Now I'm done though. I'll have to figure out something else to start on tomorrow.
I've had this idea percolating in my brain for a little while. I mentioned it to Rish a while back and we discussed it a bit. I saw somewhere that a study said that one in a hundred kids have autism. That seemed like a lot to me. A lot more than it was when I was younger. When the movie Rainman came out, it seemed like autism was a rare and strange disorder, but these days it seems like everyone has at least one kid with that problem. Maybe that's not true. Maybe I was just uninformed back then.
However, if autism is increasing, and we have no idea the cause of it, what happens in a hundred years when it's one in ten kids that are autistic or worse, what if it's seven in ten? Or nine out of ten? What would the world be like? What steps would society have to take to ensure its survival. I'm sure it couldn't be pretty.
So I was thinking of writing a story about that potentiality. We'll see how it goes. I'll have to read up a little on autism, though. I'm not very educated about the condition at all.
4 comments:
If you have any questions about dealing with them in a classroom, I'm here.
Dude, I'm fairly sure you said that the report said it already IS one out of ten kids. If you recall, I started screaming and throwing things, refusing to believe the statistics were true . . . until Father McIntyre asked me to leave the funeral service.
Just don't blame vaccines.
Yeah, Rish, you're right. I still thought it was something like one out of ten when I started to write the post. I thought I ought to check the facts, so I did an internet search, and found that I'd inflated that number quite a bit.
It's not such an impending doom type situation when it's only one out of a hundred, but still that's a damn lot of kids with autism. When you consider that there's about 4 million kids born every year in the USA, that's 40,000 autistic kids each year. Enough to make a pretty well populated town.
But the article I found on the internet said that they had to revise their idea that it was more like one in every one hundred and fifty kids. So that's a significant jump. What if it's one in fifty in ten years? One in ten in twenty years, one in five in thirty, and so forth. It still kind of scares me. What would happen to our society if even twenty percent of us couldn't care for ourselves completely? It could be a serious problem. Makes good fodder for a Sci-fi story anyway.
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