my new favorite based out of context voice clip of all time.
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Kennedy is going in on all you pant shitting autist out there. absolutely brutal. lol
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I'm delighted to hear someone call it out like this. "Oh tee-hee I have autism go easy pls" is some serious downplaying of how broken actual autism is and how fucking desperately we need to find ways to prevent it.
I'm reminded of a documentary whose name escapes me at the moment that showed a "low-functioning" (really should be called "non-functioning" imho) autistic man who lives with his parents, because he never moved out (and there's nowhere to send him anyway). He can't (won't?) speak, just watches shitty TV in his trashed bedroom and squeals and screams like a baby when anything doesn't go just the way he likes it, including such nuisances as being bathed by his elderly mother, fed food a few minutes too early or late for his tastes, or hearing a noise from outside (that no one in his world has control over) that -- in the moment -- becomes the single most painful and nasty thing he's ever heard or experienced.
He routinely beats himself in the head with his fists and rams his head into (and through) the house's various walls. There's holes in the drywall everywhere -- his parents have long since abandoned efforts to repair the damage as he goes, partly because they know it's futile (since he'll just trash it again later) and partly because they can't afford it (and finally because they're getting too old to be physically able to do it). On good days, he uses the toilet. On bad days, his mother wipes his 30-year-old adult ass while he screams and shrieks at the "discomfort."
By all accounts, from the outside, he's just a lazy fucking asshole. I begrudgingly accept (as the documentary seems to) the "informed" opinions of various healthcare providers that he indeed suffers from autism and isn't
just a colossal prick, and that e.g. just smacking him around a few times and kicking him to the curb for a week to fend for himself wouldn't fix him immediately.
The trouble is -- what do you/we/society/healthcare/whatever actually
do with him? Assuming he actually is fundamentally broken and not just being a cunt, it means he will genuinely never improve. As Mr. Kennedy points out in the above video, he will literally never make any kind of meaningful contribution to society or mankind at all. He has no creative or artistic skills or interests, so he won't even be able to fit that mystical "tortured idiot savant artist" stereotype.
His life is a misery. He will never know anything better, because he cannot experience it due to his malfunctions. He will never earn a wage, produce anything of value, produce or raise a family, date another person, have sex (thank god, honestly), render aid to another person (he is low-functioning, remember, so he doesn't actually know how to fucking
do anything and apparently can't be taught any skills; he also doesn't speak), etc.
Even if we accept (in the most charitable view) that none of this is his fault, the fact remains he is effectively a useless creature with not only no redeeming qualities, but with active hostility towards others and will always be a net drain on the world around him until his internal misery ends in his inevitable death.
His parents will never be able to retire, relax, go on vacation, or even get more than a few hours' break from taking care of him, until the day they die. There are no other family members extant to step in and help. He himself has no friends, and neither do his parents because they simply don't have the time. When his parents die, he will become a ward of the state, which will officially give zero shits about him and will result in him being kicked around different services and "systems" until he crash-lands somewhere that can tolerate him more than it can bear to kick him back out.
What makes this tragic is the fact that, best as we can all tell, this isn't really anybody's "fault." Subscribers to the "just universe" hypothesis find situations like this especially uncomfortable, because there's no real "justice" to be had in this situation. There's nobody to punish -- the parents (to anyone's knowledge) didn't do anything particularly egregious before or during pregnancy to provoke this defect, didn't mistreat him in-utero or post-partum while raising him, and he was given the same opportunities to grow as every other average lower-to-middle-class child gets in the US -- public education, reasonably decent healthcare, a non-broken two-family heterosexual home comprising both parents, etc.
Two ordinary middle-class people had a kid and he turned out to be a dud through no fault of their own (or anyone's). There's nothing to be done, no way to fix it, no one to punish and arguably no way to actually help that doesn't cause intense suffering and potentially involve cruelty.
Can't just kill him (sarcasm and snark notwithstanding). Physically removing him from the house (to give his parents a chance to retire and rest) will fuck him up pretty hard too (most low-functioning autists fucking
rage when their surroundings and routines are forcibly changed and it often never stops). He doesn't trust anyone besides his parents (and even then, just barely), so even arranging for in-house care by professionals will disrupt things and possibly harm more than it helps.
There's no happy ending coming either. His parents will eventually die, never having known a moment's peace from the moment their son was born. He will dimly sense their absence, at least for a time, then continue his nonsensical rage against an existence he apparently isn't equipped to comprehend or cope with. Whether he winds up in a home of some kind, or homeless on the streets somewhere, or lying dead in a ditch for offending the wrong person and earning the only rebuke a drug fiend or gang banger can understand, there's no happy outcome for him.
So what the fuck do we do about it? For him and his family? Sadly, not much. But we can sure as shit go on a research frenzy to figure out WTF causes autism and how to prevent it. It's nuts to suggest we shouldn't.
And we should certainly discourage people from downplaying how fucking obnoxious low-functioning autists are or glamorizing autism as a "mixed blessing." No, it's not a blessing of any kind. Just because you can compute primes in your head really fast and can successfully wipe your own ass most days without help doesn't mean being a "high-functioning autist" is something to be proud of.
Good for Kennedy finally calling out publicly for the need to attack this head-on.
