Transcript Dump: I Am Autism

[trouble]

[Background music is ominous, including the sound of a child wailing or crying. The voice over is aggressive and male. Images are of a variety of children, mostly male, alone in the park, on the beach, on a bike, in a playground, etc.]
Voiceover: I am autism. I am visible in your children, but if I can help it, I am invisible to you until it's too late. I know where you live, and guess what? I live there to. I hover around all of you. I know no colour barrier, no religion, no morality, no currency. I speak your language fluently.and with every voice I take away, I acquire yet another language.

I work very quickly. I work faster than pediatric AIDs, Cancer and Diabetes combined.

And if you are happily married, I will make sure your marriage fails. Your money will fall into my hands and I will bankrupt you for my own self-gain.

I don't sleep, so I make sure you don't either.

I will make it virtually impossible for your family to easily attend a temple, a birthday party, a public park, without a struggle, without embarrassment, without pain.

You have no cure for me. Your scientists don't have the resources, and I relish their desperation. Your neighbours are happier to pretend that I don't exist, of course, until it's their child.

I am autism. I have no interest in right or wrong. I derive great pleasure out of your loneliness. I will fight to take away your hope. I will plot to rob you of your children and your dreams. I will make sure that every day you wake up, you will cry, wondering, "who will take care of my child after I die?"

And the truth is, I am still winning, and you are scared. And you should be.

I am autism. You ignored me. That was a mistake.

[Background music changes to one more hopeful, and instead of crying, there's the sound of children laughing. Images change so that family and/or friends walk into every frame, with lots of love and affection. The tone turns from despair to hope. Instead of one voice, it is many, male and female, almost all adults. All accents sound American.]

And to autism I say: I am a father, a mother, a grandparent, a brother, a sister. We will spend every waking hour trying to weaken you.

We don't need sleep because we will not rest until you do.

Family can be much stronger than autism ever anticipated and we will not be intimated by you, nor will the love and strength of my community.

I am a parent riding towards you, and you can push me off this horse time and time again but I will get up, climb back on and ride on with the message.

Autism, you forget who we are. You forget who you are dealing with. You forget the spirit of mothers and daughters and fathers and sons.

We are Kattar, United Kingdom, United States, Argentina, Russia, the Europe Union. We are United Nations.

We are coming together in all climates. We call on all faiths. We search with technology, and voodoo, prayer and herbs, genetic studies and a growing awareness you never anticipated.

We have had challenges, but we are the best when overcoming them.

We speak the only language that matters. Love for our children. Our capacity to love is greater than your capacity to overwhelm.

Autism is naive. You are alone. We are a community of warriors.

We have a voice.

You think because some of our children cannot speak, we cannot hear them? That is Autism's weakness.

You think that because my child lives behind a wall I am afraid to knock it down with my bare hands?

You have not properly been introduced to this community of parents and grandparents, of siblings and friends, of school teachers, therapists, pediatricians and scientists.

Autism, if you are not scared, you should be.

When you came for my child you forgot, you came for me.

Autism. Are you listening?

Comments

[torachan]

God, that makes me sick to my stomach. :(

[trouble]

I'm so sorry. It makes me ill, too. I'm doing a post for Bitch about Autism Speaks and... yeah.

[torachan]

Autism Speaks is so vile.

[phosfate]

So the proper treatment for autism is to send Bruce Willis to kick its ass?

[thetroubleisme.wordpress.com]

Thank you for almost ruining my keyboard. :)

[onyxlynx]

What the hell?

I don't think that personifying autism as The Enemy is going to lead to better understanding or (sorry, the shriek had to come out there) any kind of communication.

Wrong. (I don't want to rag on the gender or the probable privilege or the ethnicities or the orientation of the two writers, but a cluebat needs to be applied.)

[rainbow]

o.O

i'm not sure whether i find the anthropormophisising of autism or the idea that none of the "voices" include people wiht autism or the characterisation of people with autism as crying children more troubling.

but ewwwwwwwwwww at the lot of them.

(and then there's the whole use of "voodoo" isntead of vodou or vodun....)

(and the pont that until we know the how and why of autism, how can it be legitimately claimed that it's "faster" than a group of diseases?)

[willow]

I will not be able to watch that video. Thank you for the transcript.

I'm... stunned by the fear mongering and the simplification. And the juxtaposition of voudoun against technology? Corn swaddling, mind numbing bullshit high on crack - what?!!??!

And why spend any time at all perpetuating the 'OMG it is the worse. thing. ever. to have a disabled child. OMG the woe. and pain. and DESTRUCTION OF LIFE & HAPPINESS'. Hell even the positive part was all about 'We embracing the suffering and turn it against you!'

So every (C)catholic.

I just...

Why are people like this?! I mean, why don't they go live where the rest of us can't see them woeing.

OMFDeity! The ad doesn't even focus on the effing children and people who's lives are affected it's all THE DISEASE & THE BRAVE WARRIORS.

Jesuit Monkfish On Bikes!

[sqbr]

I am also glad for the transcript, because I would rather not watch it. Blah. I think there is a dark irony that, unlike my expectation when I first heard the name, "Autism Speaks" has no interest in promoting or listening to the voices of autistic people.

As an aside, yesterday I was flipping through a magazine and came across an article about Post-autistic economics wtf?

[thedivinegoat]

On behalf of my eight ear old son,

Fuck them and the horse they rode in on.

[(Anonymous)]

This whole thing... makes me want to cry.

But this?

"You think that because my child lives behind a wall I am afraid to knock it down with my bare hands?"

umm.... yeah.

--Lisa

[synecdochic]

Wow. I knew they were horrid, but I didn't realize how horrid. *shudder*

[codeman38]

I wrote a post about this video back in September.

What particularly galls me about it is that the video clips used in it were solicited from parents under what, at least to me, seems like false pretenses. If this is what Autism Speaks considers "shin[ing] a bright spotlight on autism", I shudder to think what they'd consider dark...

[codeman38]

Oh, and the other thing that struck me about the video is that it gives a completely different message with the sound turned off-- just a bunch of kids happily frolicking, no doom or gloom or anything like that.

[cesy]

That's ... really horrible.

[dorian-is-i.livejournal.com]

WHAT THE FUUUUUUUUU---

Like, seriously? I don't even know how to articulate how HORRIBLY MESSED UP this is. Augh.

[troubleinchina.livejournal.com]

I'm writing a post for Bitch about Autism Speaks. And this video seriously pisses me the fuck off, especially when you learn that they decieved the parents of those kids in order to get the video content.

[goldjadeocean.livejournal.com]

OH MY FUCKING GOD.

OH MY FUCKING GOD.

[furikku.livejournal.com]

And if you are happily married, I will make sure your marriage fails.

Sounds like not such a great marriage to me. :/ I am p. sure many people manage to raise neuroatypical offspring and not lose their shit completely.

I will make it virtually impossible for your family to easily attend a temple, a birthday party, a public park, without a struggle, without embarrassment, without pain.

. . .

I am autism. I have no interest in right or wrong. I derive great pleasure out of your loneliness. I will fight to take away your hope. I will plot to rob you of your children and your dreams. I will make sure that every day you wake up, you will cry, wondering, "who will take care of my child after I die?"

Another thing I am p. sure of is that this is less "autism" and more "NT folks who don't know how to deal with folks with autism." I mean, it's not going to be that embarrassing if people know, "O hay, that's the family with the kid what has autism, this is probably why there is a problem. Now I will go over here and feed the ducks."

What is this thing even about? Like, how are they supposed to be fighting autism, if they think it's incurable by science or whatev? Faith healing? I'm so confused.

[goldjadeocean.livejournal.com]

Ask not what these people do to try to cure autism; for you probably do not have enough Sanity Watchers points for the day.

[furikku.livejournal.com]

I just realised this while watching:

I am visible in your children, but if I can help it, I am invisible to you until it's too late.

Too late for what?! To cure them? OH WAIT THERE IS NO CURE! To kill 'em off? WHAT DOES THIS EVEN MEAN?

[troubleinchina.livejournal.com]

They're working towards developing a pre-natal test for Autism.

[furikku.livejournal.com]

Does that mean what I think it does? D:

[qem-chibati.livejournal.com]

yes.

[furikku.livejournal.com]

aaaaaaaaa fuck these guys! DDDD:

[xturtle.livejournal.com]

What the hell? Ima get my cluestick, where do I aim the beating?

[fantasyecho.livejournal.com]

DDD:

[parsimonia.livejournal.com]

They keep talking about people of all faiths, backgrounds, countries, etc, and yet most people in the video are white, in happy suburban landscapes.

[mystickeeper.livejournal.com]

My skin is crawling.

[(Anonymous)]

I had never heard of this autism speaks thing. It seems you could make a whole series of antropomorphized illnesses, bipolar speaks, cancer speaks, blindness speaks. Seems more like stupidity speaks. I don't think it is at all helpful to ascribe a willful purpose to illness. (But hey, people have ascribed willful purpose to weather, earthquakes and other things troughout history, I wouldn't, but if that makes it easier to come to grips with it then who am I to tell them they are being stupid)

[sabotabby.livejournal.com]

Wait, what? *shudders*

[firynze.livejournal.com]

I...I...WHAAAA?!

[betacandy.livejournal.com]

*gobsmack*

I get the feeling this was re-written from some paranoid flag-waving post-911 commercial that never aired. They've just replaced every instance of "al Quaeda" with "autism" and tweaked a few other bits.

[troubleinchina.livejournal.com]

The best part is that they didn't tell parents what they were doing with the videos of their kids.