(Part II) Roust the Bums in Aspen Hill: Blame the Victims

Previously, abusiveness of myself, and of autistic charges of a publicly-funded day-supervision outfit. Somehow I think it's related.

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People are strange. They always seem to be looking for the outsiders, someone to oppress or to fight or vanquish, and they always seem to be willing to organize to do it.

In 1994, Rwandan Genocide stunned the world with the vicious murder -- generally hand-to-hand at close quarters -- of hundreds of thousands over about 100 days. Despite the fact that ethnically and culturally the Hutu and Tutsi tribes were almost indistinguishable one from the other -- and were largely the creation of classism imposed by the Belgian colonial government -- the bloodshed was astonishing. And all that was necessary to set it off, it seems, was a lot of propaganda on the radio and the use of the word "cockroaches".

Africa, of course, is globally infamous for the unremitting tribal warfare, and in recent decades, the very name of that continent has become as synonymous with genocide and famine as it was in earlier times synonymous with slavery and the exportation of entire nations as slaves.

Africa is the mother of all of mankind, and some suggest that the farther you go from Africa, the closer you are to civilization. How strange it is to say that; the earliest civilizations were in Africa, from Great Zimbabwe to Egypt. Yet is Egypt in the modern day believed to be the center of mankind's rise above the bestial? Is Zimbabwe now famous in the modern day for its construction of grand palaces, or for cholera? And throughout the history of Africa, civilizations arose because they welcomes the trade of strangers, but defended their own places from enemies. In the modern day, the worst parts of Africa are in such terrible shape because the enemies they attack are their own countrymen, as in Zimbabwe where the ruling tribe and political party have reduced a fertile nation to a failed state, as in Sudan where one ethnic group is driving another into destruction in the desert.

Many who can have fled Africa. Many have sought refuge here in the US, but recent State Department and Immigration estimates place at above 80 percent the number of African applications for immigration or refuge, which are fraudulent on the face of the application. Many do come here from Africa, however, and it is very important to make the distinction between honorable persons of good family who emigrated from their homelands as the elite of their society. The African immigrant population here in Montgomery has one of the highest per-capita rates of college education. This reflects very positively. Yet many who have come here from Africa came here by means of fraud perpetrated on an immigration agency so broken that it granted to the 9/11 hijackers their student visas -- to come to America to learn how to fly -- six months after their fiery murder/suicide that was the most devastating attack ever made on American soil.

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I rather enjoy conversations with foreigners, though most such conversations I have had took place in Washington DC, and sometimes in Northern Virginia. I'm less interested in speaking with professional visitors and more interested in speaking with "ordinary people". I like to understand from such people how it was that they lived in their homelands, and I often hear from them about how beautiful was Nature, and how ugly was the corruption and warfare. Many such persons with whom I have so conversed were the cream of their nation's youth, and many of them left their fine academic careers a year before graduation, mostly due to political upheavals or due to running afoul of this-or-that corrupt official or their entourage. Or so they say. But I won't deny that these were literate and well-educated people, and most of them had a great concern for the welfare of their friends and families back in their homeland, and for their culture and for their nation.

Here in Montgomery, my contacts have been less, but nonetheless where it is possible to be a friendly person and to listen to and remember the histories of others, that is proper and fitting. Here, as elsewhere, one meets a lot of people whose fine academic careers was cut short by this-or-that war, uprising, change of political power, or running afoul of corrupt officials or their entourages. Yet to my alarm, in many cases it has turned out that the political associations were not with the more moral (to my thinking) side of the conflicts. Some of the people rightly fled corruption in places such as Zaire (Congo) and some of them escaped because their families sent them abroad to escape being victims of reprisals for their family's looting of the public treasuries. Some did not rightly flee corruption either because they opposed it, or because they were a part of it; some fled because they were officers in the militaries of revolutions or insurgencies, whether Soviet-backed or otherwise.

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Research into the conflicts in Africa show patterns of genocide and atrocity. The so-called "diamond conflicts" and the resource-control wars such as the "coltan war" are characterized by machete amputations of the limbs and extensive use of child soldiers, not to mention rape as a weapon of war.

But the common thread in all of this is seeing people not of one's own tribe (or religion, or nation, or political party) as nothing more than enemy, or a resource. In the "coltan wars", in particular, captured parties become slaves in the diggings, if male, and the females suffer far worse fates.

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Seeing "others" as nothing but a resource or opportunity for income is nothing new. Slavery and subjugation are hardly limited to Africa or to Africans. Greece and Rome were both built on slavery as an institution and with slaves as a majority of the workforce. Comparably, the early days of the United States were, in some regions, highly populated with slaves and permeated by the institution of chattel slavery, the ownership of human beings. Indeed, in the modern day, slavery is almost widespread once again. Of course it isn't legal, and recent legislative action by the Montgomery County Council has required all persons hiring domestic workers to record a contract specifying duties and pay. This is in part due to a recent spate of domestic-worker slavery prosecutions in Montgomery County. Evidently an Amendment to the Constitution of the United States of America wasn't enough; now the much higher authority of the MoCo County Council has to step in.

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At the Aspen Hill Local Park I have seen two totally different groups of autists.

One group comes down the hill from the Frost Center.

One group used to be brought over by van from the Community Services for Autistic Adults and Children ("CSAAC"), as best I could figure and as I was told when I asked.

The group that comes down to the park from the Frost Center comes down to play baseball. These guys are not going to be winning the World Series, but they seem to be having fun and they're playing baseball. The staff is interacting with them in a totally human-to-human if slightly custodial way.

The group that came down to the park in the van from CSAAC either sat in the van for hours, or were herded around the parking lot of the park. It looked almost like someone was filming background footage for a zombie movie. The staff weren't exactly prodding them along with sticks, most of the time. But the overwhelming impression was of human being herding cattle.

The Frost Center people seemed to have an individual sense of each of the personalities and persons with whom they interacted, and one got the sense that their clients were perhaps not the same as the average "normal" person, but they had personalities, hopes, fears, and perhaps talents and aspirations. Perhaps, like most autists, they didn't seem to be all that concerned with what anyone else might be thinking, yet they seemed to be human people and a part of their culture. The Frost Center staffers were all, to judge by the accents, born here in the USA.

The group of autists that came in the van from "over on Twinbrook Parkway" milled about like cattle: lost cattle, at that. I've spent a summer with relatives that ran sheep, and I have been around cattle farms as well. You get to know the names and the personalities of some of the most outstanding livestocks. But mostly what they are is something stubborn that wants to go its own way, and as stubborn as they are, you'd like to let them go their own way... except that would be a monetary loss. So you don't do anything to them that would decrease their value at market; but also if they get out of line, you yell at them, throw things at them, and if necessary you manhandle them.

The difference here is one of whether the caretakers of disabled persons treat them as human beings with the intrinsic worth of humanity. Alternatively, the caretakers of disabled persons treat them as cattle, kine for the market, with no value other than the income they can bring.

The Americans were therapists.

The Africans were herdsmen.

Or so it seemed to me.

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Once I had some very strange interactions with some of the Africans.

Once some of them seemed to be quite ready to deal with me as if I were one of their herd, one of the clients whose therapy consisted of being herded around a public park's parking lot like so many cattle. I had seen some of these Africans get fairly violent on some of their charges. I didn't much care to be the victim of such dehumanizing treatment at the hands of a man I already knew to be a veteran of the revolutionary-insurgent side of the exceptionally bloody and atrocity-riddled Angolan Civil War. I left in a bit of a hurry.

In retrospect I am not quite sure what to make of it, other than that these guys want to have a larger herd, because it increases their income.

Or perhaps it was because all but one of the autists they herded like livestock were white, and about my age, and insofar as anyone could tell, I was just as unemployed and unemployable as were their charges.

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Perhaps the African staffers (and sometimes customers of comparable origins) at the Northgate Rite-Aid who abuse me as if I were a recalcitrant sheep are abusing me because I'm not earning a paycheck for some African who should be following me around to keep the autist in line. Maybe they just think that autists are there for them to abuse.

Or perhaps they're just American-hating foreign racists.

Or maybe someone thinks that if they can convince the staffers to help run me out of the neighborhood, they'll be able to close down my group-house and turn it into a flophouse for illegal alien workforce. That's not going to happen; I live in the family home and it has been paid-for and mortgage free for over 30 years now.

Or maybe they just hate bloggers.

It doesn't matter to me; all that matters is that the abuse is studied and of clear long practice. It evidences, to me, clear organization and a furtive pursuit of criminal violence.

Another thing that matters to me is that if they are doing this to me, to whom else are they doing this? The difference here is that I'm not a voiceless autist who can only suffer and can complain only to their abusers. I'm here to stand up for those voiceless autists, though. And perhaps there will be others who will speak up for them. Perhaps the people at the Frost Center and other comparable institutions will start asking around, because if a clear pattern of systematic discrimination against persons covered by the Americans With Disabilities Act is ongoing at local stores, Montgomery is a county full of lawyers who love nothing more than crushing litigation.

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TO BE CONTINUED

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