Note to the egregiously vicious Conservative Minister of Canadian Heritage & Official Languages, James Moore, who claims that autism is not a disability and its sufferers are just a special interest group:
Now it’s personal. My grand-daughters, two-and-a-half year old twins, have just been diagnosed with autism. They cannot speak as yet. They are too young to be the lazy malingerers that the Minister suggests autistic people are. And they are not, Godwin be damned, the “useless eaters” that Moore’s earlier political co-religionists might have called them.
They are sweet and engaging, inquisitive little dynamos, always in motion, but they are hard to communicate with. Their loving mother spotted the possibility of autism at about six months, and became seriously worried after eighteen months. It’s taken our wonderful health-care system more than a year to get around to testing them, and no therapy can be promised until their names on a waiting-list come up. That could be six months, it could be a year. Or two.
Their father, equally supportive and caring, holds Turkish citizenship. In Turkey, there are nine autism education centres in Istanbul alone, and no waiting-list. Treatment is free. The family may be forced to emigrate just to get the children the help they should already have been receiving. Better the kids learn Turkish as their first language than be left with no language capacity at all.
Yes, I’m angry. We’re now saddled, for the next four years, with a government stuffed with evil mountebanks like James Moore. And our universal health care system, badly in need of an overhaul that doesn’t involve wholesale privatization, is bursting at the seams.
Sometimes we jokingly throw around the phrase, “Think of the children.” Well, I’m thinking about them now. And I’m not laughing.