Things do change over time, and people and what they get into also change over time. And I am toying with changing the name of this blog. Apparently it's possible; it may be a bit of a hassle. I don't have a lot of followers anyway--I can notify them if I do it.
When I started blogging, "postmodern" was a thing. It hadn't totally taken shape as to what it was. And I guess I had some hope maybe I could shape it a bit myself. My blog did not turn out to be that influential over time anyway, even before I stepped away for a few years.
Now I am back to doing some blogging, and a lot has changed over the years I was away. I am now divorced, after 48 years of marriage (long story, and I won't go into it here--maybe some other time). My parents passed away in 2010 and 2012, and my in-laws in 2018. So I am now the patriarch of my family--still getting used to that, in some ways. At least we are all here in the same city in Indiana; for a few years my daughter and her family lived an hour away in a rural area, my older son was in Seattle, and my younger son was in Naples, FL. In 2015 and 2016 they all moved back into this area. Some of my friends have passed on, some have moved away, and I have more grandchildren than I did when this blog started (ten, ranging in age from 4 to 20 years old).
And the grandchildren have caused some changes in perspectives and what we look at, and one thing that years ago seemed so minor I didn't even think of putting it in the blog name but now is a factor we have to deal with a lot of the time.
That factor is called autism. In 2005, my older son found out about what was then still called "Asperger's Syndrome" and passed some printouts he'd made on to me. For both of us, it was like a light coming on for a lot of things in our past. My son later seemed to lose interest, kind of like saying "That's nice" and moving on. My daughter found the book "Aspergirls" by Rudy Simone in 2007, and the lights came on for her. (For a long time, it was assumed that Asperger's only affected boys; it was later figured out that some girls have it too, but they manifest it differently from most boys.)
But my kids married and had kids--and the kids started getting diagnosed as being on what is now called the Autism Spectrum. (Asperger's is now considered as being on the "high-functioning" end of the Spectrum.) As parents, my kids started having to do some research on the matter. I looked at what they found, and did some more research myself, and we pass what we learn around. And we have learned a lot.
Just to clear the air if anyone who reads this post is unaware of the current state: No, it is not caused by vaccines or chemicals or what you eat. It is genetic--you get it from your parents! The CDC has a section about it on their website, and they pegged it as being 70-80% genetic. That's actually the conservative estimate; there is an Italian study I heard of, but have never seen the details, that put it at 90% genetic! There actually is a difference in how our brains are structured internally compared to what are now being called the "neurotypicals." Autistic people have started calling themselves "neuro-diverse" because we are not only different from the neurotypicals, we can also be quite different from each other.
And no, there is not any "epidemic" of autism. In the 1940s Hans Asperger first identified what later came to be called Asperger's Syndrome in Vienna, and German-Jewish immigrant physician Leo Kanner in the US first labeled a few children as "autistic." A lot of Kanner's ideas about causes and treatments started being rejected by the 1980s. In the last 20 years or so, they have gotten a lot better at identifying us. But mostly they are finding the children. They are only beginning to catch up with the adults like me.
How many are there of us? Nobody really knows. Like I said above, they are only beginning to deal with adult autistics. The conservative estimate is that there are as many of us in the US as there are Jews--about 2-3% of the population. The all-out, wild-and-wooly guess is that we may be as much as 15% of humanity. It is known now that we're found in all skin colors, all ethnic groups, all nationalities--we're all over. And they are facing the fact that we have actually been around for a very long time.
And it isn't a matter of one or two genes that cause it. There are a bunch of genes involved. Some families can go along for years, and then out of the blue, they get a baby who turns out to be autistic. What seems to be odd about my family is that, as near as we can tell, we have been marrying other people on the spectrum for at least 3 generations, and possibly longer. So in our family the genetics have gotten rather concentrated. So far, eight of my ten grandchildren have been diagnosed--the other two fit the pattern, but haven't been identified for certain yet. But with what we know now, we can see signs of it on both sides of the family--mine and my ex-wife's, and even on both sides of hers. My son-in-law's family is beginning to figure out they are on the spectrum (yes, he is too).
And we do have variety. We have musicians in the family (from my side--my sons are fifth-generation guitar players). We have artists. Of course we have one professional computer programmer, and a tech who repairs business equipment, both mechanical and electronic. And we have all kinds of sensory issues! My daughter has given up trying to fix meals that everybody will eat--if one or two don't like a particular meal, they can opt for leftovers!
So dealing with this has been a factor in our lives for some years. There is a fair amount of information now, that was not available when I was growing up. And there are strengths along with the deficits, it's just a matter of sorting out which is which.
But--even with all of this, I am still a Redneck. My grandfather and at least two of my mother's brothers worked in the coal mines around Hazard, KY. My grandfather died of injuries from a mine accident. And my ancestry is half or more Scots-Irish: the family names on my mother's side were Burns and Webb, both good Scottish names. My father's name was Hawkins, which is English; but there are other names that married into his family that could well be Scots-Irish. He grew up on the western edge of Appalachia in Ohio, near the town of New Richmond, where his forebears had settled in the 1790s. My own guitar has been used for country music, bluegrass, old-time, and traditional folk--not much rock and no disco. And for much of my working life, I was in construction--a few new houses, including one I built myself for my family, but mostly remodeling and home repairs.
If anyone is curious, a good source for the history of the Scots-Irish is a book by former Senator Jim Webb, "Born Fighting." (No, not a relative as far as I can tell, or else extremely distant.) And for a good short history of autism, its past, its recognition and progress, I recommend Steve Silberman's "Neurotribes."
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