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Ignorant Incredulity

When I was a child I broke my wrist.  Another child who was there when it happened said to me that a broken wrist was no big deal.  That when he broke his wrist at football practice he just shook it off.  With this he grabbed my arm and shook it, causing, predictably, extreme pain.  Why did he do this?  He was wrong about some things.  He was wrong about what was happening at football practice.  It could be that he interpreted any wrist pain of certain intensity as being indicative of a broken wrist and therefore believed without thinking that he was capable of repairing a broken bone by shaking it.  He had apparently misdiagnosed me, but he had done so in a very specific way.  He looked at what had happened to him and imagined that the same thing must be happening to me, but where did he get the certainty of this that allowed him to grab my broken wrist and cause me agony?

He was young and inexperienced, yes.  But I have seen adults make this kind of mistake too.  Recently I reported to a professional person that due to my diagnosed neurodevelopmental disorder I often misunderstand people when they speak figuratively.  This individual dismissed me, saying that no, people just misunderstand each other sometimes; it's normal. This ignorant incredulity is typical of minds that are insulated against diversity.  Minds that I imagine see a flat, desaturated world in which everyone is basically the same.  There are people who accept themselves as the paradigm of normalcy, often without question.  They may not even consider what they believe.  Like the child who shook my broken wrist, they cause pain by accident because of their lazy assessments of others and of the way the world can be.

I want to increase understanding of autism but I don't know how to penetrate such ignorance.  Eloquence is not the answer.  Nor is proof.  Because this broken way of understanding the world has its advent long before reason, patience, and compassion have theirs.  Some ideas are primal.  Rhetorical argument will not suffice to change attitudes and beliefs that were cemented before an individual was sophisticated enough to understand rhetoric.  The adult chicken cannot learn a new way to emerge from its egg.

I will say this: we will not grow in understanding if we have already decided to stop growing at all.  If we eschew asking and settle for knowing, we give up learning.  And if you can't learn, then you can't help, and I don't trust you.

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