Where's Molly? Where are the others?

From CNN.com:
Families get help finding loved ones lost in institutions

The story

One day in 1957, when Jeff Daly was 6 years old, his little sister Molly, disappeared.

Every night at dinner, he would ask his parents the same question, "Where's Molly?"

Every night, he says, he received the same answer: "Stop asking about Molly."

Decades later, Daly learned that his parents had sent Molly to a state institution nine days before her third birthday. Nearly 50 years later, Daly found his sister and made a documentary about his search.

"Since the movie, literally hundreds of people have come up to us and said, 'I had a [relative] that I remember my family talking about that was sent away. Do you know how we can find out about that person?'" says Daly.

Wheresmolly.com

The CNN. com website has several video clips that you can watch if you computer allows you do to do that.

There's a timeline that explains that in 1967 about 195,000 people, half of whom were children were institutionalized for being disabled, many of them would have been diagnosable as autistic by today's standards. Many of the were treated brutally and died in those institutions of the actions of drugs and of neglect and disease.

One of the most horrific statements made in one of the video clips was that people in corporate American just did not have retarded kids, so they sent them away and pretended that they didn't. Another statement was that no one wanted to be known as the mother of a "retard." These were the peers of Molly's parents. The unmitigated gall of such thinking. The hardheartedness. Who are these people who thought they were so special? How sad that they ever got caught up in the whole corporate rat race and sold their humanity to it. To give away a child--a baby. Handing over a baby for forever would be most women's worst nightmare, most father's too.

The parents of autistic kids today who are demanding a cure for their autistic children (not all parents are like this) are themselves children of this very generation of people who would callously send their children away to be warehoused and pretend they did not exist any more. It's just what was done. So, there's nothing there now in the culture, no inherited way to deal with the shame of having a autism spectrum child, and these days there aren't so many people who will participate in such a sham as to pretend a disabled child who lived with the family for three years from birth on, did not exist.

The insulting and self-righteous of the parents demanding a cure, Mark Blaxill of SAFE MINDS, for one, will say things like, "There's no one in my family who is autistic. No cousins, no relatives at all. I never heard of any autistic people in my neighborhood and none of my friends can remember any, either." The utterly repulsive and disingenuous David Kirby says the very same thing.

Therefore, there's been an autism epidemic, right? Wrong. But nice try.

How's that for an effective revision of history?

Wipe out a people,
throw away their photographs and their personal things,
refuse to talk about them so no one knows they existed
and then lots more people especially younger ones will be able to say
with all honesty that they never heard of the disappeared ones
and deny that they ever did exist.

And when people say that these disappeared ones did so exist, just mock them and call them liars, as is common practice among the mercury parent activists.

These next quotes are from Kay Olson, guest blogging on CNN.com She has The Gimp Parade blog:

...
And, you know, diagnosing developmental differences is one thing - tricky by itself - but determining how differences affect potential is even trickier. The very act of deciding a person has limited potential can limit their opportunities. I know a few people whose abilities were radically underestimated because of developmental diagnoses, and I've read of or conversed online with dozens of other disabled people whose lives have been seriously affected by judgments - faulty judgments - about their worth and ability.
...
I think the main thing that nondisabled people don't necessarily know or understand is that developmentally disabled people are not this separate category of human beings. People tend to think, "We can do things. They cannot." And there's no line like that dividing all of us. There are shades of ability, varying talents that surface in surprising places. This is true for physical disabilities as well. Most of us, in the course of our lives, discover we have abilities or affinities for some things and lack talent elsewhere, so this idea that a certain class of people lack value or the ability to contribute inevitably underestimates and wastes a lot of human potential.

If you want to know about how kids were treated in the U.K. it wasn't much different. (site contains some artist's nude photos, probably safe for work, but possibly not). Alison Lapper:

QEB, the building where I lived, at least the first one I can remember, had two parts; an inner section and an outer section. The inner was warm and had central heating. It was where the more delicate types like the Spina Bifidas lived. And for us toughies, as we were called, there was the outer part which didn’t have heating and was freezing cold in winter. Us toughies in the outer section were accommodated in large dormitories, twenty or thirty to a room, with our metal cots laid out in rows - cot, locker; cot, locker; cot, locker - great big tall cots with great big tall sides, so it was like being in a cage. I wasn’t able to get out on my own. Somebody had to unlatch the side and get me out.

At night they used to put me inside my cot with the high sides, never in any underwear for some reason, just a little nightie, and in the morning they’d wake us all at six o’clock , while it was still dark outside. The nurse would sweep through the dormitory in her starched uniform with her assistants tagging along behind her and making sure that everyone woke up.

I had to wait my turn for the bathroom – there were thirty of us – so a nurse picked me up out of my bed and plonked me down on the floor I remember the freezing the shock as my bare skin came up flat against the hard cold concrete. All around me cockroaches were running about, just a few, but I didn’t mind them as much as feeling my bottom and legs slowly going numb with the cold. Eventually someone would get me and take me to the bathroom to wash my face and clean my teeth. And then it was off to breakfast which we all took together in a huge refectory room.

Alison Lapper was born without normal arms and legs. An artist did a huge sculpture of her, pregnant, nude. That sculpture was on display

in Trafalgar square in London for a year.

More here Mark Blaxill and the Hidden Horde and Dear Jon Movie.


CNN did a wonderful thing by bringing attention to this issue of hundreds of thousands of people who were disappeared this way in the U.S. Molly's brother did a wonderful thing by seeking out his little sister after all those years.


Autism Diva
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