Friday, May 12, 2017

voicing into the autism strategy, so we must stay visibly organised

Facebook link for it coming soon. Already linked from the autism strategy's site by this link, because it is a document attached to the autism strategy. A grassroots sourced guide of what real life situations for aspies it has to address, for effectiveness of all services. Thus is the Autism Network Scotland's compilation An Ordinary Life Too. From many aspies in Scotland as contributors, and the editing team's membership overlapped ELAS.

That is what ANS has been about: grassroots input into the policy system for us. Scotland seems to be where this model is best developed in the world. In the 10 years it has run, it has succeeded as an experiment and a principle: proud to be part of that.

What a contrast with the failure rate, throughout Britain, for independently organised aspie local societies. Their number in Scotland is declining. According to an ELAS member who has observed the trend, "all over Britain AS support groups had started, and folded when their members were tired of one another." To get tired of the countrywide mass and scene of your fellow aspies is a really nasty thing to do and increases vulnerability. You don't get fellow aspies' empathy and understanding in NT society, dammit. Aspie Village keeps a national aspie scene in existence, but a successful networked scene of UNCORRUPT local societies, with constitutions tying them to standards of personal fairness and no instant or arbitrary rejections, and the standard protections of minorities, is what we need to stand up for ourselves at a practical level everywhere, and not be reliant on the arrogant self-interested NAS.

ELAS has just crossed a line of failure as a self-reliant independent group, as a dispute over honouring of ethics and fairness has made it cease to be possible to have an impartial and ethically spotless chair from within the group, and need to have Autism Initiatives workers take the chair. It is a milestone of scene contraction, that underlines the need for conscientious group fairness ethics at all times, to underpin all aspie societies. No excuse for anyone ever to assert toughly spoken brute views of reality and limits to willingness to adhere to fairness, or to claim there ever exists any reason for anyone's personal fainess to be sacrificed for a group's expediency - those are violations of vulnerability. When local societies are proper tied down ethically safe spaces, where all know that nobody, officeholders included, can get away with doing a dirty on you, then there is less motive for anyone to get tired of it. For the aspie scene and nationally networked community to be sustained, much less grown, it needs to be worthwhile, means reliably nice and caring, for the folks taking part in it. That's a no-brainer.

Fibromyalgia can co-occur with autism or in the same families at it, though curiously the gender balance of its prevalence is the reverse of autism's. Liaison with a friend with it has confirmed that its recognition as a disability is accurate and wanted, and brings really practical benefits and helps with establishing practical disability entitlements. So that this petition to class fibromyalgia as a disability picked up from another aspie contact, is worth your support. To share it is an example of practical good from a sustained aspie scene, from us caring not to tire of it !!

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