Please Don’t Stigmatize Autism

Cho's great-aunt, who lives in South Korea, said Thursday that because he did not speak much as a child and after the family emigrated to the United States, doctors thought he might be autistic. "Normally sons and mothers talk. There was none of that for them. He was very cold," Kim Yang-soon told AP Television News. "When they went to the United States, they told them it was autism." Neither school officials, who have his educational records, nor police who have his medical records, have mentioned such a diagnosis. Autistic individuals often have difficulty communicating, but such a diagnosis would not necessarily explain his violence. In the frantic search for an explanation for the Virginia Tech rampage last week versions of this blurb from the AP were reprinted widely. It’s unfortunate. Unless better supported, any claim that Cho Seung-Hui may have had autism is idle speculation. To suggest that autism may have been responsible for this tragedy is careless and irresponsible journalism. AP included a disclaimer that autism might not explain Cho’s violence but they very plainly left open the idea that it just might. I don’t know what demons possessed Cho and I don’t think anybody else does either, certainly not AP. When they don’t know what they are talking about they should have the decency to keep their mouths shut. More importantly they should turn off their keyboards. I know this. Autism affects a lot more children than it used to. One of them is my grandson Weston. Weston doesn’t talk much but he is a beautiful and affectionate child who gets a great deal of support from his parents, his therapists, and his church pre-school class. We expect him to start kindergarten this fall. He will need help there too and he will get it. What he doesn’t get at school his parents will see to it that he gets after school. If it is at all possible, and we believe it is entirely possible, Weston will become an emotionally and intellectually mature adult. He will lead a full and rewarding life. That is our dream and our expectation. We are not so naïve as to think it will be easy or inexpensive. Weston’s parents have devoted an extraordinary portion of their time and treasure to their son’s well being already. They have every reason to believe that will have to continue indefinitely. They also need the support and understanding of the community at large. That’s why the casual suggestion that last week’s horror in Virginia may have been the result of autism is so disturbing. Weston’s parents’ worst fear is that he may someday be shunned by his peers because of his autism. That hasn’t happened to date. On the contrary his friends have accepted him as one of their own. That’s the value of the pre-school class. Some of our proudest moments have been watching him play with his cousins. He may not be able to do some things quite as easily as they but he is one of them. Please, please don’t think of autism as something to be frightened of. Understand it is something that happens to a child, not something the child does. Parents of children with autism are careful to say it just like that, “children with autism.” The adjective “autistic” carries a pejorative they would prefer to avoid. And if someday somebody with autism does something terrible, please don’t conclude that people with autism are fiends. There are a great many of them and they need us. We need them too. Until I understood Weston had autism I thought it was rare. If it ever was it isn’t now. If you’ve never had autism in your family don’t rest easy. Nowadays one child in 150 has it and even some of the scientists who have been denying it is epidemic are beginning to think the real number is higher than that. But don’t think the child with autism will grow up to be Cho Seiung-Hui. Think concert pianist and do what you can to make it happen. That’s what we do.

Law v. Justice

They aren’t the same thing you know. In some ways it’s like the difference between a strike and a foul ball. But this isn’t baseball. This time a man’s life is at stake. This time the law has failed the standard most of us would hold justice to. It happened last week in Collin County. Trial Judge Nathan White retired in December and Judge Webb Biard was appointed to review new facts in the case, a review Judge White sat on for years. Judge Biard recommended that Ashley Estell’s convicted killer, though probably not guilty of the crime, be denied a new trial. In essence he ruled that under the law Michael Blair should be executed for a murder he may well not have committed. It was a notorious case that many of us remember. I thought Blair was guilty. A lot of us did and so did the jury. Ashley was a beautiful child and Blair was a known child molester. That he was even out on parole was a bureaucratic blunder. It didn’t take much evidence to convince us all he did it. We were most likely wrong. Judge Biard didn’t consider the moral issue at hand, whether the original trial jury, or any reasonable jury, might have reached a different verdict had they known what we know now. What we now know is the principle physical evidence used to convict Blair has been discredited. Hair originally thought to tie him to the crime does not. That much has been proved by DNA testing. The forensic scientist who testified that it did had been involuntarily committed to a mental institution at the time. Neither the jury nor the defense knew that at trial. Whether it might have made a difference, or whether the state knowingly concealed it is a matter of some question but it would have certainly been a topic of interest to a competent defense. Prosecutors are left with a thin case. There are witnesses that place Blair at a soccer tournament where Ashley was abducted. None of them knew Blair, saw him up close, were able to accurately describe him, or saw him with the child. Such eye witness accounts are notoriously unreliable but unlike other unreliable evidence remain admissible under court rules. Blair has other witnesses who place him away from the scene. Jurors didn’t believe them. What physical evidence remains amounts to fibers found on Ashley and in Blair’s car that could have come from one of her toys, from toys he might have used to lure her to his car, or from any of a thousand other sources. The most damning evidence may have come from Blair’s own testimony. He doesn’t see anything wrong with consensual sexual contact between himself and underage girls, certainly not with mere fondling. He believes young girls he thought about abducting but didn’t are proof of his innocence. His victims are still alive and there is no evidence Ashley was sexually molested. The point would be lost on most of us. So would Judge Biard’s. He relies on the very closely reasoned argument that it is not enough in an appeal to cast doubt on the condemned man’s guilt. A claim of innocence must be supported by unquestionable proof. A jury is held to reasonable doubt but that standard is left for them to interpret. On appeal the standard rises. New evidence must be shown to be not merely likely to affect a jury’s deliberations but to positively demand a not guilty verdict. The convicted becomes not presumed innocent until proved guilty. He is guilty until proved innocent. Michael Blair has not been proved innocent. He may yet pay with his life. That’s the law. It is not justice.

Two World Views

Shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall two American academics wrote essays describing very different views of the sort of world that was emerging from the Cold War. If you haven’t read them you should. They make powerful arguments and provide rational frameworks for understanding on one hand the phenomenal emergence of political freedom and economic prosperity in the former communist bloc and elsewhere, and on the other the horrific violence that has so shaken the Muslim world. The title of one has been so over used as to become a cliché, the other dismissed as premature at best. It’s a pity. They deserve more careful consideration. The two essays are Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man and Samuel Huntington’s The Clash of Civilizations? Fukuyama observed, correctly in my view that Liberal Democracy had triumphed over all competing political ideals. The age old search for a political system which would allow man to realize his material and emotional ambition was over. The first man bettered himself by dominating or killing his fellow. He could win only if his opponent lost. The last could work with his fellow, if not in harmony at least in mutual self interest. Each could benefit from the success of the other. Huntington saw a different order emerging, one of cultural fault lines based largely on religion. He saw an era of renewed conflict with various ethnic groups unable or unwilling to come to terms with each other. For a time Huntington seemed to be right and he is now regularly lauded as one of the more prescient sages of our day. The 1990s were a period of one religiously tinged conflict after another. Orthodox Christians went to war with Catholics in the former Yugoslavia. They both went to war with Muslims and Muslims nowhere in the world seemed able to live in peace with their neighbors. But Huntington didn’t foresee that his Clash would be reduced to a two way struggle of Muslims against the world. His was a view of each of the world’s major religious groups aligned against all the others. According to Clash we should be seeing China in violent conflict with Japan and Catholic South America with the Protestant North. Huntington did not account for major breakdown of order persisting only among Muslims. For all the derision he has endured, Fukuyama’s analysis has been the most telling. His essential tenets are rock solid. Monarchy is dead. So are Empire, Fascism, Communism and all the forms of totalitarianism. Where they persist their days are numbered. Even dictators hide behind sham elections. Extremist Muslim calls for a return to the Caliphate are nostalgic appeals for a system that failed centuries ago. A new Caliphate has limited appeal among Muslims and no appeal at all among non-Muslims. It is not in competition with Liberal Democracy for global political organizing principles. End of History predicted a continuing and accelerating move toward elected representative government and the rule of law. That is exactly what has happened, with astonishing speed in the case of Eastern Europe. The evident economic progress has been a powerful model for the emergence of China and India as well. To prosper they must reform and so they do. Russia too wants to join the World Trade Organization and must adopt its rules for enforceable contracts, Turkey has to respect human rights in order to enter the European Union, and so it goes. Huntington was right about one thing. He was careful to say that the major obstacles to peaceful global integration are cultural, not religious. We often have trouble distinguishing the two but the difference is critical. As emotional as culture’s draw can be it can be changed. It is adaptable in ways that religion is not. Religion, as God’s revealed truth is not for man to question or tamper with. Culture when properly understood offers room for compromise. Both essays suffer from their choice of titles. End of History sounds like doomsday prophecy. It isn’t. Fukuyama was saying the future is evident, not that the world will end tomorrow. He doesn’t suggest that Liberal Democracy has been universally adopted, or that it will be any time soon. He is saying the competing ideologies are clearly on their way out, but unless one is paying close attention the concept is easy to discard in a sound bite. The trouble with Clash is that it obscures a fundamental struggle inside the Muslim world. It makes it appear that the rest of us face a unified enemy across an unbridgeable chasm. But in many important respects the primary conflict is among Muslims themselves. The rest of are caught in the crossfire. We are in the middle of somebody else’s civil war. That is certainly true in Iraq, though it wasn’t in the beginning and we do have a vested interest in the outcome. The calls for a new Caliphate are made by those who would see themselves in charge, those who would impose their view of what is or is not Islamic on other Muslims who want no part of it. The good news is that Fukuyama was right. Liberal Democracy has provided the last man with a way to win not at his fellow man’s expense. His success is not necessarily dependent on his rival’s failure. For the first time in history we have a system that makes it in our best interest to have prosperous neighbors. It is an enlightened way to look at everything from immigration along the southern border of Texas to an ultimate resolution to the dispute between Palestinians and Israelis. It is a hopeful view. Even the shortcomings of the two essays are well worth thinking about. It has been difficult for many of us to make sense of what’s been happening around the world. Fukuyama and Huntington provided thoughtful context for a lot of it. Both pieces are readily available on the internet. Just google them. I recommend it.

Chisholm Trail

One of the things I really like about where I live is the bike path just down the street. I wish we didn’t call it that. There are more walkers like me and joggers using it than bikers. But no matter what we call it, it’s a lovely place to pass the time. It runs about two miles each way down one side of the creek from Jack Carter Park to 15th Street and back up the other, though one last section on the right bank has been sitting incomplete for many years. It connects to a wider web of trails but I think the portion of the round trip I usually make is the most scenic in Plano. There are lots of families down there on sunny spring days. I’m surprised it isn’t more crowded than it is. I’ve been walking there for almost a quarter of a century, ever since I had a physical on the occasion of my fortieth birthday. My doctor told me I was eating too much, drinking too much, and not getting enough exercise. He prescribed a half hour walk every day at a brisk pace. Two miles should be about right. I took that part of his advice. I still eat and drink too much but I do the walk faithfully. Having a pretty place to do it has been a big help. The view is always changing depending on season or time of day, and I often stop to talk with friends, some of whom I rarely see otherwise. The best part is that walking leaves my mind free to do other things, like thinking about a crossword clue, maybe a more serious problem, or even what I’m going to do with my millions. I’m still waiting for my ship to come in. It’s late. I never liked running. It’s too painful, and I don’t really care for riding a bicycle. A while back I developed a sore foot and couldn’t walk so I tried the bike instead. My balance wasn’t that great and I was nervous in tight spaces, especially going under the bridges where visibility ahead is restricted by sharp turns. Most bikers are courteous and careful but occasionally they try to go too fast. One of my dearest friends was seriously injured several years ago trying to get out of the way so I don’t listen to music either. I want to be able to hear someone saying “on your left!” The little bicycle bells are no help at all. It takes me a moment to realize what I’ve heard and by that time the bicycle has gone by. In spring and fall we occasionally see an exotic duck or two. Usually we just have cormorants, egrets, gulls, mallards, a few blue herons and the ugliest flock of domestic ducks I ever did see. Last year a flight of Canadian geese paid a brief visit, the first in my memory. That’s just as well. My image of geese is they are mean and messy. For a long time we had domestic geese but they were aggressive and territorial. They were pests so someone finally got rid of them. Absence does make the heart grow fonder. Spawning season for the fish is always exciting. They really make the water roil. Frankly I don’t understand it. External fertilization just doesn’t seem to be much to get that worked up about. Every year storms blow down a few hackberry trees and Parks and Rec plants new varieties. Once in a while the nutria chop down a sapling but wire wrappers prevent most of that. They’ve even put in a solar powered irrigation system. Each young tree has its own sprinkler. (I wonder if they are subject to the watering restrictions.) In fifty years we are going to have quite a forest down there. I can’t wait.