Sunday, April 29, 2012

What If...

Because my mom is an occupational therapist, growing up I was taught to respect retarded and special needs people. My mom works for the local school district and helps kids with their fine motor skills. Every summer I help out a couple times with making cookies or art projects. The kids range from no ablitiy to do pretty much anything, to very high functioning autism. Autism, aspergers, and down syndrome are all different types of disabilites, that you should really look up and learn the difference. It's actually quite interesting. 
Anyways, I decided to write about this because I just watched a very good movie, called Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, starring Tom Hanks, Sandra Bullock, and Thomas Horn. It's about a kid's recovery after his fathers death in the 911 disaster of the World Trade Center. Though they never say he does for sure, my mom said that she was pretty positive that he had aspergers. The movie was excelant. The acting was amazing and the plot was touching. 
The point of this entry is the idea of having aspergers or high functioning autism. I've seen all these kids around town who I know have some of these disabilities and they go through their life like nothings wrong. But then, like the kid in the movie, they have freak outs on the smallest things. Like loud machine noices, small places, running people, the littlest incidents affect these children in the oddest way. Sometimes, after helping my mom with her students, I try to imagine what life would be like if I or someone close to me had one of these disabilites.. To be afraid of whats around the corner, to have to do everything on a certain time schedule, having to eat the same foods or else you'd freak out. Just a little thought for all of y'all out there.

Until next time...

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