We often tend to have a lot of preconceptions around the subject: Asbergers syndrome. As sketchy as it may seem, a lot of these perceptions are straight up stupid and I would even go to the extent of claiming that they are wrong and actually prevents our society from moving forward as a unit. Let me explain why: People these days show no sign of compassion, no sign of willingly wanting to understand one another. No sign of having the intelligence capable to see things for what they are and what not. We live in a society where all these things are coexistent and yet we don’t seem to care one bit. When it has become clear that we haven’t adapted our society to accommodate these wonderful, extraordinary people who possess a gift, only to be extracted unless/thus? the circumstances are in order, understanding the boy Christopher in the novel becomes a whole lot easier all of a sudden.
The obvious thing one would do when reviewing this kind of book is of course to look at the facts and the plot in the book and not to think about the severe difficulties Christopher has, interacting with the world around him and how absurd it is that it has to be that way. I on the other hand want to first and formost adress this issue particularly. Because it’s actually equivalent to silencing and slowly but surely putting someone’s intelligens to sleep for good. when we come to realize that this different functioning brain could for a fact be extracted and soon be in full blossom if we learnt to utilize what makes the people with Asperger’s do extraordinary things and not ”shutting the doors”. But for that to happen I believe we have to understand them on a very fundamental level and that is also why I went through the hassle to enlighten this absurd accepted drive to ”only accept people who can fill out the form with no deviations” when it should be the other way around. We should embrace ”the different”.
Every one should feel needed and accepted no matter even if your brain works differently just because you were born that way. As a matter of fact, life is like a lottery that always has losers and winners. But instead of building an hierarchy upon that idealization we could achieve so much more if our mentality was that no matter where you’re born you diserve the same rights and the same possibility to succeed at what ever you want to contribute to. The same goes for being born with autism or asbergers or what it may be. An easy parable can be drawn to Mr. Hawkings who has suffered from the desease ALS from his early twenties until this day. He has done so much for the world but also more specifically in the field of science. His groundbreaking discoveries would never have been possible if we wouldn't have helped him doing what he excels at even if it was at the cost of money. He couldn’t help that his future was altered the moment the disease started to develop, could he. That’s precisely why we need to rebuild our high schools and rethink how we can incorporate these learnings to hopefully get many more Einstiens, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and the list goes on.. It’s the ones who are fundamentally different that can do extraordinary things. Sometimes it’s the ones who no one imagines anything of who do the things that no one can imagine.