Society can be a cruel place for those with special needs.
Not just for those on the Autistic spectrum, but for anyone who presents
themselves as “different” to the accepted norms of the day. Whenever people come
across an individual they don’t understand, there is a tendency to mock them or
blatantly go out of their way to avoid the person in question. Apparently it’s
ok in some people’s minds to publicly ridicule or put down a person who most
likely has little control and little understanding of their “different” appearance
or mannerisms.
So what must it be like for someone who’s been misunderstood
since childhood? How would a young child develop over the years after being
shunned and made fun of? Imagine a young boy growing up in the 1970s. His
mother often finds that he’s broken all of his toys. He’s thought of only as a
problem child, with most people branding him as annoying and different. As he
grows he begins to aggravate people to such an extent that he's always in
trouble, and for this reason a psychiatrist decides he’ll never be able to hold
down a job. Yes son, you will never be able to get a job or have a half decent
future, because you annoy everyone around you, sorry.
Imagine how you’d feel from a young age if no one would play
with you and seemingly everyone laughed at you. You’d probably start to lose
respect for the world because it’s certainly not showing you any respect. So
here’s the catch 22. Society gives you a hard time because you are different,
and in return you learn to hate society. To say sorry for giving you such a
hard time and making you hate it so much, society then gives you more of a hard
time…. Now repeat this cycle through to adulthood. By now you’ve completely
lost all faith in humanity, and humanity’s lost all faith in you being a
respectable part of it. So who’s to blame? Personally, I think society’s so
full of itself that most of it fails to show any compassion for those who could
use a helping hand anyway. How different might this young man’s life had been if
he had actually been nurtured and helped in his journey instead of being swept
under the carpet, bullied, and mocked?
No doubt, most of you have heard of the Port Arthur Massacre,
a horribly tragic event where a young man went on a public killing spree in
the Australian state of Tasmania back in 1996. I do not condone one bit the atrocities that this man
carried out on that dreadful day. I’m also not here to defend his actions or to
justify his intentions. The man has been locked up for the rest of his life,
and that’s where he belongs. He’s an obvious danger to society. It’s just a
pity that he started life as the same young boy I was writing about in the
first few paragraphs of this blog you are now reading. Would he have been a
good member of society had he been treated nicer in his youth? Who knows? Maybe
he might not have hated the world so much as to think killing parts of it was a
good idea. I now know a person who went to school with him, and apparently the
boy was a bully himself. Was his bullying a result of his upbringing? Again,
who knows?
There have been theories thrown around that this person
might have been Autistic. From what I’ve read, he’s not shown any classic signs
of being on the spectrum. He even went out of his way to travel overseas in his
attempts to make society accept him. He didn’t make the trips because he wanted
to see the rest of the world. He made the trips so that people would be forced
to sit next to him for long periods of time and would be forced to be polite
with him, maybe even talk to him. He wanted to be accepted, even after all the
abuse that the world piled on him. He’d dress up to go to his local restaurant
and the world would laugh at him because he dressed in an eccentric manor,
which was most likely a request to the world to “please look at who I really am
and please accept me for who I am”. I recently read of a published study
claiming that psychopaths have sections of brain that show reduced amounts of
grey matter. The sections noted were those identified as being responsible for
empathy and other emotions. I also have read many studies that show similar
reduced amounts of grey matter in those who are on the Autistic spectrum. Those
on the Autistic spectrum however, also have sections of brain with excessive
amounts of grey matter, which was not shown in the study of the psychopathic
brain. The psychopathic brain would therefore be only partially Autistic, if
Autistic at all. People on the Autism spectrum, in my opinion, have good
qualities which, if they’re capable of bringing them to the surface, show that
being on the spectrum and being psychopathic are two completely separate
conditions. I don’t believe this man was Autistic. Psychopathically challenged perhaps,
but not Autistic. He was known to be deliberately cruel to animals in his youth.
Again, this could reflect on his view of a world that refused to accept his
differences.
Unfortunately by the time he was 28 years old, the years of
rejection by society was all too much for this young man, and he ended up
killing 35 innocent people, including some very young children. He also wounded
a further 21 who are probably emotionally traumatised to this day. He no longer
has a place in society and quite rightly will never have a place in society
ever again. So next time one of you decides to bully someone or laugh at
someone or avoid someone in disgust because they’re not the correct shade of
public society for your liking, just stop and think how many other people are
treating this individual the exact same way, and how you are actually
contributing to this individual’s feelings towards society by being a part of
the greater collective. A collective of bullies that you don’t see, but this
person is forced to encounter on a daily basis. Now stop and think, how you
would feel if the rest of the world treated you like dirt because you were a
little “different”. What he did was wrong, but are you contributing to the way
someone else’s world becomes by not treating them as a human in the first place?
As a society we are all responsible for the way it forms.
How you treat an individual today contributes to how that individual deals
with life tomorrow. Play nice with each other, and include the “different” kids
too. You may actually make the world a nicer place to live in, not only for
today’s generation, but for the future children of today’s generation.
Treat the people of the world with respect, no matter how different they may seem. They may respect you in return.