85
" Is autism a disease?
If a woman asked me right now, “but wouldn’t you rather be cured?” I’d reply, “would you like to be cured of being a woman?”
Autism, like womanhood, is painful, and difficult, and not made easy by the structure of our society. But it is who we are.
There are treatments that can make certain aspects easier, yes. But there is no whole cure because there is no whole disease.
Some women take birth control to reduce the effects of PMS or PMDD, to stop their bodies from being so at odds with the world, to make living just a little more easy, a little more comfortable. But it is not for every woman, it does not change the fact that they are a woman, and it does not change the sexism that they face every day, all the problems that result from the fact of society being built to serve people who are not them.
I’d like treatments for autistic people to be seen in the same light. Medicine’s priority should be to improve quality of life, not to make a person more palatable to society.
Society must be forced to deal with these people because these people will not be easily consigned to oblivion. "
― Irene Wendy Wode
89
" In the imposition of a unitary and homogeneous popular culture, disseminated now throughout the world by the spread of Western technology and communications, is to be found one of the central features of modernity's distinctive way of achieving the priority of the one over the many. Homogeneity derives from the creation of an undifferentiated social or other reality...It is not therefore the priority of the many that distinguishes modernity from other cultures, but the shape the priority of the one takes in practice. Thus both the ancient and modern eras, in so far as they can be distinguished in the way often attempted, share in a tendency to elevate the one over the many: to enslave the many to the heteronomous rule of the one. The pathos of the modern condition is that, after rejecting what it rightly sees to be the oppressive forms of unity deriving from the past, it has itself succumbed to various false universals that replicate or even exacerbate the bondage from which it had hoped to free itself. "
― Colin E. Gunton , The One, the Three and the Many: God, Creation, and the Culture of Modernity
93
" Our society gives its economy priority over health, love, truth, beauty, sex and salvation; over life itself. Whatsoever is given precedence over life will take precedence over life, and will end in eliminating life. Since economics, at its most abstract level, is the religion of our people, no noneconomic happening, not even one as potentially spectacular as the Second Coming, can radically alter the souls of our people. "
― Tom Robbins , Another Roadside Attraction