Things I Don't Understand - Number Eleven - Change

I don’t understand change.

Don’t get me wrong here. Change as a means of improvement, I’m fine with. Without it, we wouldn’t have things like safer cars, improved rights for minorities, better health care, and the Internet. And yes, it does bring undesirable things too, but I can understand the roots of those, even if I don’t like them much.

I can also understand change as variety, something to spice up life, because every day being the same can be totally, mind-numbingly, boring. I can cope with this kind of change, as long as it doesn’t happen too much, too often, and I can go back to my ‘normal’ afterwards.

But change simply for change’s sake, that’s the one I don’t understand.

Take for instance when supermarkets switch items round in their aisles, so that what was once in Aisle Seven, is now who knows where, because for sure you don’t. Or when manufacturers change the packaging of their products, so you can’t even recognise them. Or worst of all, they actually stop making your favourite of some product, for no reason at all that you can figure out.

Then there are things like the fashion industry, which constantly changes its ‘look’, so that even if you do find a style that fits and you look not-too-bad in, next year it’ll be gone, and something uncomfortable and unflattering will take its place. Not to mention that they use crappy fabrics, and charge outrageous prices, and that some of their designs would make you a laughing stock if you actually wore them in the street. And don’t get me even started on POCKETS. We’re conned into thinking this absurdity is good, people make movies, TV programs and even write books about it, it’s become normalised, and largely unquestioned.

A lot of it seems to be about money – if this product isn’t making them a squillion of profits, they toss it and make something else. Never mind if lots of people are quite happy with the existing one. Or supermarkets, department stores, etc, will rearrange their floors because they want to put more ‘high-value’ (ie, more profitable) stuff where people will see it and impulse buy. And fashion, of course, is definitely about money, especially at women’s expense, as we’re the ones being the most badly conned (or forced, for lack of alternatives) into buying their products.  The ethos seems to be ‘make people buy more, make more money, make more money, make more money...’ We’re all in thrall to the Great God Profit.

Politicians seem fond of this kind of change too. Maybe they just like to be seen to be ‘doing something’, even if it’s endless tinkering what should be left alone. We in New Zealand have seen a fair bit of this over the past few decades, especially in regards to things like our health and education systems. Politicians wanted to ‘leave their stamp’ on the country, and they have, not always to good effect.

My feeling is always, why can’t people leave well enough alone? If something ain’t broke, don’t fix it, is my philosophy. This constant change-for-change’s-sake seems to be very much a modern thing, a function of late-stage capitalism perhaps. We now have ‘planned obsolescence’ rather than quality, ‘trends’ rather than a search for perfection, ‘the latest gadget’ rather than the best tool for the job. Change has stopped being about improvement or variety, and become an end in itself, an out-of-control spiral, meant only to further enrich those who have way too much already. This is a big part of what makes the world seem to get crazier every year.

Political analysis aside, I’m sure many NTs feel bugged by much of the above too. But the autistic reaction to this sort of change goes beyond irritation. It can mean very real distress. The world to us is a chaotic place, and we rely on a lot of little things to provide anchors or islands of calm in the swirling mess. If the tinned tomatoes aren’t in Aisle Seven, if our favourite shampoo is discontinued, if we can’t find clothes we like, it feels like the bottom has dropped out of our world. Our anchors are gone, and we’re drifting out to sea in a storm. Our little islands have disappeared, and we’re free-falling into the abyss.

When this happens, our thinking can spiral into what I call catastrophising, where one little thing triggers a chain of thoughts that invariably end in a disaster scenario. No tinned tomatoes – we can’t eat tonight, we’ll go hungry, we’ll starve, be found dead on our kitchen floor. No shampoo – we’ll have to use something that induces sensory overload and meltdowns, or we’ll never be able to wash our hair again, will end up dirty and smelly, lose our jobs, become homeless... No new clothes – we’ll end up dressed in rags or butt-naked, unable to set foot outside our front door, our lives falling apart… You get the picture. Sometimes, we’re able to find a solution, or others help us find one, but we go through the emotional wringer on the way to it.

I’m not saying that the world has to be organised around us. I am saying that other people need to understand that if we get upset about some ‘little thing’ having changed, we’re not ‘making a fuss about nothing’. It’s very real, and very horrible. This world is hard enough for autistics. Please, don’t make it worse.

So yeah, I don’t understand change for change’s sake. And I think I’m not alone.

Arguments For Use Against Anti-Vaxxers

Lately I’ve found myself getting into arguments with anti-vaxxers on social media. A tiring and unpleasant experience, it’s brought home to me just how cult-like the whole anti-vax movement is, and how closed-minded they are. You cannot reach them, and I certainly don’t argue with them with that in mind. Rather, I post in hope of reaching those who are undecided.

This can be a tricky call. Statistics are good, but too dry to really cut it. Not to mention the anti-vaxxers simply come back with their own stats and links that supposedly ‘prove’ their contentions. Never mind that these are either from contaminated sources (ie those of like mind, in a sort of circular argument), or, on closer inspection, really don’t prove anything of the kind they claim. [‘Vaccine injuries’ are a typical example.] We need something more.

So if any of you find yourself arguing with these people, and realise it’s not the anti-vaxxers you need to reach but those who might be wavering, I’ve realised there are two main points that are likely to appeal to them. I plan to use them myself, and if you’d like to use them too, feel free to link to this post, or to copy and paste, with suitable acknowledgement of the source, or a link back to here. Anyway, these are the points I’ve come up with -

1) EXPERIENCE. 

If you’re someone who’s not sure about whether to vaccinate or not, think back over your life, and ask yourself the following questions. 

a) Were you raised in a developed country? If yes, it’s likely you received whatever vaccines were common at that time. And if for some reason you weren’t, it’s likely that most of those roughly your age (what researchers call your ‘age cohort’) were. If however you grew up in an under-developed country, the immunisation record for your age cohort is likely to be far more patchy or non-existent.

b) Do you remember kids of your generation getting sick and/or dying of any of the diseases that can now be vaccinated against? I’m thinking here of diseases like TB, whooping cough, diphtheria, scarlet fever, measles, mumps, rubella, and chickenpox. If you’re older, did you suffer through these diseases yourself, or remember them ‘going around’ as epidemics? And during these epidemics, did you hear your parents talking anxiously of who might be infected, and how (eg from attending a party with infected children)? Do you remember whole families being quarantined, or friends you weren’t allowed to visit for ages or never saw again after they got sick, or relatives who died young?

c) Did you grow up before or after the vaccines for these diseases were introduced in your country? Younger generations are far more likely to have been vaccinated for pretty much all of these diseases, if they grew up in a developed country.

If the answers for these questions are yes, yes and no, or yes, no, yes, or even no, yes, no, then that’s one powerful pro-vaccine argument right there. Some of these diseases are now coming back in Western countries of course – and, not-so-coincidentally, right in the very places where vaccination rates are dangerously low.

Just to give one example, my own generation grew up AFTER vaccines for whooping cough, diphtheria, TB, tetanus and scarlet fever were introduced, but BEFORE the MMR (measles, mumps and rubella) vaccine came in. So we didn’t get the first group of diseases, but we did get the second. I know, however, that those as little as ten years older than me did commonly get whooping cough, while those only a generation younger didn’t get any of these diseases.

If that’s not enough to convince you, consider the following –

2) Rational Common Sense.

Anti-vaxxers frequently argue that these diseases are ‘still happening’, but are being mislabelled by doctors, researchers, scientists, hospitals and the government. This can only mean that either –

a) Doctors, nurses, etc, are so incompetent that they can’t recognise these diseases, even though the symptoms are widely known, and pretty unmistakable. It’s difficult to mistake whooping cough for ‘just a regular cough’, or measles for ‘just a rash’, for example. Yet the anti-vaxxers would have you believe that all medical staff etc are this incompetent. All of them. All of the time. Everywhere. In every clinic and hospital, everywhere in the Western world, and possibly beyond. How likely is this, you must ask yourself?

And yet, according to the anti-vaxxers, it’s either this, or –

b) That these same doctors, nurses, hospitals, researchers, government departments, etc, etc, are all in cahoots, conspiring to obscure and deny the truths, and keep the rest of the world’s population in the dark.

For what reason, you might ask? Good question. The anti-vaxxers never really answer that. Conspiracy theories abound, but tend, as do all such theories, to lack all rationality. They become an end in themselves, defying logic and plain old-fashioned common sense. We all know how difficult it is to get one or two people to keep a secret for long. How logical is it that hundreds of thousands of people, perhaps millions, from all around the world, are engaged in such an enterprise? For decades on end? Someone, somewhere, somehow, would start to spill the beans. And probably lots of them.

The anti-vaxxers of course claim that people already have, but weren’t believed. Firstly, these supposed ‘whistle-blowers’ invariably prove to be very few, and also part of the anti-vaxxer crowd, with the same confused and misleading ‘data’. Secondly, it still doesn’t explain WHY this was done. 

Explanations about ‘Big Pharma’ wanting to make a profit etc, etc, don’t really meet the logic test. Doctors, pharmaceutical companies, etc, don’t actually make that much on vaccines, on the whole. Not to mention that pharmaceutical executives, doctors, scientists, etc, live in the same world we do, after all, and by and large want the same things as we do – a safe world for their descendants to grow up in. 

Yes, there are ‘rotten apples in every barrel’, and a few might be corrupt, selfish, greedy creatures only in it for the money, but it defies logic and a basic understanding of human nature to think they are ALL like that. I’ve met some of these supposedly terrible people, and they’re human beings, just as we are. (It’s also worth noting that one of those truly ‘rotten apples’, who was struck off after having found to have faked his research for financial gain, is none other than Andrew Wakefield, yep, that’s right, the ‘guru’ of the anti-vax movement himself. Hmmmmm….)

Put simply, conspiracy theories about vaccines belong in the same category as ones about alien anal probes and Elvis still being alive.

So, if you’re reading all the screeds of supposed ‘facts’ the anti-vaxxers post everywhere at every opportunity, turn to these two things to test their claims – experience and logic. The anti-vaxxers fail spectacularly, on both counts.

Autism Matters - Education on Autism, By an Autistic

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This website is the brainchild of a friend of mine, previously living in NZ, now back in the UK. She's developing her business of educating people and organisations about autism, from the viewpoint of an autistic - a departure from the usual parent or professional 'consultants'. So if anyone in the UK is on the lookout for someone to teach their group or organisation about autism, this is the person to contact.