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Why Progressives Don't Get Autism: 8 Years Later

Why Conservatives Don't Get Autism: 8 Years Later

Helen lovejoy! Managing Editor's Note: Ginger Taylor wrote this post 8 years ago at Adventures in Autism.com as a counterpart to Dan's post. We're running it 8 years later because the state of American childhood is just so grim. Autism is at the crux of our wheelhouse here at AofA, but the depth of the issues at hand is much deeper. This latest school shooting (even that verbiage, "the latest" is startling) might be a catalyst for change. Does either side, Progressive or Conservative have the stomach and the cajones to face the truth? Is it the guns? The access? The vaccines? The medications? The video games? The iWorld? What's creating this all consuming craving to kill among?

By Ginger Taylor

A few days ago, Dan Olmsted at Age of Autism wrote a piece entitled, “Why Progressives Don’t Get Autism”, where he made the case that those on the left are so enamored with the idea that government can solve the problems of humanity, like communicable disease epidemic prevention via public health policies, that they fail to see the unintended consequences of these policies.

In a rare moment of self-reflective contemplation, one of the leftiest blogs on the left, The Daily Kos, admitted that Olmsted had a point.

In reading all this, I have to face that conservatives just have another version of the same problem. We are often so enamored with the idea that business and industry can solve the problems of humanity, and that free man can, with his clever mind and by the sweat of his brow, build the bright, shining city on a hill, that we fail to see the unintended consequences of these ambitions.

Our freedom to work and to own and to engage in commerce, coupled with our dedication to creation, has done some truly astonishing things. We went from the horse and buggy to the moon in less than two centuries. What other culture in the history of man has made such advances?

Progress and innovation have lifted us out of the muck and put us in climate controlled skyscrapers, where we can have pizza delivered while we watch football, and where we don’t have to hunt through the forest and toil in the garden. Which is great. Except that we were kind of made to hunt through the forest and toil in the garden. And when we get too far away from the garden, there are consequences to our health.

When “PROGRESS” and “INDUSTRY” (insert 1950’s post war pro-business, “Better Living Through Chemistry” educational film here) push us to create thousands of compounds and molecules that have never existed on this planet before, and we manufacture them in massive quantities and spread them everywhere, to interact with one another everywhere, in the air, in the water, in homes, in clothes, in foods and in medicines, what we WILL end up with is a chemical soup that WILL harm some or all people. (Any one who does not believe that this is an eventuality is just in denial or has never read Frankenstien or any of the other thousands of cautionary tales of how man’s creations return to bite him in places to which only God and the TSA have unrestricted access.) Because THAT chemical world is not OUR chemical world, the one that nurtured the human race to the place where it could begin an industrial revolution only a very short time ago.

We belong in our garden.



There are basically two camps on how we came to be here in our garden. One is that an omnipotent and loving being made us and placed us in a garden that was created especially for us and would meet our physical needs. The other is that we evolved from the garden and are actually part and parcel of it… just another flower in the garden.

In either case, we belong in our garden. But the burning desire for Free Man to claim his manifest destiny and to build the industrial utopian shining city on a hill has become such a siren song, that we have lost site of the blessings of the garden and begun to trample it.

And as that happens, it is the vulnerable, the tiniest ones, whom still need desperately to be nurtured by that same original clean, rich garden, those little ones whom conservatives really do love and strive to protect from the moment of conception… those are the ones who get hurt first. Our sweet little canaries.

We conservatives too easily forget that just because we can exercise our power and creativity and industry to build ambitious things, does not mean we always should do so. And taking a hard look at the massive damage that unwise industrial “progress” has done to the vulnerable, to those who should have also been Free Men fulfilling their destiny when their time came, but instead will, like my son, be life long dependents, or like Elias Tembenis, never live long enough to fulfill their promise at all… well it is painful and difficult for those on the right. Because guilt is painful and it is also expensive. It means learning difficult lessons and it means that progress will have to slow down in many cases and in some cases stop completely.

And the right can be a powerhouse that does not ever want to stop.

And all this is frustrating for me, because autism is something that the right really should get. Because the right is supposed to be about the rights of the individual. It is supposed to be about protecting the little guy from being pushed around by the government. It is supposed to be about individual responsibility. It is supposed to be about law and order. And if you know anything about autism, you know that if we were living in a society where the rights of the individual were being protected, the government was restrained, individual responsibility was being practiced and industrial corruption was kept in check by law and order, you would have to conclude that there would be no autism epidemic, because as soon as the first child was poisoned, the problem would be addressed at every level.

Conservatives get the Laffer curve. So why don't they get that there is a vaccine laffer curve that has a peak vaccine administration rate, and when you go beyond that, health returns start to diminish? We get that making the tax rate 100% will ironically bring in 0 dollars in taxes. How many vaccines does it take to make all our children sick and dead? Does anyone notice that we seemed to have hit the top of the bell curve in the 1970s?

Our autism community has discovered that ultimate solutions don't come from the top down, but the bottom up. Isn’t that what the Tea Party is about? For pete’s sake, the Tea Party should be all about autism. So why don’t they “get” autism?

Blogs on the right like The Daily Caller, Reason and Andrew Breitbart's "Bigs" blast the waste and abuses of government and the Obama administration with both barrels, but seem blind to fraud, coersion and profiteering going on by Sebelius' HHS in the vaccine program. Even in the wake of billions of dollars wasted on a fake pandemic (that we knew was not going to be a threat as it was not a threat to the southern hemisphere during their winter - our summer - of 2009) to make and push the H1N1 vaccine on the American people. And the additional millions of dollars spent to dispose of the hundreds of millions of doses that had to be disposed of as hazardous materials (because mercury containing vaccines have so much mercury that they are hazmat) because the three quarters of the public didn't take the vaccine because they knew the "pandemic" was a sham to begin with.

Big Hollywood so doesn't get autism, that they actually published a piece, trashing liberal Jenny McCarthy, for probably her only conservative view point, that the government should not force vaccines on people or lying about vaccine safety in order to maniuplate the public into doing something that might harm them for the governments subjective and self-serving idea of "the greater good". Instead of applauding McCarthy for challenging the abuses by her own side of the political spectrum, Big Hollywood belittes her fight against HHS thus giving cover to Sebelius and the Obama administration for their egregious behavior in autism, in an substance-less, ad hominem, "nuts and sluts" attack.

The only way that this could ever get published on a blog that is such a vociferous critic of over reaching and corrupt government is because the editors just do not get autism.

True constitutional conservatives should be at the forefront of autism and should completely get autism, but people claiming to be conservative represent at least half the country and yet still the epidemic rages on.

Which leads me to the overall problem of why neither side, American’s left or right, get autism.

As Liberals and Conservatives we are too enamored with our selves, our big ideas and what we can do, and we do not prize wisdom and caution and the long, long view.

We see the other side's flaws and short sightedness and corruption and disasters with crystal clarity, and we are blind to our own.

The public doesn’t understand that the vaccine program represents the WORST of both worlds. It is the pairing of tyrannical government that decides the most intimate thing in your life, what goes into your body, because it has decided what is best for you, and the cold machine of industry that cannot see lives but only sees profit, BOTH unrestrained because the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act of 1986 has freed them from the system of checks and balances that our brilliant founders put in place to restrain both the evil intentions and the good hearted unintended consequences of government and industry.


The government/pharma vaccine program treats children (and adults) as if they are functionaries of a system, not individuals of value to be served by the system.

Because the individual members of the public have been reduced to the position of mere functionaires in The Program that has arisen from this ‘public-private partnership’, government and industry can literally lie, cheat, steal, maim and kill, and there are no consequences to either government or industry. The deep pockets of the pharmaceutical industry buy the airwaves and the message and the doctors and the institutions and the government itself, while the government insures that free market principles cannot work and people cannot vote with their feet and leave the vaccine program. And it now thanks to ObamaCare, the federal government will fund the vaccine program, so the industry can continue to buy the airwaves and the message and the doctors and the institutions and the government itself... as the pre Vaccine Injury Act, 24 dose childhood vaccine schedule continues to mutate into a bigger and bigger monster as vaccine dose number 70 was just added this month. (Will we hit 100 by 2020?)

And round and round we go, as the canaries fall one by one, and then two by two, as their biological individuality is denied and they are given the same dose of the same shots layered on top of exposures to pesticides and dental amalgam and antibiotics and GMO's and food additives and the thousands of chemicals that live in their bodies and that their great grand parents never came into contact with.

And the public doesn’t understand that those causing the problems in government and those causing the problems in private industry are really just the same unethical bunch of people serving their own grandiose ideas and careers and egos. Julie Gerberding, the government queen of the autism epidemic, is both the head of the CDC AND the head of Vaccines for Merck. Paul Offit, the worlds chief figure head Pharma Rep, is both Merck AND CDC. They fully belong to both tribes.

And the individuals who do this horrible business are given cover when they lie and obfuscate and push for universal mandatory vaccination, damn the consequences, because each side sees them as on “their side” (government public health or industry) and fails to see that the fox is guarding the hen house and making a KILLING on egg sales.

It is time for the public to walk away from these blind and/or corrupt ‘leaders’ and embrace the garden again. We have strayed too far from it and most of us know that.

But what prevents many from doing it is one of the most basic instincts of humanity, the fear of death. We have been tricked into believing that with out unrestrained government and industry to save us, we will die. We have been tricked into believing that “government science” and “industrial science” is science itself, and that scientific observation is something the masses cannot practice for themselves with out these institutions (much like religion centuries ago).

Through every medium government and industry cry out to the public, “You Need Us… You Need More Of Us!” And we are seduced and frightened into believing them.

There is a wise saying, “When we make decisions based in fear, rather than wisdom, we often end up bringing about the very thing we were afraid of in the first place”.

It is time for progressives to realize that the idea of the utopia ushered in by the government has never worked and will never work, and it is time for conservatives to realize that any utopia brought to you by industry is fleeting and will ultimately become poisonous ruins.

The interesting phenomenon that shows itself in the autism community is that those families and individuals so were so blindly entrenched in either of these systems and who became injured from them, become healed as they move away from them and start using their own work and reasoning, and turning to independent thinkers, to treat “autism”. (Or asthma or allergies or diabetes or cancers or insert modern neuro-immune chronic disease epidemic here.) There is a freedom in coming to grips with the shortcomings of ‘your side’.

It is time for the public to face facts that ambitious progress by either the blind right or blind left has just as great a chance of destruction as it does of salvation. And it is time to work on moving back toward the garden one person, one precious life, one unique individual, one loving family, at a time.

And people are starting to figure that out… so the vaccine program looses adherents to the schedule, and the political parties loose partiers to independent movements, and the medical industry looses customers to natural and alternative medicine.

We are neither cogs in the government program nor grist for the industrial mill.

Comments

Maddox Cox

i'm autistic, and i like trump

David Weiner

Aimee Doyle,

"I don't understand...these conservatives are the champions of the free market and individuals rights. Why are they making these decisions - and choosing to do nothing about the autism crisis."

There is a big difference between the (sometimes) free market rhetoric of conservative politicians and the way that they actually govern. They too love to spend a lot of money and expand the power of the State, though they sometimes have different priorities than the progressive politicians.

The only American politician in recent times who was consistently faithful to free market principles and individual rights was Ron Paul. But he was hated by the Republican party establishment, who did their best to thwart him at every opportunity, though he was loved by his constituents and by many others. I was a delegate for him when he ran for president in 2008.

Aimee Doyle

Thanks, Ginger.

I don't understand why the Republican-controlled Government Oversight Committee has done nothing on the issue of autism. I don't understand why Republican Bill Posey has done nothing with the whistleblower documents he received from Dr. William Thompson. I don't understand why conservative Antonin Scalia wrote the decision he did in Bruesewitz v. Wyeth. I don't understand why Trump appointed pro-vax individuals to HHS, FDA, CDC.

I don't understand...these conservatives are the champions of the free market and individuals rights. Why are they making these decisions - and choosing to do nothing about the autism crisis.

Someone

I enjoyed this article. The outrageous greed and lack of values surrounding this issue is truly breathtaking. Science is corrupted and becoming worthless. I am not a conservative but found some appealing, valuable thoughts here. Thanks!

Will

Conservatives often have ties to the for-profit health management orgs, and the pharmaceutical industry . The conservatives also have ties to social welfare and developmental disability sub contractors that are also for profit and have huge tax breaks. So it is no wonder the neo conservatives do not care if environmental toxin damage a whole generation they did not care about Agent Orange in Vietnam. As long as the neo conservative elite make money the middle class and small business will fit an every increasing tax bill while they enjoy all the perks. Trigger warning. Trump is an incompetent fool with false promises that has ties to big pharma and the chemical industry himself even if he claims otherwise.

Rebecca Lee

That was a great article, Ginger.

Hans Litten

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/feb/21/trump-vaccination-safety-commission-robert-kennedy-autism

Not Good news (if the Guardian is to be believed - which is rarely).

Trump appears to abandon vaccine sceptic group denounced by scientists
Robert F Kennedy Jr claimed to be leading a review of links to autism – a widely debunked claim – but now says he hasn’t heard from the White House in months

David Weiner

I appreciate this thoughtful and insightful analysis.

One thing that we can never lose sight of is the CONTEXT in which innovation occurs. If it takes place in something resembling a free market setting, then it very likely will improve our lives. On the other hand, if it takes place in a Corporatist setting or comes about directly via government coercion, then it is very likely that such innovations will harm our society.

We need a JUST legal system, not one where certain forms of innovation are arbitrarily promoted while others are arbitrarily disadvantaged. Where fraud and coercion are punished, not sanctioned. Where appropriate liability rules are established and enforced. In such a context, we can enjoy the blessings of innovation while not putting ourselves at the mercy of those who want to use State power to impose their agendas upon us.

Mark Wax

I don't care to guess how Bob Moffit votes. Like him, a think of myself as a "conservative", less because someone else would categorize me so I can elect them to hold public office, but because I wish to "conserve" what provides human dignity and civilization. I live by an honor code. I think each of us has duty, with or without an oath. Life is a solemn promise we must "conserve." I gave up a long time ago on the hope that people would "do the right thing." But, I choose not to let that change me. It is daunting, but changing the "system" of government, is the only chance that autism can be severely mitigated by the choices we make and involves what we voluntarily or force into our bodies. That we live in a "poisonous environment" can be explored in every dimension, especially the metaphysical.

Bill

"loose" = not tight
"lose" = not win
OK, besides nit-picking a couple of typos, the above piece is EXCELLENT! Thank-you, AoA, and
Ginger Taylor....

bob moffit

"Which leads me to the overall problem of why neither side, American’s left or right, get autism."

With all due respect .. as an advanced senior citizen .. I consider myself a life-long conservative .. and .. trust me .. far too many present themselves as "conservatives" .. when in fact they are nothing more than members of the Republican in Name Only (RINOS) .. "elite establishment" that dwells deep within that SWAMP WHERE BOTH ESTABLISHED PARTIES LURK.

Remember .. President Trump was elected as a Republican .. after being challenged by fifteen primary candidates and opposed by MANY within the supposed "conservative" Republican "elite" .. who actively supported and continue to promote a NEVER TRUMP agenda at every opportunity they can.

I believe Trump could not have been elected unless many on BOTH .. the left and the right .. joined together voting for him.

Truthfully .. whether or not President Trump is going to fulfill the expectations that I have for him regarding autism/vaccines remains to be seen ... but .. I do know for certain had he not been elected .. that particular issue would never have the opportunity to be addressed for the next four years at least.

I guess what I am trying to say is .. recognizing and confronting the autism epidemic is NOT A LEFT OR RIGHT ISSUE ... IT IS ABOUT DOING WHAT IS RIGHT .. PERIOD.

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