Dude, where's my country? (apologies to Michael Moore)

I recently checked Lisa Sain's blog and was surprised to see her posting again. Since her severely autistic son is now in residential care, she wrote that she "feels human again" and sleeps in a clean bed and even has a boyfriend. I haven't read much of her blog, but I know that her son Preston practically demolished the inside of her house with his frequent, terrifyingly violent meltdowns. She recently said that he would rip out chunks of drywall and eat them. Among other things.

So I googled Kelli Stapleton to see how the case was coming along. Her trial is in a couple months. And then I found myself staring at the following link, via a couple clicks:

http://blog.cleveland.com/metro/2009/12/kent_state_professor_trudy_ste.html

Trudy's son was 6 foot, 200 lbs of rage. Uncontrolled rage. Rage so fierce that he ultimately beat his mother to death. The jail had to keep him in a separate cell. It took two months to find a placement.

One thing that seems to pop up over and over is that there are zero services for teens and adults with autism. Parents look and look and are turned away every place they go. If the kid is violent, there are even less than zero. There are no institutions anymore. Few group homes take autistics. I suspect that the "bulge" of autistic kids who started being born in the late 80s will eventually wind up on the streets, alongside the schizophrenics and bipolars and delusionals and so forth.

When Reagan closed the institutions, he expected other options to be instituted. Future politicians refused to fund that. So we have a network of grungy "group homes" in rundown suburban tract homes, built for happy 50s and 60s families, cheaply retrofitted for a small number of special needs persons. The group homes are horrid, dirty, smelly, and abusive. As for the rest, we have the streets. Maybe the institutions were bad. But now we have something much worse.

So, to recap: millions of special needs people who nobody will care for. Parents grow old and die, if the kid doesn't kill them first. The bureaucracy is full of chair warmers whose refrain is "not my responsibility, sorry". Schools refuse to teach the kids, and after age 22 it's "sorry, not our responsibility".

Reading forum posts from autistic adults, it's clear that even the higher functioning ones find it hard to hold jobs and live independently. Many live in fear of their benefit checks being yanked out from under them by callous politicians. In England, the disabled have faced the end of ALL benefits. At least one man starved to death.

How much longer until the world decides to build death camps for the disabled? I'm reminded of the part of the neo Nazi novel The Turner Diaries where after the white revolutionaries take Los Angeles, everybody deemed "lesser" is simply marched into the mountains, never to be seen again. In the future, there may be camps set up in Flyover Country where the "imperfect" are taken to "disappear". A burning human body smells quite rancid, from what I've heard. If you think of a place like Auschwitz, where the kremas operated day and night, the smell must have been horrible, yet nobody thought to ask, hey guys what the frick is that awful smell, anyway?

Sometimes, I wonder what the world would be like if the Nazis had succeeded in their goal of slaughtering every "non-Aryan" on earth. One truism of genetics is that small, inbred populations eventually have weird diseases surface, the result of random genetic combinations. The Fundamentalist LDS Church, a Mormon polygamy cult near the Grand Canyon, was ruled by a man who wanted to create a master race via inbreeding. His efforts caused a weird, rarely seen disorder called fumarase deficiency to afflict and kill hundreds of cultists. If the Nazis had succeeded, eventually some disease would have popped up and torn through the remaining "perfect" humans like a firestorm in the Southern California mountains in August. And that would have been that.

When cops are given free rein to kill the disabled, and so are their parents, and we willingly via neglect put the disabled in positions to be killed, we come ever closer to genocide. When bureaucrats refuse to help, and so does everybody else, ditto. America in the 1940s was in some respects not such a great place; millions lived in third world conditions, people were confined in institutions on the word of a single doctor, and who can forget the internment of the Japanese. But we defeated evil, real evil. Now WE ARE that evil. I don't know what Satan did with my country, but I want it back.