Of Mice and Men: A Menace to Society

When the news broke about the Sandy Hook slaughter, I tuned it out. I did not want to get caught up in the emotional turmoil that was taking hold of the nation. I'm sure that sounds cold and heartless to most people, but I try to steer clear of the news as one strategy for staying positive in a world of negativity. I still get plenty of coverage from all the talk all around me (and the Sunday paper which I get for the coupons). When something big is announced, I actually look it up. I don't have my head in the sand, but I choose not to get hit with the waves, and certainly not stand in the way of the tsunami like so many others. I got the gist of the tragedy but tried not to get caught up in the flood sweeping the country.

But then I overheard the accusations about the murderer as they dug up his background to understand the mind and motives of this unstable man. Like most of the other desperate individuals that take the lives of others before taking their own, the media decided that he'd snapped under the weight from the depression of being a social outcast. This was not a surprising theory...until my ears perked up at the word "Aspergers."

Maybe I'm just overly sensitive, but it felt like the media was convincing the masses that the young man committed these crimes because he had Aspergers. He was mentally unstable because he had a developmental disability. Since the general public is unfamiliar with Aspergers, the news explained that such individuals were "characterized by difficulties in social interaction and an inability to read emotions and empathize with others." As if that simple sentence explained everything. First of all, no two people are the same, even those with the same disability. You can't collate people like abstract data to analyze for further application on other people -- even if that's what we do with our NCLB testing ways. Secondly, they forgot to mention that Asperger's deficiencies also included the ability to be malicious! Have you ever met someone with autism that intentionally hurt someone else? That is not to say that they are devoid of all emotion and cannot feel anything at all. Just because you cannot understand how or what they process does not mean they don't; they just do it differently. And, like all human beings, they too can be driven over the edge. I have had my share of phone calls from the school counselor, concerned over my son's repeated declaration that he wanted to kill himself. But do not forget that all people, Aspergers or not, feel and respond in both similar and different ways. Autistic people are not any more nor any less dangerous than their neurotypical peers. Individuals are just that: individuals. Don't lump them together with their labels. That's called profiling. And how sad it is that we have descended so low as to profile our most defenseless populations!

The media didn't outright say that his condition caused him to commit the crime, but it did put it in the minds of all those who heard it. Since I tend to analyze everything, I understand the general need to draw parallels, but simply saying "killer" and "Aspergers" in the same sentence will draw wrong parallels and make people fear and loathe them like Quasimodo. Insinuating that those with Aspergers are predisposed to violent crimes labels these innocent pariahs as murderers waiting to strike. Intentionally or not, the search to find a reason for the atrocity has started a witch hunt.

We must have an enemy, and if it lacks an identity, we must give it a face. Indeed, there was no label more apropos than "The War on Terror." The ad hoc title of George W. Bush's war is so general that it applies to every evil of our day. And so Society must have someone to hang, even if he is already dead. If the man who did this was now dead, who could we blame? Guns? Schools? Teachers? Bullies? The mother? Mental illness? For we must always have a viable scapegoat.

For once, the finger pointing is starting to settle on the individual himself, but since we don't acknowledge that an individual is accountable for his actions, we must find something bigger than himself to blame: his DNA. What do all these people have in common? Maybe if we could isolate the gene, we could gather all the bad guys together and make them register like sex offenders must do so they aren't allowed anywhere -- even though they haven't committed any crimes.

First off, if you could discover someone had Aspergers by a DNA test, it wouldn't be so damn hard to get a diagnosis in the first place! Second, have you seen the movie Gattaca? Or Minority Report? This feels like the next step to preemptively stopping DNA-inferior people from making choices they might make. How far are we going to go with this witch hunt? First you make war on an unknown enemy, then you find the most powerless people to be the fall guys, and finally you squash any hope that Boo Radley might one day be accepted into society. One woman already reported that because of a first-time mild altercation at school, her Asperger son has been recommended for outplacement in a self-contained behavior disorder program because "he was on the spectrum and showed aggression." After the 9-11 attacks, my neighbor was seized from his home and taken for questioning for no other reason than the fact that he was originally from Iraq. Will we likewise suspect all socially withdrawn individuals, especially those now diagnosed with autism, to be potential killers? Isn't it bad enough that they are bully-magnets already?

I concede that I have feared many times that my own sweet boy will accidentally hurt someone, like Lenny stroking Curly's wife's hair and unintentionally killing her. There are things my son does that he still does not understand are inappropriate, and we continue to teach and reteach him where the boundaries lie. But I can only do so much, whether my son has a disability or not. A person will become who he will become, Aspergers or no. While Asperger characteristics may help understand behavior, it does not define who they are, nor does it confine them to those behaviors. My son is no more a menace to society than anyone else. Stop the inquisition!