The Berwick Trip
This year, the local Edinburgh-based AS group, ELAS, located their long weekend break in Berwick with the plan of hanging out together and exploring the attractions of the town and neighbouring Northumberland area.
The trip was organised by members of ELAS and consisted of seven AS people and a NT support worker. The ensemble took over a charming guesthouse, very close to the historic town hall, which had an elaborate layout of rooms and included external metal spiral staircases and balconies.
On Friday, we walked round the impressive Elizabethan Walls and visited the Gymnasium Gallery to see a film installation of abandoned Soviet gymnasia from the Brezhnev era.
On Saturday, we spent the morning in the Holy Island of Lindisfarne. We looked at the ruins of the Benedictine Chapel and walked around the striking Lindisfarne Castle. In the afternoon, we went to Bamburgh, a town dominated by a mighty castle, though only one of us actually visited it, the others went into town or set off on a trek along the lovely beach and dunes to Seahouses – a fish, chips and mushy peas paradise.
On Sunday, we went to Alnwick. We all went to the gardens except one who visited the large castle. With the sun shining, the gardens were beautiful. There were lots of things to see including the great water cascade, the tree house, the poisoned garden and the serpent garden full of intriguing water sculptures.
On Monday, some of us left early while others walked around the town walls down by the quay and scrutinised the ruins of the castle, viewed incongruously from the platform of Berwick Train Station. The last party caught the 3:55pm bus back to Edinburgh.
We mostly ate out. My favourite haunts were the Castlegate Café, Sinners, the Castle and the Maltings Theatre and Arts Centre in Berwick, the Bamburgh Castle Inn in Seahouses and the incredible tree house in Alnwick.
Tuesday, September 29, 2009
Power to all our friends
When he became Prime Minister, Gordon Brown promised to reform our democracy. He said he'd listen. He said he'd learn. But he didn't act.
Over 2 years have passed since then and a few moments ago the PM finally promised a referendum on electoral reform - but not until after the next election. This is not enough.
Our democracy needs change. I know that you've already submitted your ideas to the POWER2010 campaign - you've already played an important role. But I need your help to spread the word. You can invite your friends to take part here:
http://power2010.org.uk/invite
Maurice - our movement just became all the more important. Today the Prime Minister had the opportunity to commit to real change, but he failed to do so. Delivering change now rests on each of our shoulders rather than his.
Together we can change our politics. But we need your help. Please invite your friends to tell us their ideas for change - it should only take you a minute or two.
http://power2010.org.uk/invite
The challenge has been thrown down - it's up to each of us to meet it.
Best wishes,
Pam Giddy
Director, POWER2010.
I justify this as relevant for this blog, because this is simply about ordinary folks' opportunities to participate in democracy, and if you like you can think of any particularly aspie ways it needs making easier to participate. Like maybe? Stronger ways of forcing committal answers out of them when you write to them, and avoid the need to struggle to to go to their "surgeries" and speak to them?
The idea I have submitted, is an automatic right that any person's knowledge about any ill-treatment that goes on as a result of regularly applied practices, that is not already wide public knowledge, to be published on a wide circulation scale. The stength of this idea is, it can be demanded not just proposed, because the state is seen to commit illegal vulnerable adult abuse if it refuses to actually implement this idea! Many of the unrealised wrongs that could then be publicised are aspie specific.
Maurice Frank
Over 2 years have passed since then and a few moments ago the PM finally promised a referendum on electoral reform - but not until after the next election. This is not enough.
Our democracy needs change. I know that you've already submitted your ideas to the POWER2010 campaign - you've already played an important role. But I need your help to spread the word. You can invite your friends to take part here:
http://power2010.org.uk/invite
Maurice - our movement just became all the more important. Today the Prime Minister had the opportunity to commit to real change, but he failed to do so. Delivering change now rests on each of our shoulders rather than his.
Together we can change our politics. But we need your help. Please invite your friends to tell us their ideas for change - it should only take you a minute or two.
http://power2010.org.uk/invite
The challenge has been thrown down - it's up to each of us to meet it.
Best wishes,
Pam Giddy
Director, POWER2010.
I justify this as relevant for this blog, because this is simply about ordinary folks' opportunities to participate in democracy, and if you like you can think of any particularly aspie ways it needs making easier to participate. Like maybe? Stronger ways of forcing committal answers out of them when you write to them, and avoid the need to struggle to to go to their "surgeries" and speak to them?
The idea I have submitted, is an automatic right that any person's knowledge about any ill-treatment that goes on as a result of regularly applied practices, that is not already wide public knowledge, to be published on a wide circulation scale. The stength of this idea is, it can be demanded not just proposed, because the state is seen to commit illegal vulnerable adult abuse if it refuses to actually implement this idea! Many of the unrealised wrongs that could then be publicised are aspie specific.
Maurice Frank
Saturday, September 26, 2009
America and the Royal Bank of Scotland
3 aspies in the Scottish scene, to my knowledge alone, have made recent or present visits to the United States. Others are more daunted by the fraught and risky pospect of that country's arbitrary and chancy entry barriers, which are on edge against any imperfection in foreign visitors, disabilities included, though this is never discussed in our media. It would very obviously be an injustice in the scene, if supportive chats and swapping of experiences should just accept easier US access for some than others. That the ups and downs of social experiences located in the US, for some, should be shared and receive support while not all are confident they would have access to that country at all. As a point of disability discrimination, such arbitrary difference between the accessibility of the same experience to folks with the same condition shouldn't be possible.
Now, more than just another protest that the big autism organisations will ignore as they always do with all ordinary aspies' issues. There is something timely to do about this one. While others have been having adventures in the US, I have had one concerning the US. Consider this. Read 3 paragraphs about a banking problem here at home, then see how it impacts on US travel. I have been writing the following to all the constitutional reform campaigns and others like Jubilee Debt.
**
The Royal Bank of Scotland, among the biggest players in the banking crash, has rejected doing a clear ethical duty for its customers against a blatant violation of a basic democratic principle: innocent until proved guilty. RBS is supposed to be getting cleaned up and showing us all so to rebuild confidence. Instead, there is now a reform to be forced in the West's basic standards towards its citizens by exposing that our second biggest bank is still offending.
There is now a security system around bank cards, that has never been publicly announced, in which your card can be blocked without warning while they check up on any activity that fits a profiling system's view of being suspicious. If you find your card blocked when you use it in a shop, you have to answer confusing security questions to RBS over the phone, which will take time, so unwarned you may suddenly face a choice between losing your card or missing transport and not reaching your next destination - on time or at all. It happened to me after I used my card to pay 50p for a coach seat reservation, because that is an unusually small transaction and card fraudsters often test systems with "dummy transactions" of this size. Okay if they explain this to folks, but I made a complaint about all the life situations I could think of where unfair effects can be caused if this can happen without warning and you don't know how to prevent it.
Anything at all that counts as "unusual", even just for you personally, can trigger a security block, so if you can think of anything unusual you intend to do with your card you are now advised to inform the bank first. This you only learn after having your first experience of a problem. Foreign travel is always one of the "unusual" items that you should notify.
Now - pair this with how this security includes profiling that makes assumptions about the customer, which means, about their character, and RBS itself says it does not know all the details of how the system it is using makes its assumptions! Apply this to travel to the United States. The Western superpower's immigration control system is in massive violation of the basic human rights standards the West says it stands for. It asks foreign visitors, as one question, "Have you ever been arrested or convicted" for any crime. It requires innocent people who have been arrested to declare the details just like a criminal record, it does not treat them as spotlessly innocent, burt as carrying a likelihood to be guilty that the US will pass its own opinion on regardless of the person not being found guilty in court. They may never even have gone to court.
The US has not signed up to the International Convention on Civil + Political Rights, but on any reckoning of international law and the standards that coutnries with uncorrupted law must show to each other's citizens, the US's entry control system is illegal. My complaint about the bank card problem gave RBS, which does business in the US too, an opportunity to lay claim to have the US's system abolished! because it is causing card security here in Britain to be undermined by an illegal human rights violation affecting customers here. This follows because if an RBS customer plans a visit to the US, known to the bank, then is refused entry on grounds of character tarring by an arrest, and by any other event the card security system discovers that the customer is not in the US when they should be, it can make assumptions about what has happened and about the customer's character. This is clearly a violation of the customer, on the human rights count of judicial propriety and on data protection. So RBS commits such a violation, upon its cardholders here in Britain, by leaving it possible for this to happen, by refusing to take the formal legal position I described towards the United States and all its business there. By taking this position, RBS could have forced the US to stop operating this outrageous system that most of the Western public are quite unaware of unless they have travelled there.
Now - by speaking out about RBS's failiure, you can force an end to this system. The ethical impact on the working of banks still stands despite RBS's silence on it. Others, reform campaigns, can publicise the fact instead. This is an actual case, an actual bank customer complaint, around actual practices in bank card security. To speak out what RBS should have done is to cite the same illegal violation by the US upon folks here, to make it known to be that - and so to actually force its abolition. All cooperation of law and police and business between the US and here will now collapse into illegality unless the US's use of a question about arrests is terminated forthwith, abolished not even as a policy shift but specifically as illegal. A major democratic reform, that affects folks' lives and character records here. You [meaning any reform campaign group I write this to] can force it to happen, just by exposing this bank issue. So please do!!
So will they?
Maurice Frank
Now, more than just another protest that the big autism organisations will ignore as they always do with all ordinary aspies' issues. There is something timely to do about this one. While others have been having adventures in the US, I have had one concerning the US. Consider this. Read 3 paragraphs about a banking problem here at home, then see how it impacts on US travel. I have been writing the following to all the constitutional reform campaigns and others like Jubilee Debt.
**
The Royal Bank of Scotland, among the biggest players in the banking crash, has rejected doing a clear ethical duty for its customers against a blatant violation of a basic democratic principle: innocent until proved guilty. RBS is supposed to be getting cleaned up and showing us all so to rebuild confidence. Instead, there is now a reform to be forced in the West's basic standards towards its citizens by exposing that our second biggest bank is still offending.
There is now a security system around bank cards, that has never been publicly announced, in which your card can be blocked without warning while they check up on any activity that fits a profiling system's view of being suspicious. If you find your card blocked when you use it in a shop, you have to answer confusing security questions to RBS over the phone, which will take time, so unwarned you may suddenly face a choice between losing your card or missing transport and not reaching your next destination - on time or at all. It happened to me after I used my card to pay 50p for a coach seat reservation, because that is an unusually small transaction and card fraudsters often test systems with "dummy transactions" of this size. Okay if they explain this to folks, but I made a complaint about all the life situations I could think of where unfair effects can be caused if this can happen without warning and you don't know how to prevent it.
Anything at all that counts as "unusual", even just for you personally, can trigger a security block, so if you can think of anything unusual you intend to do with your card you are now advised to inform the bank first. This you only learn after having your first experience of a problem. Foreign travel is always one of the "unusual" items that you should notify.
Now - pair this with how this security includes profiling that makes assumptions about the customer, which means, about their character, and RBS itself says it does not know all the details of how the system it is using makes its assumptions! Apply this to travel to the United States. The Western superpower's immigration control system is in massive violation of the basic human rights standards the West says it stands for. It asks foreign visitors, as one question, "Have you ever been arrested or convicted" for any crime. It requires innocent people who have been arrested to declare the details just like a criminal record, it does not treat them as spotlessly innocent, burt as carrying a likelihood to be guilty that the US will pass its own opinion on regardless of the person not being found guilty in court. They may never even have gone to court.
The US has not signed up to the International Convention on Civil + Political Rights, but on any reckoning of international law and the standards that coutnries with uncorrupted law must show to each other's citizens, the US's entry control system is illegal. My complaint about the bank card problem gave RBS, which does business in the US too, an opportunity to lay claim to have the US's system abolished! because it is causing card security here in Britain to be undermined by an illegal human rights violation affecting customers here. This follows because if an RBS customer plans a visit to the US, known to the bank, then is refused entry on grounds of character tarring by an arrest, and by any other event the card security system discovers that the customer is not in the US when they should be, it can make assumptions about what has happened and about the customer's character. This is clearly a violation of the customer, on the human rights count of judicial propriety and on data protection. So RBS commits such a violation, upon its cardholders here in Britain, by leaving it possible for this to happen, by refusing to take the formal legal position I described towards the United States and all its business there. By taking this position, RBS could have forced the US to stop operating this outrageous system that most of the Western public are quite unaware of unless they have travelled there.
Now - by speaking out about RBS's failiure, you can force an end to this system. The ethical impact on the working of banks still stands despite RBS's silence on it. Others, reform campaigns, can publicise the fact instead. This is an actual case, an actual bank customer complaint, around actual practices in bank card security. To speak out what RBS should have done is to cite the same illegal violation by the US upon folks here, to make it known to be that - and so to actually force its abolition. All cooperation of law and police and business between the US and here will now collapse into illegality unless the US's use of a question about arrests is terminated forthwith, abolished not even as a policy shift but specifically as illegal. A major democratic reform, that affects folks' lives and character records here. You [meaning any reform campaign group I write this to] can force it to happen, just by exposing this bank issue. So please do!!
So will they?
Maurice Frank
Thursday, September 10, 2009
further to the library
Sep 10: Further to my item in April, it's still current and I want folks to dig it out and remain aware of it coz this is important !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
- on the library internet system being changed for a worse system, with a built-in time cut-off that can make you lose your work if you hit any technical problems over the net running slow when you are trying to save. Which is provenly bad for us if we are trying to use the web to communicate to organise to meet up with researchers and the like.
The change is going badly. At Newington library, computer users are being told that the one they have converted to the "Netloan" system that it's not working very well, and advise against choosing to use it.
Same as nobody uses it in the downstairs room at Central, where the first conversion to it was made. This is because the new system is a bad system, so bad it's not worth introducing - and the libraries trying it out are now finding that in practice.
Oct 28: The system's piecemeal further extension is a total shambles, and the system's own faults are visibly why, to every annoyed library user who is struggling with it. Timers are going wrong, starting their count with 2 minutes already missing that have not passed, just like in Fife. Sometimes computers are taking 6 minutes to log in, and the solution to slowness, available under the old system, of telling the previous user not to log out, is no longer available in this system. The system for staff to set bookings is working too slowly, so that you are frantic if they are racing against the timer to set an extended booking. Mostly the staff don't know how to work the extension system, either. There are blocks in the system that are meant to force a minimum time gap between users' sessions, the staff are struggling to override these in order to do extensions. These blocks shut you out of the system half the tmem and refute the chicken-and-egg idea that you are supposed to log in to the system just to book when you are going to log in!! I mean, what the ... At central reference where it used to be you could see exactly how long the queue was, you no longer have any idea when you will get a vacancy. Unless you stare over all the users' shoulders to see their timers, which is unlikely to be allowed or popular, so you have to bother the staff more than before and with a question it takes them a long time to answer, so the new system is not saving them work at all, and the answer is supposed to be that you have made prebookings that are difficult or impossible to get a chance to make for much of the time. Staff in every library where I have observed, which is many, are frustrated and stuck and apologetic the whole time.
Everyone can see none of this should be happening. Everyone can see only the old system worked. Everyone can see this is a disability injustice that was totally preventable.
Maurice Frank
- on the library internet system being changed for a worse system, with a built-in time cut-off that can make you lose your work if you hit any technical problems over the net running slow when you are trying to save. Which is provenly bad for us if we are trying to use the web to communicate to organise to meet up with researchers and the like.
The change is going badly. At Newington library, computer users are being told that the one they have converted to the "Netloan" system that it's not working very well, and advise against choosing to use it.
Same as nobody uses it in the downstairs room at Central, where the first conversion to it was made. This is because the new system is a bad system, so bad it's not worth introducing - and the libraries trying it out are now finding that in practice.
Oct 28: The system's piecemeal further extension is a total shambles, and the system's own faults are visibly why, to every annoyed library user who is struggling with it. Timers are going wrong, starting their count with 2 minutes already missing that have not passed, just like in Fife. Sometimes computers are taking 6 minutes to log in, and the solution to slowness, available under the old system, of telling the previous user not to log out, is no longer available in this system. The system for staff to set bookings is working too slowly, so that you are frantic if they are racing against the timer to set an extended booking. Mostly the staff don't know how to work the extension system, either. There are blocks in the system that are meant to force a minimum time gap between users' sessions, the staff are struggling to override these in order to do extensions. These blocks shut you out of the system half the tmem and refute the chicken-and-egg idea that you are supposed to log in to the system just to book when you are going to log in!! I mean, what the ... At central reference where it used to be you could see exactly how long the queue was, you no longer have any idea when you will get a vacancy. Unless you stare over all the users' shoulders to see their timers, which is unlikely to be allowed or popular, so you have to bother the staff more than before and with a question it takes them a long time to answer, so the new system is not saving them work at all, and the answer is supposed to be that you have made prebookings that are difficult or impossible to get a chance to make for much of the time. Staff in every library where I have observed, which is many, are frustrated and stuck and apologetic the whole time.
Everyone can see none of this should be happening. Everyone can see only the old system worked. Everyone can see this is a disability injustice that was totally preventable.
Maurice Frank
Monday, July 20, 2009
TALENTS
I am aged 41 now. For all but the last decade I led a normal life. Or at least I thought I did. I had no reason to think otherwise.
I had no option other than to think I was normal. It was what society expected of me. Even if I thought deep down I might not be.
As I reached the age of 31, I was at my wit's end, at the end of my tether wondering why - although I thought I was normal, I was not getting along very well in the trappings of "normal" life. Especially meeting, and making relationships, with women. I wondered why I was only getting anywhere with women at Sainsbury's. Surely that wasn't "normal".
Desperate for solutions, I went to my GP. I was willing to look anywhere for assistance. Why was the life of someone apparently "normal" not turning out in a "normal" way?
It was from that consultation with my GP that my life changed. I was diagnosed with a syndrome. A syndrome that makes me extremely talented. That was why I wasn't really normal. I thought, "Wow". This news gave me a new "oomph", a new vibrancy. It was like winning the FA Cup. I knew it paid off not to be normal.
This syndrome has features such as being good at communication, due to my vocabulary, and my phenomenal memory, and general knowledge, and my prowess in pursuits such as Scrabble. The syndrome also causes me to be able to make sparkling conversation and connect well with others due to admittedly obsessive interests (the Sainsbury's thing was discussed at length with my GP). It is what causes me to be very academically bright, meaning there's no limit to how far I can go in life, as doors are open in any field I wish and I can get a job anywhere due to academic performance.
Anxiety can be a side effect of the syndrome. But that’s a talent in itself when it occurs, as it shows me where people with my syndrome can be better supported, and helps me in stating the case for fairness and understanding. Other powers the syndrome gives me are useful sensory skills like detecting temperature, sounds, smells and details such as correct language usage better than typical people.
Speaking of which, here’s a little story. When I was 35 I did have a girlfriend, named Kathryn. Kathryn was a doctor, so she was super smart. With my eye for correct and proper language I noticed, as smart as she was, she didn’t seem able to use capitals when typing, including when typing her own name. To cut a long story short, my curiosity about this led to a bust-up. A case of my super powers getting the better of me.
Greater self-awareness and knowledge of my extreme talent would later enable me to become chief executive of Sainsbury's, and World Scrabble Champion.
But back to the present, I just told a friend Jessie that I've just been diagnosed with a syndrome which gives me all the super-powers I've just mentioned. How I have the special power to focus so well on things, helping me do anything I want to do. How my GP told me that some guy on the continent, who lived during the early 20th century, his name sounded something like Mr Asperger, had powers just like mine. How I'm so impressed with that.
My friend had a special admission to make too. She has the powers a famous person was known to have, in this case another continental chap Mr Bleuler. These powers include prediction of the future, being able to read people’s minds, and the insight to see and hear stuff no-one else can. It really helps Jessie to think very well outside the box and have a lot of unique ideas, perceptions and takes on life. I thought, "Wow, that's just as amazing as my powers" and wished I had them.
To prove that like typical people, I don’t get things right all the time, I once said to Jessie, “Are you delusional or something?”
“I’m delusional? What the hell is that supposed to mean? I’m thinking that it’s probably better if you don’t talk to me any more.”
That was that, but there’s no doubt I have done extremely well due to my powers.
I had no option other than to think I was normal. It was what society expected of me. Even if I thought deep down I might not be.
As I reached the age of 31, I was at my wit's end, at the end of my tether wondering why - although I thought I was normal, I was not getting along very well in the trappings of "normal" life. Especially meeting, and making relationships, with women. I wondered why I was only getting anywhere with women at Sainsbury's. Surely that wasn't "normal".
Desperate for solutions, I went to my GP. I was willing to look anywhere for assistance. Why was the life of someone apparently "normal" not turning out in a "normal" way?
It was from that consultation with my GP that my life changed. I was diagnosed with a syndrome. A syndrome that makes me extremely talented. That was why I wasn't really normal. I thought, "Wow". This news gave me a new "oomph", a new vibrancy. It was like winning the FA Cup. I knew it paid off not to be normal.
This syndrome has features such as being good at communication, due to my vocabulary, and my phenomenal memory, and general knowledge, and my prowess in pursuits such as Scrabble. The syndrome also causes me to be able to make sparkling conversation and connect well with others due to admittedly obsessive interests (the Sainsbury's thing was discussed at length with my GP). It is what causes me to be very academically bright, meaning there's no limit to how far I can go in life, as doors are open in any field I wish and I can get a job anywhere due to academic performance.
Anxiety can be a side effect of the syndrome. But that’s a talent in itself when it occurs, as it shows me where people with my syndrome can be better supported, and helps me in stating the case for fairness and understanding. Other powers the syndrome gives me are useful sensory skills like detecting temperature, sounds, smells and details such as correct language usage better than typical people.
Speaking of which, here’s a little story. When I was 35 I did have a girlfriend, named Kathryn. Kathryn was a doctor, so she was super smart. With my eye for correct and proper language I noticed, as smart as she was, she didn’t seem able to use capitals when typing, including when typing her own name. To cut a long story short, my curiosity about this led to a bust-up. A case of my super powers getting the better of me.
Greater self-awareness and knowledge of my extreme talent would later enable me to become chief executive of Sainsbury's, and World Scrabble Champion.
But back to the present, I just told a friend Jessie that I've just been diagnosed with a syndrome which gives me all the super-powers I've just mentioned. How I have the special power to focus so well on things, helping me do anything I want to do. How my GP told me that some guy on the continent, who lived during the early 20th century, his name sounded something like Mr Asperger, had powers just like mine. How I'm so impressed with that.
My friend had a special admission to make too. She has the powers a famous person was known to have, in this case another continental chap Mr Bleuler. These powers include prediction of the future, being able to read people’s minds, and the insight to see and hear stuff no-one else can. It really helps Jessie to think very well outside the box and have a lot of unique ideas, perceptions and takes on life. I thought, "Wow, that's just as amazing as my powers" and wished I had them.
To prove that like typical people, I don’t get things right all the time, I once said to Jessie, “Are you delusional or something?”
“I’m delusional? What the hell is that supposed to mean? I’m thinking that it’s probably better if you don’t talk to me any more.”
That was that, but there’s no doubt I have done extremely well due to my powers.
Monday, July 6, 2009
Stigma
This is an account written by a man with Asperger's, prior to his diagnosis of AS. He has requested the following article to be published on the blog to illustrate the difficulties that people with AS can have without adequate or appropriate support.
I am presenting a brutally frank account of my lifelong struggle to overcome a stigma which has so scarred me that I have been unable to hold down a job or find a wife. I am sure that my account will offend some dogmatic religious fanatics such as my late father who was primarily responsible for the stigma in the first place.
I am aged 61 now and I was born of fairly well to do people from North Devon. I lived at Bideford until 1947 and then moved to the railway rolling stock town of Lancing in Sussex. There I attended primary school until 1952.
On the very first day I remember running towards a grassy enclosure with humps – air raid shelters – and being grabbed by a teacher in front of the other children. I did well at primary school but I was called LOONY by many other children. My devoutly Christian parents made an inordinate fuss about religious observance, excretion and swearwords. I was acutely aware of CLASS DISTINCTIONS at age 7 when told NOT TO PLAY with COMMON LITTLE BOYS.
I was stigmatized by pupils and staff at different schools because I could not perform in the gymnasium or on the sports field. I was totally overwhelmed by the “input overload” of children singing hymns at school assembly and to this day I get a flashback of the disgrace I was in whenever I hear certain hymn tunes.
I passed the Eleven Plus a year early and was sent to Steyning Grammar School as a boarder when my father moved up the coast to Seaford some 40 kms away. In those days Seaford was a town full of social fossils, wealthy cranks who aped the extravagances of Edwardian aristocrats. Just as the incessant gales stunted trees, so in the all pervading social atmosphere, children grew up there with severe cognitive distortions that they were entirely unaware of until pitched into other social milieu where they had to be confronted with the wide world but a short busride away. I was SO DESPERATELY HOMESICK that I tried to suffocate myself. So began my lifelong mental distress in earnest. I was NOT ALLOWED to visit my family at weekends though it was about an hour’s journey by bus with a change at Brighton (Indeed I was to travel appreciably further to work every day at my first job). In that autumn I was taken ill and sent to hospital. In March 1953 I began attending Lewes Grammar School a short trainride from Seaford. There, fellow pupils took blatant advantage of my naivety and I committed pranks which had a sexual content. I was just a normal boy with a healthy curiosity about everything. I was rapidly lapping up the principles of flight and indeed a short while later DESIGNED AND BUILT a model plane with swept back wings that actually flew. My curiosity extended to the workings of the human body and the other boys who ran off with my satchel and fountain pens all plied me with smutty talk. I remember for instance when asked what a prostitute was I SAID THAT IT’S A HUGE BUILDING in London and they all roared with laughter.
I have coined the word MINDQUAKE to denote and event that induces mental instability in an otherwise normal person. Such as for example being falsely accused of a crime. Now what happened to me in May 1953 was a Mindquake of such severity that I have never in fact recovered from it. I was flung into permanent disgrace for simply using SWEAR WORDS! It immediately set off a florid personality disorder which of itself brought about further stigmatization. That personality disorder included a conviction that at age ELEVEN I was a LUNATIC and a SEX MANIAC. People especially woman were “land mines”. The only safe path in life was self banishment.
I was too ashamed of myself to make friends. For nearly a year I was absent from school and never as a boy recovered lost ground in maths, I retreated into myself and then I was sent to a prep school in Seaford. I feared that I might swear accidentally. This grew in my mind to be a hideous mental cancer and it was as late as 1992 that I realized I had OCD and in fact I was one of many people thinly scattered round the world who had delusions that we were mad – funny thing to say that! Yes DELUSIONS THAT WE WERE MAD but in fact we are saner than the common run of people. Such insights had to wait until I found Frederick Toates’ book in Cumbernauld Library in 1992 decades after any action could be taken to extirpate this mental ulcer.
FEAR OF SWEARING BY ACCIDENT persisted well into adult life and even now I am smitten with a subconscious fear when I use swear words as INVOLUNTARY CRIES OF PAIN that come from my lips as inevitably as blood flows from a wound. I am SO SCARED OF GIVING OFFENCE to Christian people that my relationship is poisoned whenever I get to know that anybody has strong religious views.
In 1955 I was sent to Red Hill Residential School “For Maladjusted Boys” near Maidstone. At first I thought that it was a “Broadmoor for Boys” but I soon ceased to be homesick. There the eccentric headmaster Otto Shaw administered his version of psychoanalysis. I dutifully disclosed absolutely everything I could remember about my life down to my parents’ obsessions with excretion. I was required to write down my dreams and Shaw made interpretations. This I took as GOSPEL TRUTH and soon after I was reading psychology books to become au fait with Freudian theories by the time I had left school, I was happy and my intellect blossomed there amongst fellow pupils who valued me as a friend – I was secure and I treasure the memories of my Red Hill days.
However strife broke out during holidays and I told Shaw all about it including a theatrical row where I was spanked with a section of model railway track. My father never took any interest in my schoolwork and kicked up a fuss about model aircraft (which smelt of glue and trespassed into neighbours’ gardens) and model railways – I was constantly picked upon for alleged rudeness. I was NEVER TOLD ABOUT MY INTELLECTUAL POTENTIAL but it was regarded as a DARK SECRET LIKE A SEXUAL PERVERSION.
When in early 1958 my father told me that we were all going abroad I promptly TAUGHT MYSELF GERMAN in a dormitory where by barrack room democracy MY RADIO blared out mindless pop music. I would be mastering German grammar rule by rule and so was the ONLY member of the family to speak German. In 1959 we went abroad again and I taught myself MORE GERMAN as well as doing similar exercises from a grammar book of 1910 with obsolete words like “Droschke” for taxi. On that visit I bought a train ticket from Uberlingen Ost to Uberlingen Stadt all of a man for my 17 years and melted into the town like any lad from a station up the line. My father NEVER FORGAVE ME for that affirmation of my ability, or as my RK teacher Canon Norwood always maintained, the Presence of God manifest in me as I persisted with German grammar.
NOBODY told me about Universities so I was FROGMARCHED into the Civil Service on leaving school. I entered the Civil Service National Open Competitions and was NINTH out of 1776 candidates for the Clerical Class and in the top hundred in the Executive Class. Shaw was cock a hoop at this result. He crowed to my father that I had the brains to become a Cabinet Minister and my father was very offended indeed.
My first job was the Sisyphean adding up of salaries in £.s.d. 8 months later I was sacked for being too slow. So Permanent Disgrace resumed for nigh on a year and with it recurred all the symptoms of the post expulsion personality disorder. Feelings ran high at home when I retreated into myself, avoided my peers and felt that I was essentially a parasite. I had NO RIGHT TO ENJOY ANYTHING when unemployed. I was then sent to a Ministry of Labour Industrial Rehabilitation Unit where I amazed fellow inmates by BUILDING MODEL RAILWAY TRUCKS from working drawings. This hobby also impressed the staff I was given the Eysenckian personality and aptitude tests administered to conscripts. These showed that I was head and shoulders above the rest of the inmates in intellect and somehow the sight of those model railway trucks gave the staff the impression that I would do well as a laboratory technician.. a monumental non sequitur (Not that my father would understand that Latinism – he REPRIMANDED me for using Latinisms right up to the very last meeting some years before he died.
I had vainly sought a job as a railway clerk but was deemed unfit for unspecified medical reasons. Eventually I got a job as a lab technician at a London comprehensive school. There I was used as a pawn in a sordid game played by two science teachers to discredit one another. 8 months later I got the sack and again I was pitched into permanent disgrace.
During the spells of unemployment I became very anxious and jittery in the presence of authority. This was to become a conditioned reflex later in life after harassment by the police and what happened to me in Stirling in 1997 (q.v. below).
In 1967 I got a job in a London museum and a fortnight later I had an accident which seemed to be a spill in Sevenoaks and I was unable to go to work the following day (I have fragmentary memories of coming off my scooter in Sevenoaks and without knowing how, finding myself in my lodgings in London). When I went to work I was summoned to the boss, a Dr Claringbull, and accused of either breaking or stealing a mineral specimen and offending Italians and other matters like allegedly being rude to my immediate superiors. I was sacked on the spot and told that the Museum would not be able to provide references. I was “taken onto the staff against their better judgment”. This Mindquake nearly pitched me head first into the Thames. I was only held back because I had university applications in the pipeline. Were I to have been told that I was rejected, at that time, I really think that I would have ended my life.
I was briefly in a Day Hospital until I got another job which lasted until I went to university. Yet I had to put this down on job applications when I graduated and this was a heinous as admission of a criminal record.
I plummeted into the same state of despair as before as I wearily trudged round London looking for jobs. On my 21st birthday I had to “sign on” at dingy Battersea labour exchange and that was supremely hurtful. My father as ever was hostile towards any efforts of mine to improve myself such as the smattering of Russian I had taught myself on train journeys to work. He was particularly scornful of my model railways and held me to BLAME for NOT TRYING HARD ENOUGH to master maths at Red Hill School YET I was lapping up applied geometry when I built model lineside structures from cardboard got from cartons! And indeed built a model engine from plywood and card!
How I was mortified, absolutely mortified by disgrace, shame, an abiding conviction of flawedness when unemployed! How it poisoned my already fragile capacity to make friends! I was badgered to take part in social events within my father’s circle and was exceedingly on edge with strangers. I was absolutely certain that they would know already about my dark secrets. My father even said to neighbours within my earshot that I was mentally unstable.
When at Glasgow University I was in my element but during vacations I got the sack after struggling to satisfy employers and it was then that I felt suicidal and TOLD MY FATHER ABOUT IT. He rubbed salt into ancient wounds by the content and style of his reprimands. I would feel my manhood drain out of me whenever I had to go to Sussex for a vacation and the train entered Sussex. I would feel like a guilty schoolboy in my father’s presence until 1981 when I was maimed and from Christmas 1984 when family strife resumed with full ferocity till the last ever visit in 1996 when there was a flaming row.
Graduation joy was very ephemeral and soon afterwards I was plucked off the Glasgow streets by plain clothes police and dumped in the Woodilee Mental Hospital. I was waiting for a Glencoe bound bus with impedimental for a weekend’s climbing and dressed in shabby climbing attire and had on my person such necessities as a COMPASS a MAP and a CAMERA. This was at the time the severest mindquake of all and upon my release it became known to me that my devoutly Catholic landlady had lied to the police that I was a drugtaker. There had been much friction with her and another Catholic landlady over such matters as my model trains and daftest of all my “obscene pin ups” of OLD STEAM LOCOMOTIVES and ENLARGEMENTS OF MY VERY OWN MODELS!
I had been stopped by the police on other occasions such as when carrying wet enlargements; a mysterious object with arch shaped cutouts which is a MODEL OF THE MORAR VIADUCT and most ludicrous of all MY MODEL OF A SOUTHWOLD RAILWAY COACH (scrapped in 1929) which were all the subjects of lengthy cross examinations within earshot of bystanders.
I had a succession of motor scooters wont to break down and TWICE in Stirling I was harassed by the police when a machine malfunctioned and could only start by bumpstarting. On another occasion it broke down on the Rest and Be Thankful pass during a gale and the police were called and they accused me of blocking the road.
Father would get at me all the time during my frantic futile search for a job or post graduate course. He was exceedingly hostile towards my ambition to do a Ph D. Eventually I was badgered to accept a place at Stafford Polytechnic to study computer science. Within a week of starting I was hopelessly out of my depth. Then followed acrimonies and both father and brother accused me of not trying hard enough. I dropped out and my Stigma fell on top of me. Again I was vainly seeking work and again my father was nagging me “SET YOUR SIGHTS LOWER”, he always insisted and he had bizarre ideas that I MUST BECOME A POSTMAN! If ever I demonstrated my intellect in his company he was quick to denigrate me such as a memorable row about photographs I had taken of the newly created Ballachulish Bridge which gave me boundless joy.
What a crime it was for me to express JOY in his company! And how presumptuous it was of me to aspire to share my knowledge of photography, of the Highlands, of the subjects I had graduated in! What offence caused by the Latinisms which flowed from my lips and the jargon of psychology, of aviation, of photography!
The late seventies dragged on with brief spells of temporary work chiefly fruitpicking and occasional expensive train journeys to fruitless interviews. My morale sank ever lower with each rejection. The Ministry of Labour Officials decided that I needed treatment in the PERSONALITY DISORDER UNIT of the local mental hospital which shared extensive grounds with another hospital. I went to the WRONG HOSPITAL and so never attended the Personality Disorder Unit which took in people sent from the Courts.
During those years unemployment soared and so I gradually lost a feeling of disgrace especially when in the company of people in the protest movements. An important latent function of CND and suchlike movements was to alleviate my loneliness and draw me out of my reclusivism. I formed friendships with laid-back rebels and critics of the Thatcher regime.
In 1981 I was hit by a drunken driver near Stafford and had my right leg amputated below the knee. This had a supremely paradoxical impact in that I immediately SHED MY STIGMA and for about a decade I was free of it when living in Stafford during the halcyon years of my life. I moved to Cumbernauld in 1991 in the belief that I could create a role for myself as a tutor in the demanding intellectual pursuits which made my life meaningful but my hopes were soon dashed when I was snubbed by every voluntary organization that I had approached. Then followed intimidation and religious strife and RESTIGMATISATION.
I moved to a fine house at Banknock at the end of the M80 from Stirling. My parents had coerced me into buying it and it had a big garden for an outdoor model railway which I was never to start. I was burgled days after moving in and the scar of that event abides. Soon afterwards I was intimidated by Catholic mobs and suffered unremitting harassment. I was charged with a BREACH OF THE PEACE namely a sarcastic remark about the Catholic religion after neighbours flatly refused to turn off a tap during a flood in my home and then accused me of BREACH OF DECORUM namely being seen in my garden with false leg detached. These very neighbours who paraded their piety went on to SMASH MY WINDOWS BURN DOWN MY GARAGE and SMEAR EXCREMENT ON MY WALLS so the house was sold at a massive loss and I retreated to Cumbernauld.
There the intimidation was even worse than at Banknock. I had NINE Honda C90 scooters stolen one after another from 1992 to 2000. Windows were repeatedly smashed at both Cumbernauld and Banknock. I was regularly molested BY gangs of children wherever I went and my glasses got smashed and drying clothes got pilfered. CATHOLIC social workers in Cumbernauld had the cheek to insist that I was to blame for my plight because I wear RIDING ATTIRE to hold my false leg on securely and because of the way I speak I was unacceptable because I did not conform to the “values” of my neighbours and indeed DESPICABLY ODD because I HATED FOOTBALL and neither knew nor cared about football teams. I was in their eyes also despicable because I “play with toy trains” (anything BUT toys! As fragile as Dresden china figurines and all of them manifestations of my drive to self-mastery!)
On Sept 11th 1997 I went to photograph a pageant in Stirling and was dressed in smart homemade Gripperbreeks and immaculate white shirt and TIE and equally immaculate jacket and shoes. I had on me five 35mm cameras and spare films and a screw in auxiliary wide angle lens and a CHANGING BAG with which to rewind a film in my Zenith which cannot be accomplished in daylight due to some unexpected malfunction. There I was assaulted THRICE by the police and later accused of MASTURBATION IN PUBLIC namely rewinding the film in the Zenith with its back opened inside the bag. My explanation cut no ice and I suffered agonies for two years indeed the very act of disclosure elicits a sharp replay of what happened to such an extent that as I type I relive all the agony. It is so hurtful that whenever I see the name STIRLING on a signpost I have s sharp jab of mental sciatica as I do whenever I see the apparatus that was confiscated for two years which I now rarely use. This is by far so far the most hurtful experience of my life and I have to declare that in the light of my experiences in Scotland since 1993 I simply cannot stick the SCOTS except perhaps UNIVERSITY GRADUATES who alone amongst the Scots behave as mature adults.
CATHOLICS have always been quick to jump on me for the most trivial of reasons. I can recall numerous incidents since boyhood where I clashed with Catholics. They got at me for developing films, one Catholic man made off with a precious hand made model engine later recovered in pieces from a dustbin, and I have referred to the Catholic landladies. During my stay at Banknock I made discreet investigations and my findings confirmed all my worst fears that Catholics are “the Enemy within Britain’s gates” who pick upon non-believers and get people into trouble so that for instance Banknock should stay one hundred per cent Catholic. They would go to any depths to discredit non-believers who in their eyes “steal people from Christ”.
An embittered ex-Catholic lady of my generation disclosed that she had her MIND RAPED by Catholic dogma and Catholics insist that there is a distinctly Catholic way of doing everything in life from tying one’s shoelaces to running a Government department. Even a distinctly Catholic typeface in the textbooks in Catholic schools because it is held that Catholic children will be CORRUPTED by textbooks written by non-Catholics, she added.
I find other religious fanatics just as odious such as the cranks from the Outer Hebrides who insist on Sabbath observance and who forbid modern equipment such as WORD PROCESSORS! I have at times suffered religious cranks who proselytize and yet like my mother could NOT understand the everyday English of the “Daily Telegraph” and would jump on me particularly for such matters as my need to wear riding-attire.
THE SOCIOLOGY OF STIGMATIZATION
I graduated in sociology and was later to read A CRITICAL CONDITION a Sociology of Disability written by Paul Hunt who had muscular dystrophy and lived in a Cheshire Home. He was a towering intellect who ought to be remembered as the Socrates of Odiham his home town in Hampshire.
I therefore present a Huntean perspective on Stigmatisation. It is sure to disturb and offend.
Stigmatisation is most rife in people from subcultures at odds with the mainstream values of society. There is a need amongst such embattled minorities to parade a bogus superiority and maintain a mythology sustained by symbolism. Prowess in FOOTBALL is one of the desiderata expected of adult males in such subcultures as is a kind of bodily perfection which is entirely divorced from practical considerations. Innate and morally neutral attributes are held to be moral failings even though they may confer practical advantages. Most decidedly any boys who fall short of the stereotype will be picked upon my classmates and at an early age be burdened with a stigma which will progressively warp their personalities.
No matter how virtuous the victim may be, indeed precisely because he may have giftedness which should lead to qualifications and so to a fulfilling life, he will be singled out for ill treatment. Unless the victim is transplanted to a social “vicinia sana” where he can discover his true value, the pressures of his peers will lead him to becoming mad, bad, and ultimately dead (of self-abuse readily to hand). The stigmatized boy is submerged in his sub-culture (such as one finds in Northern Ireland) and has NO WAY of escaping from it. For it permeates his waking existence and it stifles awareness of the world beyond. In such subcultures GIRLS who deviate are somewhat concealed as it is generally held that women have a subordinate role in the world – strikingly at odds with the role of women in sophisticated metropolitan societies. There are unwritten laws which are unwittingly broken by outsiders; and jargon meant only to be understood by members of the sub-groups.
Whilst the most florid examples of tribalism are to be seen in Northern Ireland the stigmatization of subcultures is observable in towns full of social fossils like Seaford where my father lived for most of his life. Wealthy cranks set the standards in Seaford. Children are merely fashion accessories, hardly more than intelligent pets. Daughters have a tacit obligation to look after elderly parents till they die. All too often an elderly mother claims a right to break up her daughter’s friendship with a young man who may leave the district to better himself. I had often speculated whether I would have been punished far less harshly for stealing or for energetically retaliating when Lewes Grammar School boys made off with my belongings. Most definitely I was never ever forgiven for what I did at Lewes Grammar School whilst all the time in school assemblies we had to SING HYMNS about Jesus Christ FORGIVING SINNERS.
So I was stained for life and there was no way I could expunge the stain by academic prowess still less by demanding feats in disciplines frowned upon by my father (such as building sheet metal model locomotives!) His very handwriting would induce mental sciatica and I feared his PRAISE more than his REPRIMANDS. If ever I had done something that pleased him I had somehow SURRENDERED MY SOUL TO HIM.
LOVE came to mean abject submission to my mother’s will; having to behave as a compliant servant and indeed regress to a cuddly little pet. LOVE was therefore denial of all those attributes which gave me my fragile self-respect 40 years ago. It was indeed a form of self-annihilation. I can no more understand “love” in the popular sense of the word than a deaf man appreciate music. (But in my story “Offence was most definitely given” I define the Highest Kind of Love, hopefully define a “Highest Possible State”. I term DELPHILATION in a dialogue of Socratic adduction between my leading character and a man who is really MYSELF).
I share with Jean Genet and a number of other psychically maimed people, a kind of split personality. For all my intellectual growth, whenever I am disturbed I feel like a baby rabbit frightened out of its wits and never more so than on 11.9.97 at Stirling where I had the presence of mind to tell the police that I suffer from a lifelong affliction called PHOBOGENY which I said, is Greek for “BORN WITH FEAR” yet this is MY neologism yet to appear in any dictionary. So whenever harassed by the police I become a quivering wreck and display such florid symptoms of fright that are readily mistaken for symptoms of insanity. These are autonomous reactions of the lower brain which were induced in me by my father in the mists of time and as much a part of me as my myopia. Here in Dunfermline Library I struggle to define what overwhelmed me throughout my life, which will be with me till my dying day – simmering below my relaxedness here, ready to erupt in anxiety and mental sciatica that is far more hurtful than any physical pain. A glare, a cutting remark, from a bystander. A trivial gaffe made, and I go over a figurative precipice into suicidal depression accompanied by such irrational guilt as to compel me to cut myself off from other people in the delusion that I am a social bull-in-a-china-shop, or a sex pervert or so incompetent at running my everyday affairs that I must dispose of myself hygienically. This is how I have felt all my adult life and no matter how hard I struggle to cast it aside by prowess in demanding pursuits, it persists. Though I know that this entirely a delusion I am overwhelmed by it and when in a state of self-disownment I ruminate about ways of dispatching myself and what will happen to me in the Hereafter.
SO FAR I HAVE RESTRAINED MYSELF and instead I have projected all these suicidal thoughts into my characters. Sometimes I create a character who is suicidal. In one instance I wrote a suicide story after meeting a man with florid schizophrenia who was given a copy and knows exactly how I have altered his particulars. My “internal monologue” THROW YOURSELF OFF THE SOLWAY BRIDGE! Was constructed in order to convey my agony on my 61st birthday and also to make a trenchant point about a man who fell from grace in 1942 (when I was a baby).
RELIGION as the primary cause of Stigmatization?
I can only observe from my experience that people with strong religious views justify cruelty by quoting from the Bible, the Koran and other ancient religious “revelations of the Word of God”. Highly educated cosmopolitan people are the least likely to stigmatise their children. People of low intelligence are more likely to be cruel than university graduates. Low intelligence goes hand in hand with adherence to religious dogmas and inability to cope with changes of any kind. We now have a far greater understanding of the nature of Intelligence than in 1953 but even then it was widely understood how creative people differ from the common herd.
Religious indoctrination cramps and cripples people’s minds, and causes them to justify the most abominable cruelties imaginable such as the perversion that led Ben Atta to crash the hijacked airliner into the WTC in the manifest DELUSION that he would go straight to heaven. At the personal level in Northern Ireland so reliable sources insist there is an entirely perverted popular delusion about bodily perfection which smacks of those hotbeds of homosexuality which are reported all too often as commonplace in that benighted country. So if any Northern Irish BOY has a noticeable peculiarity such as hair colour or myopia or a stammer or a deformed limb or even a FORENAME with derogatory connotations he becomes stigmatized and that stigma will burden him until he quits Northern Ireland forever for a cosmopolitan social milieu where he can discover his infinite value as a Vessel of God.
STIGMATISATION will therefore burden children for as long as there is organized religion and as long as church schools impose social apartheid.
It would be understandable if a well to do parent was bitterly disappointed when his son showed no signs of the qualities that he admired most. It might be a matter of personal pride to declare that his son was a “chip off the family block” and took an interest in demanding pursuits. I had told my father that were I to have become a fornicating merchant seaman who sired bastards at every port of call his attitude towards me might be justified. Whilst he always insisted that he LOVED ME he was quick to heap scorn upon me that I understandably rejected this “love”. He was quite cock-a-hoop when I gained a place at Glasgow University but I DO remember his scornful remarks when I gave him some university essays to read and indeed his REPRIMANDS for those very passages which demonstrated my knowledge of the subjects being studied.
He was to crow to his friends that he had TWO SONS AT UNVERSITY yet never have any inkling of what drove me to my achievements indeed be basically hostile towards my self-improving drives.
DESTIGMATIZATION
Precisely because of all the woes I describe above I have written copiously about a fictitious former schoolmate named Alan Moelwyn-Wright my leading character and title role player in my ongoing epic THE SOCRATES OF CHARFORD. I describe a humane alternative value system called CONTRIBUTIONISM which by incorporating the Reincarnationist Strict Consequentialism of Masefield’s poem A CREED collides absolutely head on with Christian dogma.
Alan’s clients with many social problems redefine themselves by their contributions to the common good of their fellows. They insist that the God in themselves is manifest in their deeds and none more so than the 1.20m tall cathedral organist and master tailor Trevor Mansell in my short story SIX FEET TALL IN THE EYES OF GOD which I shall gladly provide to ram home my essential thesis that we can only be what we create for our fellows to enjoy. Bodily peculiarities are irrelevant unlike the absurd Catholic obsession with bodily perfection which smacks of narcissism and indeed sexual perversion. I have offered my services to all manner of voluntary bodies and made the point that I CREATED MYSELF through persistence at demanding hobbies and I CONQUERED FEAR through climbing precipitous mountains. I have undergone a succession of convulsive paradigm shifts in life to the extent that I am NO LONGER HUMAN but like my Mansell I have grown into another lifeform. Or as I say in my poem BEN SGULAIRD “Seed of the Almighty! Here dissolving into a greater Totality! (WHAT OFFENCE is given in that assertion!)
I observe what can be called the decay of connectedness in everything. At a very obvious level the public transport system is being fragmented and disconnected with privatization. 40 years ago one could take a train from Peebles to Forfar – both COUNTY TOWNS! And carry a bicycle without any hindrance. NOW the only way between the two towns is by CAR! And a relatively short journey such as Dunfermline to Kirkintilloch can ONLY JUST BE ACCOMPLISHED with time enough for the business in hand. At another level NO CONNECTIONS ARE MADE by our administrators between juvenile crime and lack of facilities for challenging sports. Indeed of anybody proposes that public funds should be spent on adventure sports like hillwalking they are dismissed. WASTAGE is rampant in our society because lateral thinkers like myself are dismissed as cranks.
I even fear that we are all suffering from brain damage caused by inhaling motor fumes. This is why the people in power act so stupidly. Were they to have to CYCLE TO WORK along streets empty of motor vehicles their brains would be irrigated with oxygen as they pedalled along.
Scotland is fast ossifying into a post-civilised battleground between hardened bigots and all too many Scots behave like primary school children. I am simply appalled by what I observe. I have no chance at all of influencing people so lacking in intelligence that they don’t even know the elementary arithmetic which I mastered at primary schools. Many Scots whom I suffer define themselves by who they hate. In the days of petrol rationing and when I was nine years old I was familiar enough with the Sussex coastal plain and my native North Devon but I encounter Glaswegians who hardly ever venture out of Glasgow let alone climb those mountains visible from a Cumbernauld bound bus.
I can provide graphic illustrations of the cruelty I have suffered since 1991 and never more so than in my short story THE ONLY JEW IN SKARAVAIG. Goldstucker the leading character is erudite, Jewish and has a physical deformity. His neighbours reject his cornucopia of all those fruits of his lifelong learning which he seeks to bestow upon them. This is a sorry reflection of my own thwarted philanthropy since 1991.
I have no hope whatsoever of passing on my 40 years’ knowledge of model railways, photography and hillwalking. I feel very embittered now at age 61 unable to create a role for myself and still burdened with all the hang-ups I have described.
Indeed the Scots have imposed upon me a BIZARRE KIND OF STIGMA that of being a supremely gifted man who has achieved so much in the face of adversity. As I feel that no matter what I achieve in life I shall be rejected out of hand for my Classical English, my erudition and the necessity of wearing RIDING ATTIRE to hold on my false leg I now appraise how I may yet move to Devon to find kindred spirits and frantically devote my last years to creating the society I describe in “The Socrates of Charford”.
Thursday, May 21, 2009
Effort to contribute our issues to another good cause
Is the society around us seriously registering aspie issues? and the beneficial impact they make upon many other fairness issues too? Or are they just saying what the socially minded say too often: Oh dear, will we be understood if we say anything new, let's just keep saying what we find familiar? When a local project starts up for a good cause, does it do its own thing, oblivious to us?
On May 9 the No Borders campaign held a dayschool here, as part of a tour, on the oppression of asylum seekers. Part of its purpose was to assemble such folks as might want to take part in starting a local project for practical solidarity with asylum seekers, similar to one already functioning in Newcastle. There was a predictable way that the prevalence of local faces who are already regular in the left wing or anarchist scenes reduced the likelihood that anyone not of those scenes could be involved and feel comfortable or included. The rigidity of attitude those folks have about most topics, really thwarts the wider growth of projects they would like to see wider growth of.
Some of what they are about was sensible practical sharing of material goods with asylum seekers who can't obtain them, either who are paid in food vouchers of tightly limited usability instead of cash, or who have had all income cut off completely at the same time as not being allowed to get jobs. Solidarity in the face of the unviability of life the asylum system is intentionally designed to cause. Naturally also they are interested in raising public support for our guests, for making the true situation wider known about how folks already come out of desperately dangerous situations are getting treated, and if need arises, for having the means to create campaigns of the community's eagerness to keep someone, around blatantly corrupt refusals of asylum or attempts to deport. There has in fact already been a past campaign in Edinburgh preventing a spiteful deportation of a care worker whose life was totally established here and formed part of the care of learning disabled folks too. These campaigns are brilliant in their impact aginst racism, because they pinpoint how immigration barriers trample over the practical common sense of daily life.
Here is the problem. Folks doing these campaigns, if they seriously and genuinely care and want sheer reasoning decency to win against racsim, then they must want every possible contribution to victory for asylum seekers to be seized on and made maximum use of. This is an automatic duty. In the dayschool, in the session devoted to gathering ideas, I contributed an idea arising from autism. Think about this one:
Disability discrimination is now an established principle, itself owed to a history of struggle too. Among asylum seekers, just as among any other group, there are bound to be some aspies, some dyspraxics, and some attention deficits. To treat them in any way they will have a disadvantage with because of their conditions, is disability discrimination hence must be illegal. This is arguable by 2 separate routes, nationally on grounds of disability discrimination law, and internationally on human rights grounds applying to medically real minorities. But is there a screening system that is diagnosing all the autistic spectrumites among asylum seekers, and doing it straightaway without a wait, and being generous about diagnosing in uncertain cases? Of course not. As there is not even such a system fior the ordinary settled population, even less possible is it for asylum seekers. This proves - the system handles asylum seekers completely blind to which ones are on our spectrum. Hence, any way that all asylum seekers are treated, that would be disadvantageous to the spectrumite ones, is a disability discrimination and is invalid to continue. Where there is an impairment of concentration or attention, there is a greater chance, innocently and without blame, of losing physical objects, especially small or flimsy ones. Like - identity papers and cards. It is visibly disability discrimination to make any autistic spectrumite verify their status by carrying documents. Because of not knowing which asylum seekers are spectrumites, disability discrimination is committed by making any asylum seekers at all depend on carrying documents, in any way at all !
This gets rid of the identity cards being introduced for asylum seekers, and it wipes out the validity of ever penalising them for lacking papers or passports on their arrival here.
So we wait to hear that No Borders or any other asylum solidarity project makes some use of an item of this whopping magnitude. How long will the wait be? At the dayschool, my point was just put in the list, with a murmur of uncertainty of how much gain it would be possible to make from it in practice. One more voice, speaking from lack of knowledge of disabilities, voiced the sense of unsure ground hence of need to pass this item on to any folks with more secure disabled knowledge who might pop up in the local project in future. This is all that happened. Indeed from experience this is about all I expected would happen. The item was not focussed on again in the ending. It's obvious what this means: no commitment that the item will be used at all. The project will start with local radicals just saying the familiar things they are already used to saying, that don't force any big shift in the system's nature.
We have never yet had an asylum seeker in Elas. In theory we could, if there was an aspie one living in Edinburgh. Then we would be involved at the real personal level of experiencing the oppression, the global apartheid, splitting friends and vandalising lives. We will all as a community, not only the asylum seeker, have been medically wronged and violated by any functioning local asylum solidarity project, if it claims to have even in theory a choice not to make use of the item I raised. Same goes for all the national projects. If the local project does get going, then any asylum seekers reading this will know whether the project honestly cares a damn and wants to win your cause, by whether it takes up my disability discrimination argument and cites it publicly against the identity rules in the asylum system. It is a simple clear argument.
How many other good causes are there, where the opportunity for autism to force positive advances in civil liberties gets received only with uncertainty and doing nothing, just because it is unfamiliar? This makes all the difference to whether aspies are marginalised, or campaigners for other causes are seen to care at all about the biological needs they raise. The issue about losable documents does not only affect asylum seekers, they are only the most extremely and urgently affected group. For all the settled population too, the issue has the potential to stop identity cards and to force the democratic world to abolish passports and tickets on public transport. Which brings a whole lot more issue campaigns under the same clear test:
EITHER to commit medical betrayal cheating the entire ordinary population out of a great gain, OR to have no psychological barriers ever to immediate takeup of new information heard for the first time.
Maurice Frank
On May 9 the No Borders campaign held a dayschool here, as part of a tour, on the oppression of asylum seekers. Part of its purpose was to assemble such folks as might want to take part in starting a local project for practical solidarity with asylum seekers, similar to one already functioning in Newcastle. There was a predictable way that the prevalence of local faces who are already regular in the left wing or anarchist scenes reduced the likelihood that anyone not of those scenes could be involved and feel comfortable or included. The rigidity of attitude those folks have about most topics, really thwarts the wider growth of projects they would like to see wider growth of.
Some of what they are about was sensible practical sharing of material goods with asylum seekers who can't obtain them, either who are paid in food vouchers of tightly limited usability instead of cash, or who have had all income cut off completely at the same time as not being allowed to get jobs. Solidarity in the face of the unviability of life the asylum system is intentionally designed to cause. Naturally also they are interested in raising public support for our guests, for making the true situation wider known about how folks already come out of desperately dangerous situations are getting treated, and if need arises, for having the means to create campaigns of the community's eagerness to keep someone, around blatantly corrupt refusals of asylum or attempts to deport. There has in fact already been a past campaign in Edinburgh preventing a spiteful deportation of a care worker whose life was totally established here and formed part of the care of learning disabled folks too. These campaigns are brilliant in their impact aginst racism, because they pinpoint how immigration barriers trample over the practical common sense of daily life.
Here is the problem. Folks doing these campaigns, if they seriously and genuinely care and want sheer reasoning decency to win against racsim, then they must want every possible contribution to victory for asylum seekers to be seized on and made maximum use of. This is an automatic duty. In the dayschool, in the session devoted to gathering ideas, I contributed an idea arising from autism. Think about this one:
Disability discrimination is now an established principle, itself owed to a history of struggle too. Among asylum seekers, just as among any other group, there are bound to be some aspies, some dyspraxics, and some attention deficits. To treat them in any way they will have a disadvantage with because of their conditions, is disability discrimination hence must be illegal. This is arguable by 2 separate routes, nationally on grounds of disability discrimination law, and internationally on human rights grounds applying to medically real minorities. But is there a screening system that is diagnosing all the autistic spectrumites among asylum seekers, and doing it straightaway without a wait, and being generous about diagnosing in uncertain cases? Of course not. As there is not even such a system fior the ordinary settled population, even less possible is it for asylum seekers. This proves - the system handles asylum seekers completely blind to which ones are on our spectrum. Hence, any way that all asylum seekers are treated, that would be disadvantageous to the spectrumite ones, is a disability discrimination and is invalid to continue. Where there is an impairment of concentration or attention, there is a greater chance, innocently and without blame, of losing physical objects, especially small or flimsy ones. Like - identity papers and cards. It is visibly disability discrimination to make any autistic spectrumite verify their status by carrying documents. Because of not knowing which asylum seekers are spectrumites, disability discrimination is committed by making any asylum seekers at all depend on carrying documents, in any way at all !
This gets rid of the identity cards being introduced for asylum seekers, and it wipes out the validity of ever penalising them for lacking papers or passports on their arrival here.
So we wait to hear that No Borders or any other asylum solidarity project makes some use of an item of this whopping magnitude. How long will the wait be? At the dayschool, my point was just put in the list, with a murmur of uncertainty of how much gain it would be possible to make from it in practice. One more voice, speaking from lack of knowledge of disabilities, voiced the sense of unsure ground hence of need to pass this item on to any folks with more secure disabled knowledge who might pop up in the local project in future. This is all that happened. Indeed from experience this is about all I expected would happen. The item was not focussed on again in the ending. It's obvious what this means: no commitment that the item will be used at all. The project will start with local radicals just saying the familiar things they are already used to saying, that don't force any big shift in the system's nature.
We have never yet had an asylum seeker in Elas. In theory we could, if there was an aspie one living in Edinburgh. Then we would be involved at the real personal level of experiencing the oppression, the global apartheid, splitting friends and vandalising lives. We will all as a community, not only the asylum seeker, have been medically wronged and violated by any functioning local asylum solidarity project, if it claims to have even in theory a choice not to make use of the item I raised. Same goes for all the national projects. If the local project does get going, then any asylum seekers reading this will know whether the project honestly cares a damn and wants to win your cause, by whether it takes up my disability discrimination argument and cites it publicly against the identity rules in the asylum system. It is a simple clear argument.
How many other good causes are there, where the opportunity for autism to force positive advances in civil liberties gets received only with uncertainty and doing nothing, just because it is unfamiliar? This makes all the difference to whether aspies are marginalised, or campaigners for other causes are seen to care at all about the biological needs they raise. The issue about losable documents does not only affect asylum seekers, they are only the most extremely and urgently affected group. For all the settled population too, the issue has the potential to stop identity cards and to force the democratic world to abolish passports and tickets on public transport. Which brings a whole lot more issue campaigns under the same clear test:
EITHER to commit medical betrayal cheating the entire ordinary population out of a great gain, OR to have no psychological barriers ever to immediate takeup of new information heard for the first time.
Maurice Frank
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