Actually, let's start by talking about someone very smart who probably shouldn't get her knickers in a twist over something moronic.

One of my favorite bloggers, Amalah, wrote a post today about Dennis Leary stating in his book, Why We Suck: A Feel Good Guide to Staying Fat, Loud, Lazy and Stupid, that there is no such thing as autism.

Amalah's son, Noah, has been diagnosed with Sensory Integration Dysfunction, a disorder that is, in some respects, similar to autism. So naturally, Amalah takes Leary's remarks about autism being a catchall diagnosis for bratty children of lazy parents very, very personally. However:

1. Soccer moms are not exactly Leary's intended audience in the first place. Most of the up-in-arms mothers who are raising a stink about Leary all over the internet ran out and bought the book just so they could read for themselves what he wrote. To which Leary responded, "KA-CHING!" Or they haven't read it for themselves at all, and they're just throwing a fit about something someone told them in the carpool line. Which is, after all, the American Way.

2. No one with any sense takes Dennis Leary, of all people, seriously. He's an actor and a comedian, for God's sake. The book (which I have, like a good American, not read) is probably entertaining, but when I want to read an author who will inform my views of the world, I do not choose Dennis-Effing-Leary. And I don't imagine anyone who's not a boy younger than 14 does either.

3. Like autism researchers around the world are really gonna throw up and their hands and exclaim, "Dennis Leary says autism is bullshit? Well, screw you guys, I'm goin' home!"

Personally, I believe that autism and Asperger syndrome are real, if overdiagnosed, disorders. While I think they are possibly caused by something environmental, I doubt they're caused by childhood vaccines, which, thanks to celebrity big-mouths like Jenny McCarthy, is the cause du jour.

You wanna get mad about something, Amalah? How about the fact that parents these days are refusing to vaccinate their children against deadly transmittable diseases because a nitwit famous for showing her hooters to the world via Playboy screams to anyone who will listen that those life-saving vaccines MIGHT cause a disorder that neurologists and other medical experts know very little about, including what its causes might be?

As for me, I'll get mad about THAT, thanks.

However, even though I think Dennis Leary hasn't much to offer the world in the way of wisdom, he does have a point about one thing:

Parents HAVE to take responsibility for their children.

I'm certainly not knocking all parents here; I know some truly stellar examples of parents. I won't name any names in the interest of privacy, but I have a friend whose son has ADD. Upon hearing that diagnosis, most modern parents would have driven straight to the pharmacy for their economy-sized bottle of Drug This Kid the Hell Out, PLEASE.

Not this lady.

She and her family tried (and I mean REALLY tried - not just, "oh, we did that for 15 minutes and it didn't work!") every behavior-modification technique known to MAN before they resorted to medication. Yes, the kid is on medication now, but medication combined with the afore-mentioned techniques. And the message they've sent their kid is an important one: Drugs are not the first solution, they're the LAST.

That's a good example. Now let me give you a bad one:

For the second time, I sat in Mass next to a little boy who has severe Tourette's syndrome. He doesn't have the vocal tics normally associated with Tourette's. He has the physical ones.

His mother always brings him to the noon Mass, the most crowded one, and sits in the center of a pew.

I spent Mass practically crawling into the lap of the old lady next to me, trying to keep from getting smacked in the face by this kid.

I am in no way unsympathetic to people with physical and mental handicaps. My aunt Carol, who lives with my parents, is mentally handicapped. But this kid...oh, this kid. I could have punched his mother in the face.

He flailed uncontrollably throughout the entire Mass. As is common with Tourette's, the more he tried to sit still, the worse he got. When it came time to kneel, he hit his chin on the back of the pew in front of him because he had a tic wherein his knees came out from under him and he flung his arms behind him.

He was utterly humiliated. He kept looking at me apologetically with tears in his eyes. I gave him a smile and then glared daggers over his head at his seemingly-oblivious mother.

I don't know how much anyone here knows about Catholicism, but our obligation to attend Mass on Sundays is an extremely serious one. So I don't blame her one bit for bringing him to church. I would do the same thing in her position, EXCEPT
--I would seat the child on the end of the pew, nearest the aisle. That way, he couldn't hit anyone but me, OR
--I would bring him to an earlier or later (less-crowded) Mass so that we would have more room in the pew around us, OR
--I would sit with him in the Cry Room. (The sound-proofed room where parents with babies sit. NO, it's not a place for us to work out our Catholic guilt.)

But not this lady. No, sir. She doesn't care that those around her can't pay attention to anything the priest is saying, that someone might be injured OR that her child is mortified. Just as long as she can sleep late on Sunday and make a spectacle of the both of them.

I told this story to a friend of mine who is a mother of a small child. She didn't actually say that I am a heartless monster and that she hopes God curses me with 20 developmentally-disabled children (and she absolutely is the sort of person who would view a child who is anything less than "perfect" as a curse), but that was the gist of her response. She actually used the word "un-Christian," and she is very lucky indeed that the words "narcissistic bitch" weren't bandied about as well.

(It's OK; her kid is a B-R-A-T brat from hell. The apple doesn't fall far and all that.)

So what do you guys think? Have you had an experience like this? Is the mother in the wrong, or am I just cruel?

And is Dennis Leary a 21st century prophet and I'm just missing the boat?



Your thankfully-uninjured
Kel