Love is Autistic

One day, they took me away from my family, wife and child. A Child Services', adamant and imposing representative, chewing gum without blinking once, showed up at our doorstep and said she'd need to investigate a claim against us. Her investigation, she said, would last for six months, but in less than a month from the day she arrived, I was out of my son's life. 

She started asking questions about medications, whether we used drugs, before proceeding to inspect our bodies, our home. She entered the kitchen, opened the refrigerator, and asked where was no meat. It's commonplace nowadays to have people question our way of life, I had warned my wife things were different now, it's a high price to pay for being healthy in a society bent over backwards in sickness. 

The representative insisted in interrogating our son, a 13 year old boy on the spectrum, in the privacy of our bedroom even though we suggested using the living room as we could've waited in the livingroom. But she locked herself in our bedroom and proceeded to interrogate him for five minutes or so, though we warned her he wasn't capable of reciprocal communication. 

At one point, the CSA representative referred to autism as a mental illness or handicap, whether he was taking any medication for it. I patiently explained that autism is not a disease, it's a syndrome and that there was no medicine to alleviate his condition, only the therapeutic to help with some of its ramifications. She wanted to find out what kind of medicine it was, and my child's mom gladly showed her. 

I didn't know what was this all about. As a couple, we had our differences, unsettled riffs, our shared of discord typical of a pair of lovers/married folks who've known each other for more than twenty years. She has being diagnosed bipolar, had been assigned a psychiatrist for a few years ever since and had a variety of prescriptions to target the array of symptomatic ailments that derived from her condition. She did not take any of them regularly, none that I know of, and the only one our son was prescribed was to help him sleep.

Candidly, I shared my views on the matter, how much changing our diet from eating greasy, processed foods to a mostly a plant-based diet had transformed us all, including her, promoting health changes that until then seemed unattainable, like shedding stubborn belly fat that had plagued us since the dawn of our thirties, and maintaining a healthy weight, managed our cholesterol.  Her varicose had disappeared and our moods were uplifted. It was such radical a change that 

even her psychiatrist had become aware of and called to ask what had happened at home. I did not elaborate much on the good news, noticing how she'd remain posturing cynically, unconvinced, you might even say infuriated.  Her animated eyebrows skeptically raised, and she'd take harsh-written notes on the matter. She asked if I was forcing my nutritional views on them. But I explained we had both decided to go mostly plant-based. My wife had had fish at times, but now it caused her stomachaches. At times, she'd still eat some cheese, my wife said. And butter. 

I didn't. But I had stopped elaborating. 

My wife, however, was more accommodating as she was with anyone who'd take a keen interest in her, gave her all the information she asked of her about the types of medications prescribed to her.

She's not used to having others show special interest in her, had estranged her only girlfriend of more than ten years, had had trouble making friends and did not go out much. 

She had made few friends over the years since our son was diagnosed with autism. His condition had been a life sentence of devotion, I'd insist she'd go out with her only friend but she had kept to herself most the latter part of her life, solely dedicated to raising our son. 

I was always by her side but we did not lived together all along. There's a high incidence of divorce among couples raising a child in the spectrum. Women have endured more of the hardship in raising children in all ages, even in the era of a more fatherly conscientiousness, risen since the advent of the feminist movement that sprang less than a century ago. You only need to look at the horrendous conditions under which women in general lived before the introduction of abortion. Before the infamous age of the birth control pill just a few generations ago, and of the women's right to vote which will celebrate its century old mark in 2020 (which we will conmemorate electing Elizabeth Warren as Madam President), the conditions of our mothers, sisters and daughters were deplorable. It is not only just and understandable, not merely honorable and conscientious that we put forth the most rigorous tenets and social constructs to protect, harness and implement the rightful place of women in society. 

In decrying what Marx coined as the "feminine upheavel", Karl did not forget to pun the "inclusion" of the "ugly" ones. It is typical in men of genius to write off with their penises what their front lobes gave rise. Voltaire's Candide, after an odyssey of misfortunes and calamities, finds that the object of all his troubles has become old and undesireable, rendering his unconquerable feelings null, nonetheless she had learnt how to cook. And it doesn't end with beauty, as everyone who knows anything about philosophy (etymologically, "love of knowledge") may have heard of a pompous philosopher named Socrates; his wife was deemed "the ugly one" because of famously interrupting him in the middle of his affamed discourses.  Xanthippe was not only 40 years younger but also exuberantly beautiful in contrast to her old and actuality ugly one (read Nietzsche's assertion of how "criminally ugly" Socrates was in his Twilight of the Idols) but also the one with the money and social prominence (the eldest male of the three children she bore had her father's family name) as the wisest of men (according to Schopenhauer, whose dissertation on the subject of women failed to mention his own mother acquiring literary notoriety before him) engaged in public oratory, bringing his own downfall by ridiculing the elites in sophism (etymologically, "men of knowledge"). Sophists were the philosophical equivalent of lawyers back then, earning their living by teaching oratory as means to advance in public life. Socrates' beef with them lies in sophists' fallacious assertion that an argument need not be based on veracity but only to look and sound true; sophistry, that is. We now live in a time of fakeness and unrealistic contrasts. We claim unknowable truths and disclaim with scorn certainties. It is as if we were inclined to go back to a fabled garden and find that all fairy tales and leprechauns were true, not just the talking snake but Santa Clauses, as if we lived in a South Park episode. Sure, they won't burn us alive but they won't mind slowly roasting us to death. Sartre's famous axiom "Death is other people" rings true now more than ever. We're sentencing the human species along with every other one to extinction. And, ironically, things couldn't be better and more prosperous than in any recorded period in human history. It's not that we haven't made enormous strides in the betterment of our condition; it's that, at every turn, progress has been met with ferocious opposition by the established order. We'd like to think this is the sort of thing people were subjected to in other eras. It is backwards to think we are far ahead; after all, people in the Middle Ages did not believed themselves to be living in an age of darkness. And they had very good reason not to, since their time was not middle to anything and the proverbial darkness was commonplace. Men of genius were always looked upon suspect throughout time and casted aside by those in power; wit never had a brush of madness, it was a maddened touch added to their palette by others who could not understand or aimed to make them outcasts. We don't have to look far to find that the earth does revolve around the sun, Galileo uttering in defiance as he was sentenced to house arrest for the day of his days; we need not find Seneca's writings inspiring, but grasp the underlying anxiety with which he must've lived daily. With Nero in power, it was only a matter of time. How prolific a writer can be when his livelihood is threatened. The end game is not about creativity; it's accelerating the aging process; antagonism kills ever so slowly, magnify stress and make it seem like a natural cause. 

The collective conscientiousness does not grasp experiences for long. Too many things, people and obsessions demand our attention. We cannot be made to focus for long. Voltaire mentioned seeing everywhere people missing limbs, enduring hardships, but hardly any resorting to suicide; in Viktor Frankl 's Man's Search for Meaning, you find just how much suffering humanity is capable of. It's not so much about hope. It's just an instinct to survive, a Schpenhauerean will to. Goethe got a lot a blame for the increase rate of suicide following his epic novel The Sorrows of Young Werther. Expeculation is not good business, and you could argue likewise whether there were an increase in romance. No one ever laments goodness, though good things can lead to bad consequences, says the pessimist in the room. Oh what times we live in that there are more people killed by their own hand than by the hand of another, that is, more suicides than murders. A portion of these suicides can be suspect. Sadly, only high profile cases seem to be recalled by the mind. The rest can very well be suicides, no one will question a corpse, and since it's there why not shame and cast blame on the perpetrator, after all it's more sensible than taking a dead body into custody. As a society, we shame suicidal tendencies, but shouldn't that trend be suspect? Euthanasia is a crime; a long and painful agony is more profitable. Funerals are expensive, for sure, but then again you only die once. Family will not come up with financial support in a time of crisis, but they'll come together to fess up the money for burial. Let people go hungry and be homeless, but let's find a place to keep our dead. 

What world it would be if progress took hold with the readily steadiness that does technology; what if we really applied what works and let go of failed dogmas and bigotry. Justice may be blind but political discourse is blinding. Fear of change is defeaning. Look at the fate those we called ingenious have met, our greatest spiritual leaders, the soundest men among us. We're led by a gang of insufferable fools. Stupidity rules, by majority. Isn't that how democracy works?  They were considered agitators, and some were; others were deemed mad, and some were certainly so. Galileo confined to house arrest for the crazy notion that the earth revolved around the auns, that was mad. But what of others, countless, who were true and outstanding men? Not all were destined to martyrdom. They were led there.