I am happy for you that you are relieved and open about your medical condition @sneakypete but this wasn't about you.
The video and chatter about Barron were designed to ridicule and demean a then 10 year child because his last name is Trump.
Anything categorized under the National Institute of Mental Health as a developmental disease is ripe for abuse. Mental retardation is also a recognized medical condition, but that does not stop some from throwing the condition at someone as a profound insult. Autism was used in this way when it was thrown at Barron.
The motivation behind the untrue video was deleterious; and this calls for an apology.
@Right_in_Virginia I see it as more like "insulting" someone for calling them a "geek" or a "brainiac".
The truth is the people who think people with autism are retarded are the ones who are "slow".
Autism is much more of a personality/emotional disorder than a mental disorder. Saying Autistic people are "lacking in the social graces" is a gross understatement. They don't mean to be rude anymore than anyone means to be colorblind,but they just don't "get it" and never will. Most learn to understand they need to "play the game" in order to get along with people,but they never really understand it as anything more than a theory they have to play along with in order to function in what passes for society. PLEASE note it is not that they have contempt for it or the people who are "social",they just don't understand it.
I have written on TBR before about a kid I went to school with who was 13 or 14 when I met him,and he was severely autistic. To the point where his little sister,also VERY bright,but much closer to normal than he was,had to hold his hand and walk him to school in the mornings because if she didn't,it was likely he would have just walked out in front of a car and be ran over. He was so busy doing advanced match problems in his head that he just couldn't be bothered to pay attention to minor irritants like cars. Freddie COULD speak and reason with people if he wanted,but he was just too busy having "fun" in his head with math to be bothered with mere people. He honestly didn't know how to tie his shoes. Not because he COULDN'T have learned how,but he was just too busy thinking of other things to be bothered to learn something that trivial. Chances are he would have left home naked and barefoot if it hadn't of been for his sister and his mother. He was ok with other people tying them for him,though. I witnessed this myself one day in the hallway,when a girl spotted a untied shoelace,and ordered him to stop so she could tie it for him. He stopped without saying a single word,and stood there speechless without moving until she finished,stood up,and told him he could go.
To give you some idea of his gifts,he created a remote control robot for the school science fair,and actually stood behind it and tried to explain it to the people who asked. The "body" was a plastic dish tub,and IIRC,it rolled on his sister's skates. He built all the electronics himself. He was 13 or 14 at the time,and this was around 1962. He would sleep in science class,and if someone had a question the teacher couldn't answer,he would have somebody wake up Freddy and ask him. He wasn't the slightest bit embarrassed to ask,either. Nor should he have been.
This was a small rural high school with only a few hundred children,and you would THINK these kids would have picked on him,but they didn't. If anything they adopted him,and everybody kept an eye on him to make sure he didn't wander off or hurt himself. When school ended every day,one or another of the kids that lived in town would take him by the hand and walk him to the library where his mother worked,and he would sit in there reading books and doing math problems until it was time to go home.
The funniest "Freddy Story" I remember was a VERY attractive 15 year old girl was going nuts because she couldn't get Freddy to notice her. She would do stuff like hide behind a hall buttress or wall locker,and jump out right in front of him with her arms spread so he would bump into her,and she could hug him and mash her boobs against him to try to get his attention. Even that didn't work. She told me one day "I'm going to jump that boy's bones if it's the last thing I ever do!" Pretty much all the boys,including me,would have done damn near anything to hump her,but she was only interested in Freddy because he was just too busy to think about her.
Freddy was really fortunate in so many ways,including being lucky enough to have been born to a mother who understood the problem,but I can't think of him without feeling sorry for him. Even though he was perfectly happy "living in his head" with the world of math,the rest of life that the rest of us experience will remain as big a mystery to him as his beloved theoretical math problems are to us.
In his case Autism was both a blessing and a curse.
