One of the things that happens in a new town is that you search for new radio stations. Personally, I prefer, in order, (1) an NPR station, (2) an AM News station, (3) a sports radio station, (4) a country station and (5) a folksy station that plays a little bluegrass. So far in Lexington I have 1, 3 and 4 done. So, today I was searching for an AM News station. Tonight I took a quick trip to Lowes still tuned to the AM station I was trying out. On the way home I hear the announcer start a rant on how autism is not real.

Obviously I thought the speaker, some ultra conservative wacko, was kidding ... but no. The idiot was serious and went on to say that autistic children were just "fools" and that their parents didn't cure them of being fools like his daddy cured him (riiigght...wow). That America is diagnosing their children as autistic when the problem is really just a bunch of bad parents. - I wanted to spit into the radio in the hope it might come out the other side and hit this absolute ass of a human in the face. When he finished with his autism rant, I just turned it off and didn't even catch his name, which I regret, because I may have sent hate mail for the first time in my life. (If someone heard it and knows the guy, please let me know in the comments). No doubt the moron did not actually have an original thought of his own and just borrowed the thought from this guy in the National Review and took it to the extreme. 

Anyway, after the shock of this wore off, I considered for a minute all the new attention I have been hearing autism get lately. It has occured to me before that I am hearing more about autism lately than I have ever heard within a short period of time. It is beginning to remind me of the attention that ADHD got in the late 1990's and early 2000's. Even your average person on the street had an opinion on ADHD. Heck, I'll admit that at times I have thought there was an over diagnosis problem as I watched my friend in gradeschool go from an active, energetic student that made decent grades to a lethargic blob after they put him on the medicine. It clearly screwed up my friend for at least two years of grade school until they took him off the medicine and who knows what kind of lasting after effects that had on him. I know the medicine was messing with some of my high school students as well. 

But that is ADHD. Not Autism. If you have ever worked in a school it seems there is a fairly substantial difference in the diagnosis, yet the attention autism is getting lately is strangely familiar. We may be at the beginning of a new period where autism becomes a national issue and people begin to spew all kinds of uninformed nonsense that generally leads to chaos which in the end has a negative effect on children. So, those of us that have a say at all, we need to head this off early. I am going to stress autism awareness to my school administrators and I hope all of you in similar positions will take similar actions.