The Joy of Autism has been in operation since 2005 with over 500 posts written.

because finding joy doesn't come without struggle;
because the point is to find it;
because if an autistic person calls autism their way of being, not an illness, then it is;
because every human has value and is a joy;
because despite inhumane acts, I believe in humanity;
but most of all, because of my son Adam.

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This blog's articles are only down temporarily as the site will be redesigned. This blog has been given numerous awards, as well as listed in the top 10 autism blogs as well as the top 100 health blogs. My hope is to refine the blog and you can help me do so. The old posts which have been used for academic purposes, will be up again in an archive.

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Saturday, November 29, 2008

Naked

David Sedaris is coming to Toronto. I thought it was a good time to pick up Naked and read his wry take on humanity. Particularly entertaining was his story Chipped Beef:

“We give unspeakable amounts to charity, but you’ll never hear us talk about it. We give anonymously because the sackfuls of thank-you letters break our hearts with their clumsy handwriting and hopeless phonetic spelling. Word gets out that we’re generous and good-looking, and before you know it our front gate will become a campsite for fashion editors and crippled children, who tend to ruin the grass with the pointy shanks of their crutches…They’re hungry for something they know nothing about, but we, we know all too well that the price of fame is the loss of privacy. Public displays of happiness only encourage the may kidnappers who prowl the leafy estates of our better neighbourhoods.”

Now I should have put that quote into my essay The Economy of Pity I wrote a few years ago on the nature of philanthropy and it’s arms-length safety of giving in autism – the “if we give to it we don’t really have to face it,” type of giving.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Indeed, this sort of charity is very popular in the deep south. The very (hypothetical) shoes from our (hypothetical) children's own feet will accompany some missionary to some unfamiliar and hard-to-pronounce place and we are certain that we've done our part. Our local children in their unfamiliar and hard-to-pronounce places?

Oh.

Now, it isn't always this way and it isn't always the south, but it's a bigger part of the culture down here, I think.