I speak here from my own experiences, about the mistakes that have been made with me. Here I am giving you all the opportunity to not allow these bad mistakes to continue and to make a better future for all people who are "different".

I do see and accept the need to help autistic people overcome their difficulties. I believe this can be done in such a way that the autistic person is not being made to feel that they are "being got at", because it can do a lot to make a person feel bad about themselves for the way they are, which does not help them.

As for helping these people overcome behavior difficulties, there comes a time in life this, keeping on correcting them, has to stop. One cannot just keep on and on at them all throughout the rest of their lives. People can improve a lot, but there comes a time that kind of improvement cannot got any further. This is the time we have to accept a person as they are and support and encourage the best in the way they are, instead of of trying to force something that cannot go any further, they will continue to improve in other ways, through developing the natural WONDERS of their differences.

The autistic peoples' little worlds of their own do not have to be TAKEN AWAY and should never be. Lets start sharing the wonders of these little worlds and build beautiful things with them. These people have wonderful little smiles when they smile, let them smile, that is THEIR happiness, it is not yours to take away. You wish not to have something that belongs to you to be taken away from you. So let them be happy.

Lets say there are two people who equally have the same interest in a particular thing and at the smem level. The "normal" person is allowed to have that keen interest and is often encouraged. Becuase this person is NORMAL and therefore having nothing wrong to be put right, this person is RESPECTED for that interest. The other person who also has the same interest, is autistic, therefore there is something "wrong" which has to be corrected. The autistic person very often gets told off for being "obsessed" in that interest and gets treated badly by others because of it. Why is one person respected and allowed to keep their keen interest, and the other not allowed to be "obsessed in that same interest. Because one is NORMAL and the other is NOT NORMAL, this is very unfair, they are both equally entitled to be iterested in the things they enjoy. The fact that a person may have a disability should not mean that they have no right to their own interest and hobbies. This is an "unfairness" which badly needs to be changed.

We should stop making these people "victims" of being different by consantly getting at them. Because we are too busy concentrating on forcing these people to conform to the "norms" of society, we forget to see the wonders and the beauty in their differences. This is just looking at a person's faults and resenting it, instead we should see beyond that and look for the good in the person.

With these people who are different, it is not nessasarily a matter of right and wrong. I think we should get rid of this RIGHT versus WRONG idea. This kind of intolerant attitude causes such a lot of misery and it is unfair. Being "dirrent" does not have to be a problem. This is somehting which other people with their intolerence see as a problem because it does not conform their ideas, they make it into a problem by only treating it as a problem, when there is hadly a problem there.

Here I tell you about my little wonder.

Through my youth I was constantly "got at" bacause of my silly pop music. I was often told "there is more to life than silly pop music, you will never make anything of your life spending all your time listening to silly pop records. You should watch T. V. and learn about people and life". I hated too much tele, especially the soaps, This was an attempt to break the world of my own that I had and for me to become "normal" and grow up. All this unfair criticism was wrong, and has now been proven wrong. With the right encouragement I have made somthing of my life with this world of my own "Pop Music World". Because of this, I at last feel that I am something worth being, I am now proud of myself for this pop music world of my own, which has made me now into a PERFORMING SINGER.

These people are not "naughty" they are "different", which is no crime. We need to create times and places in which these people can have the freedom to be themselves and express themselves in their own way. I beleieve that everyone in our society (including normal people) need to have the space to take off the straight-jacket of conforming to the umwritten rules of the social norms and have freedom to express and be themselves. I think this is half of what is wrong with our society. Here I do not just advocate for autistic people, I say the same for everyone.

June 2000