Have you passed through the chamber of paradox at the airport

Aspie or not, wouldn't you be confused if you were directed into a room and a recorded voice started howling "You have entered a resrticted area. Exit immediately." Wouldn't you think you were in the wrong place?

All folks with friends or good contacts abroad, and we have some helfpul ones among aspies now, know how horrible the system of entering Britain has been made by all the tabloid racism. Have you seen the "UK border" section at the airport, with all its prominent notices openly using the word "tougher"? Openly unfriendly to all the folks arriving. When we travel, even for a diplomatic purpose like the twin town visit to Norway I have just taken part in, we have to walk through this nonsense and offensive gateway of global apartheid, and succeed in carrying safely a losable document, which is in fact our apartheid passbook, past a lot of legal warnings to foreign visitors about prosecution if they lose it and are thought to have destroyed it. After not seeing anything like that in the entries to neighbouring countries.

How functionally odd it is that the baggage reclaim always comes after the passport barrier, so that anyone who suffers the apartheid evil of getting blocked by the barrier appears to be exposed also to the danger that anyone could walk off with their luggage? Then, how often is the experience I had yesterday, arriving back on my flight from Norway, experienced? After passing through that morally chilling passport barrier whose existence prevents any thinking person enjoying foreign travel, we passed baggage reclaim. This was in its own room, not in the open airport space. Then the directions led through customs, but no staffed operation of the green channel was taking place. Then passed that unstaffed point there appeared to be closed room not leading anywhere, except for a closed door marked as automatic.

It all looked very confusing, and I was at first unsure whether to retrace my steps, but there was no other way to go. Anyway I only ventured through said automatic door when some other passengers did too and I could go with their flow. This door just led into a smallish and seemingly pointless empty room, which turned a right angle then had a second automatic door out of it again. As soon as I entered that room, this voice blasted out "You have entered a restricted area. Exit immediately."

Surely anyone would think they had walked into the wrong place? I whirled round on the first thought that it must mean I should exit the same way as I had entered. But from this side the first door now said "No entry!" complete with road sign too. While the second door was there to exit through, and was the only apparent exit. There had been nowhere else that our directions off the plane and through the passport evil had led to, than into this kafkaesque chamber that seemed to tell us we should not be there! Lo and be staggered, the second door opened into the main airport space, duly completing our arrival. In front of us were the folks waiting to meet folks. When I looked back, above the door out of the chamber of paradox was the sign "international arrivals". This experience that makes no rational sense really was part of the entry to Britain provided to the passengers of that flight from Norway.

Some airport signing is bilingual, and out of the airport the road signs reminding you we drive on the left are in 5 languages. But the voice in the kafkaesque chamber was only in English. A visitor without a good knowledge of English would not know what was going on, when the signs directed them through a chamber that treated them like a criminal for following the signs, they could be caused a lot of fear and panic? Was this a freak error of them not switching off the voice or does this happen frequently? Is our system now so wilfully nasty to the outside world that it has set up this chamber of paradox to test visitors' psychology with? Then what do the resident population think of coming home through such a hurdle? Consider how an autistic person unable to sort out the mixed messages, suddenly finding themself in this chamber that made no sense, could be thrown into panic? and meltdown and cessation to cope?

A really odd story from the yukky global apartheid of our times.

Maurice Frank

tickety boo

Sailing Calmac's ferries in the Western Isles has become safer since I did an island hopping holiday back in 1992. Then, they collected your ticket only at the sailing's end. Anyone could get on but it committed you to still have this losable small object in your possession, not lost or stolen, at destination. Exactly what would happen to you carried fear through uncertainty. During that holiday I did indeed come across a case, an old lady in a disembarking queue in front of me had lost her ticket during the journey and was trying to cope by cracking jokes about going to jail. But this is a humanly sick situation against all practical common sense. What if she had been robbed, and she the victim had to talk of going to jail? I last saw her standing to 1 side with the ticket man, no idea what happened, I just wonder if the same would have happened to a teenager as to an old lady, both equally innocent.

I remember the system making me anxious all that holiday, and not being attracted to the Western Isles again for a long time. That old system is now gone, and that is some welcome progress, for Elas's recent visit to Mull and Iona. Now they do the tickets at boarding, less scary. But it would still seriously foul up your life to lose a ticket in those remote small port villages with scant buses or emergency facilities. It remains an example of how dangerous tickets are as a system, and have been for 200 years, and how the danger discriminates against anyone with a condition increasing their likelihood to lose small objects. Which is my case for banning tickets.

Duart castle, on Mull, is using a ticket system with echoes of Calmac's old one, for its private buses that meet the ferries at Craignure. If you get on without a prebooking, the driver gives you a ticket that you only pay for when you reach the castle entrance kiosk, along with your admission. The ticket's corner is cut off to validate it, then you need it in that condition for the bus back. As the castle is far up a track winding through empty farmland, a longer trek from the nearest village than it looks on the map, dear me you want the bus back. But that means not losing your ticket as you carry it around with you all the time you are at the castle. As a coastal promontory in a Hebridean firth, this is prone to be a windy spot, with quick change weather. We saw it go from sunny to misted up in a few minutes. Yet the entrance kiosk has no shelter attached to it for the customer standing on the outside. You have no shield from the wind, as the man comfortably inside the kiosk hands out to you your clipped ticket, and a little till receipt for your admission, and maybe a note in your change too as bus plus admission is £11. 3 bits of paper, none of which must you allow to blow away or else your day is wrecked big time. So pronto you have to find a spot to park yourself, back to the wind, to sort them all out. Sit on the step beside the kiosk, is what I did.

What are the castle folks going to do with anyone who can't do a long country walk and who is stuck there with a loss of ticket? When the castle wants to close at day's end, and the stranded person is missing their ship off the island too, let's wonder? It makes a disability question that should be pressed. As a practical matter of safety, your status in moving around should never be allowed to depend on the successful safekeeping of several small scraps of paper in a windy place.

What about your bigger bulkier travelling baggage? Does that carry anxieties? Procedurally or emotionally, do you cope better with keeping it with you at all times or with leaving it in a place of safety? There is an aspie coping question in there, and you want the answer to work for you. Consider this prize piece of ticketing logic, from Oban station's baggage lockers: "This contains the security code needed to recover your luggage and keep it safe." Keep it safe: can you find any practicality and logic in a system where retaining possession of a number code on a ticket and not losing it is critical to recovering possession of your safely stored possessions? I can't even look down that vortex, the anxiety this should logically give you. You need safe storage, so keep something else safe as you go around ... I mean ... This is all some of what tickets, and their acceptance as a concept, do to our lives.

Maurice Frank

Invitation to an autocratically restricted group's members to escape it and join us

Elas is open to all spectrumites who can reach us and want to, any radius, and we go visiting the aspie scene in other places too. All who want to link up with an aspie scene where folks communicate freely across region and groups are democratic and uphold personal wellbeing with everyone getting their say. That is the aspie scene we want, and folks beginning to network across Scotland want too, and all spectrumites with important stuff to say want it.

We extend a standing invitation to all folks on the spectrum who are unhappy with groups of a less free nature, to link up with us. Nobody must feel stuck in a group that is not the right type for them just by where they live. There is a disturbing case happening in an adult aspie group in a region near us.

There is a group where all the deciding power belongs to the chair and committee of a broader autism society also working with kids. The society set up the group, and in that society the chair, who until recently was also the founder, has always been the dominant leader, the committee following like sheep. So the group's members don't have their own direct say in how the group runs, what practices it follows. Imposed on them from above like that, as a "code of conduct", they are not allowed to communicate with each other, using contact info given in their contact list, for any other purpose than to arrange social meet-ups. Unlike Elas they never do arrange meet-ups, either: how can they feel close enough to each other to do that with all their contact censored? How is such a ban enforceable, it has been asked? Data protection law, designed to fight spam and junk mail, can be misused to set conditions like this to what types of messages folks consent to receive using their data. But in that group, the trap comes from how this rule was first imposed. It was announced to be in effect without advance notice, before its contents were even declared, and before the members had any chance to make known to each other their own consents to receive other types of messages. So they can't make that consent known to other members who have not already consented to them to have it made known to them, and who for the same reason can't make that consent known either. So any 2 members are trapped in a vicious circle of neither being allowed to open up closer terms of contact with the other.

Members have been cut off from each other, and from receiving info from outside the group by email from other members. The leader hence holds control of what they receive. This Orwellian rule was introduced openly for the purpose of preventing members discussing with each other anything going wrong with the group, without having to go through the leader. Needless to say they have no blog like this one: they have always been welcome to use this one but did they know? Consider too that in this now low attendance and socially dead group whose meeting last week was actually abandoned, it is clear that a large proportion of the contact list is of lapsed or ex-members, yet their ability to contact each other or the remaining members or be contacted by them remains under the same restraint. They have no say over it, if they even realise it is happening. Elas's response to the autism bill consultations contrasted that model with our open and decentralised model. Watch out for this if you are joining or visiting any aspie groups in central/south Scotland: do they follow Elas's model or the other group's?

The problem society has also appointed a spokesman for the ruling committee on all issues to do with the contact list and banned all contact with any other committee members about those. Are you keeping up? Layer upon layer of paranoia. No sensible thinker can feel safe in an organisation that behaves like that: like a cult, tying you up in gags on talking about what is happening to you and hogging all power to the leadership. How are we going to retrieve our fellow spectrumites entangled under these tricky controls they have never had proper opportunity to consent to? Is that the challenge to its legality that will break it? we have that committee spokesman already questioned thus. This should concern the whole rest of the scene in Scotland, the free scene as it may now be worth calling it.

2 members of Elas used to also belong to this other group, and as a part of Elas's far wider success in keeping socials going it used to have some contact established with one of the other group's members. All swept away now. That is really helpful in defending and growing the scene's wellbeing, eh?

The group's trouble began when a member X, volunteering at an ecology centre, recommended another member Y to do the same. When the ecology centre discriminated against Y for being a victim already and rejected him, X brushed it aside and defended the ecology centre's discretion to do it and refused to take any stand against it. Y as a result made a complaint that X should not do support work, including for teenagers, in that autism society, and the bully-hurt of being expected to endorse that as part of life in the society. He tried to overcome prolonged hurtful noncommittality from the leader and force the right outcome on its moral merits by an email to the group members. This issue could not even arise in an independently organised adult group like Elas that is not tied to a bigger society and/or to endorsing any support work. If an X/Y situation happened in Elas, Y could just cut off speaking terms with X and not be pressed about it, and could tell the story and be deemed the justified hurt party, and X might have the brass neck to stay around but would not impinge on Y's life in any way.

The problem society's committee has defended and sided with X, this being paired with the ban on members discussing its merits as justice, and answered an inaccurate rewritten version of Y's complaint with a pile of personal attacks on Y that making the complaint was aggressive and constituted not caring about anyone. This when Y had obviously cared about fair play in the ecology centre's community, and when they made no comment at all about what had happened to Y in a previous workplace.

They ranted like the Tea Party extremists in America who don't believe in autism at all, saying aspies must not lobby for any special treatment at all, and must take "life's disappointments" as they come without lifting a finger to anticipate and prevent an unfairly big share of "life's disappointments" or else they are to blame for "expecting problems." They defended X as "being realistic". These are a rejection and denial of the same organisation's whole history and all the care which the parents in it have argued with schools for and expected this society's support against getting labelled arguers or troublemakers. It contradicts the whole principle of a support scene and the whole idea of supported employment services like Intowork, it is a harsh right wing attitude that we should go back to sinking or swimming in a neocon economy geared to reject us, exactly like before we were known to need any different at all. The committee spokesman accompanied this with reckless defamation threats against Y making any outside criticisms of the society at all no matter what happens inside it: say anything to the outside world and you risk being criminalised and going to jail. (Yet defamation is civil law, he had not even realised.) More sinister behaviour like a cult, constituting an attempt to blackmail through fear and to enslave a person into a control trap and into fearful silence. It has no force: it is an established part of fair civil life that an organisation's ideas and practices can be criticised on merit, accountably to factual accuracy.

Now, you would think it is important to challenge every member of the committee on whether they are behind this or are spoken for by it. No no, can't have that - contact with the committee about it, except the spokesman, is also banned !!! How then does Y even tell anyone else in the committee if the answers to issues never raised show that the complainer has been wilfully misrepresented, hence defamed indeed, to the committee? If the spokesman can imtimidate the person he is writing to, like Y, like this, then the same intimidation hangs over any committee members who step out of line. This kafkaesque tangle of bans on who may contact whom and about what, has grown into a monster. It allows no way to find out whether all the committee are behind any decision or spoken for by any answer and no means for dissenters to be discovered or to advertise their own existence. In such a situation, to set out these obvious facts in public and not succumb to the undemocratic threatening into silence, is actively a duty of not defaming the committee members: any of them might not be behind the shockers hissed in their name and might be gagged and in fear. The only way to see that nobody is under control and in fear of speaking, will be when that whole society that has so tragically chosen power against long lasting friendships and by it has collapsed into this horrifying condition, breaks under the self-inflicted cumbersomeness of its own barminess and falls apart.

But all the innocent members in it must be able to get out without having the aspie scene lost to them, and to find refuge in the rest of the scene unintimidated and no longer obeying any of that cult regime over who they may contact. Join us, or use us as a base to bypass that controlling society and to reestablish your local scene in a form with free contact again.