I don't think I would want to live on an island with people of only one neurological configuration, no matter what it was. - Amanda Baggs
The other day I watched an interesting segment from Dr. Sanji Gupta on CNN about Amanda Baggs, a 26-year-old woman with low-functioning autism who has received a lot of attention lately as a result of some videos she posted on YouTube. Often these types of medical feature stories strike me as exploitative, but by the end of this story it became clear that Amanda is no medical oddity or against-all-odds success story; Amanda is a witty and intelligent woman with a message for all of us.
By the end of Amanda's video, I was caught off guard as it struck a strong emotional chord in me. Sometimes being confronted with truth can be profound and stirring. Amanda teaches us that there are many things in our environments with which we can communicate, and not all of that communication involves the typical system of language that most of us consider normal. In her case, she does not confine her communication to the narrow set of responses afforded by standard language. Amanda reacts to a sometimes overwhelming amount of environmental stimuli that most of us never consider. In her case, this amounts to being diagnosed with the neurological configuration we refer to as autism. So what's so profound and stirring about a lesson in how a person with autism communicates with her environment? Because Amanda's real message is about the importance of diversity in thought and the methods and implications of defining what is and what isn't normal. It is not only wrong to expect all thought and communication to exist within a unified framework that has been determined by popular consensus to be "normal," it can be dangerous. Why? Because there can be far-reaching societal implications as popular consensus may only be derived from a small percentage of people in power. Your voice may someday be among those that go unheard as our society continually attempts to define what is normal. And then of course, there are so many who even react with violence to that which conflicts with their own ideas of normal behavior.
So that's my take, but there's no way I can explain Amanda's message better than she can:
I think her point is really driven home in the fact that when she talks about "my" language -- dominate modes of lingual communication -- in and through "my" language, she is amazingly articulate while at the same time demonstrating that that isn't the only possibility of communicating. The musical quality of her language was quite nice as well. :)
Post new comment