The title above is borrowed from one of Red Skelton's characters. ( BTW, if you are ever in Vincennes, IN, there is a cool museum of his career, with his costumes, audio and video clips, and displays. He was one of the few who started in vaudeville, made the change to radio, but then successfully went on to movies and TV--some, like Fred Allen, made it in radio, but went no further.)
And I have bit the bullet. I have changed the name of this blog! When I started blogging years ago, "postmodern" was a trendy term. Now it is mostly forgotten. And there have been changes in my life and situation as well.
The part that has not changed: I am still a Redneck. If anything, as I get older, my redneck traits seem to become stronger. I get it from both sides of my family. My father was born near New Richmond, OH, where his ancestors had settled in the 1790s. It is now a small town east of Cincinnati, that's been turning into a Cincinnati suburb. It is also historically considered the eastern edge of Appalachia in Ohio. While the family had been farmers and small businessmen for generations, my grandfather pulled up stakes looking for work during the Great Depression, and ended up a cooper (making and repairing wood barrels) at a Seagram's distillery in Lawrenceburg, IN that had reopened with the end of Prohibition. My father went through assorted blue-collar jobs over the years, but settled in Cincinnati (with a stay of 6 years in Brown County, OH, a rural area about 40 miles away from the Ford factory where he worked).
My mother was born at a coal mining camp called Blue Diamond, near Hazard, KY. She was the fifth of seven children (the first two died before age 3). Her father and her older brothers all worked in the mines in that area. Her mother died of cancer, and her father died of injuries from a mine accident. From the age of 12, she was passed from one relative to another depending on who could afford an extra mouth for a while. This was also during the Depression. When she was 16, she and a friend hitch-hiked to Cincinnati to live with her older sister. A couple of years later, she was out with a friend (also from KY) and met my father. They got married in 1940.
On the Autistic side, I first found out about what they then called Asperger's Syndrome in 2005. The lights came on for a lot of things in my past life. I was fortunate enough to be good at school; a lot of autistic kids struggle there. But over time I learned I did not fit well in most corporate settings. I found my way into the world of small business and have been self-employed since 1976. I didn't get rich, but I usually made a living; there were a few rough stretches. But as my three kids grew up and got married and had their own kids, the autism matter came into sharper focus. The schools never diagnosed me as autistic or Asperger's, nor my kids; but they have been finding my grandchildren. So far, at least 8 of my 10 grandkids have a diagnosis. The rest will probably get identified sometime.
Why so many? Some families go along for generations, and then suddenly they get an autistic kid. In my family, from what we have figured out, we have been marrying other autistic people for at least three generations that we can tell. We don't know enough about the people to go back farther than that. So the genetics have gotten a bit more concentrated than usual.
How many are there of us? Nobody really knows. In the first place, autism was not even recognized by the medical and psychological professions until the 1940s. Even after that, for many years they weren't that good at finding us. It has picked up a bit in recent years. The conservative estimate is that there are roughly as many of us in the US as there are Jews--2-3% of the population. The number of school-age children seems to conform to that these days. The wild-and-woolly estimate is that we may be as much as 15% of the population. And we aren't just rednecks--we are found anymore in just about every ethnic group and every skin color.
Autism is a complicated thing. Psychologists in the US are now calling it a spectrum, a range of characteristics. Many autistic people have adopted the name "Neurodiverse" because we are not only diverse from the "Neurotypicals" but also diverse from each other. In my own family, we have musicians, artists, science geeks, a computer programmer, a high-tech repairman (who is also a musician), and more. I will probably be posting about some of the things I have learned about it in the past few years.
I will also keep posting about Christian matters as well; I have done that for years. I probably will not add much political stuff--I will likely keep posting that at a group blog I am part of, "Alexandria--Crossroads of Civilization." (https://www.aleksandreia.com/)
I may come up with other things to write about as well. We shall see.
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