendant Programs Today), as well as the EnDependence Center of Northern Virginia. ]
to designate consumer-survivor and self-advocate run organizations as independent living centers to help more PwDs receive supports to live in communities of their choosing. No more fiscal austerity-based wait lists that hide electorally unpopular budget cuts by making the services harder to qualify for
and mental health consumer-survivor and intellectual/developmental disability self-advocate ‘communities’ severity contests/oppression Olympics.
No more diversion of demand away from safety net programs (based on a medical model of disability) by self-advocates like Autism Network International former organizers of autreat, its event planning successor Association for Autistic Community organizing autspace since 2014 with no event 2015 and 2017, aascend in the Bay Area of California, an autistic adult support group in Portland, OR, Autistic Self Advocacy Network ‘community building/political activism’ and aagw.net in the DMV (District, Maryland, Virginia).
Organizational missions of autistic self-advocate run groups listed in the above paragraph are all based on 'members' buying in to the meme (to replace the social safety net with peer to peer help) 'someone is always worse off than me' of hypothetical anonymized pity representing the social model of disability applied
to autism
by calling autism a personality
(summed up by this comment from user name Trogluddite)
9 months ago
For me personally, many of my traits do not seem at all like aspects of personality - though certainly, having grown up with them, they have contributed to the development of my personality. In addition, having spent most of my life so far forcing myself to "pass as normal", there is a big question mark over whether the personality that I project to other people is entirely my real personality, rather than an false persona adopted for ease of interaction with other people.
To take one example. I may be perceived by other people as having an "asocial" or "shy" personality. However, much of my reticence to speak up socially has nothing to do with lacking the desire to do so. There are aspects of my condition which make the process of communicating more difficult regardless of how much I would prefer to be more outgoing...
- My processing of speech is very slow. This often leaves me with little chance to express my true opinion. I can choose between somebody else taking the next turn to speak before I get the chance, or to react quickly but say something which doesn't really capture what I really think or misunderstands information that I haven't processed yet.
- Reading eye contact and body language are not simply a matter of having too little practice. My senses get overwhelmed easily, and my ability to avoid distracting stimuli so that I can focus on the right thing at the right time is limited. I do well at identifying facial expressions when it is explicitly tested, but in real life, I just don't see them in the first place because of these sensory issues and problems with attention.
- Having to consciously attend to reading body language and expressions is a huge extra load on my brain relative to having an instinctive response for them. As well as being very tiring, it also distracts me from hearing what is said accurately and processing its meaning. It is hard to find the right thing to say when so much contextual information is missed.
- Understanding social situations also calls for a lot of explicit analysis, again a further stress on an already overworked brain. Trouble with judging the appropriateness of what I'm going so say leads to anxiety and self-censorship (often "playing it safe" by simply being agreeable whether or not I truly feel that way.)
- Too much sensory input can simply overwhelm me to the point of shutting down. If I feel that this is imminent, I have to remove myself from the situation, regardless of how much I would like to spend more time with the people present.
A similar argument could be made for the executive functioning issues which I experience, which can sometimes prevent me from initiating an action even when I desire it, can clearly see the benefits of it, and have all the necessary resources at my disposal.
In fact, this is largely how I define which of my autistic traits I consider to be disabilities - they are the parts which hinder me from acting on the needs and desires of my true self, or from negotiating reasonable compromises with the world around me. However, by this definition, it is also perfectly reasonable that not all autistic people need identify themselves as disabled (or even as autistic at all), as their personality and their autistic traits may be in harmony with each other.
trait.
Keeping an ambiguous 'boundary' between when an individual independent living problem becomes "a disability or a dysfunction" triggering (qualifying for) publicly-funded social services
I do agree that the above, as with any other trait associated with autism, exist on a continuum, without any distinct boundary at which they become a disability or dysfunction.
helps ration demand for expanded publicly-funded social services such as job development and retention, and housing, food and utility bill payment assistance to only the 'truly most needy' or 'vulnerable' (formerly known as low functioning) individuals with disabilities that even people with disabilities have been shamed out of seeking services in favor of 'workarounds' that shift the costs of inclusion from the community to the individual mostly in time trying to create a 'workaround.'
Reducing the demand for information and referral back to the social safety net (funded by taxes and based on residence within the taxing state or local jurisdiction boundary to be found 'eligible') to ‘unofficial,’ individual, peer to peer relationships built within confidentiality-protected group spaces helps leave what little services and authorized tax revenues are left for the increasingly more intense need (formerly known as lower functioning) autistics unable to build peer to peer relationships because of urgency to meet immediate survival needs. Self-advocacy perpetuating this situation that uses words like 'inclusive' or 'welcoming to all' is simply inclusive rhetoric for exclusive benefit.
