The lessons of 50 Cent brought home

I’m pretty sure you have your head in the sand if you have not heard about the ignorant, rude remarks by 50 Cent.  In the sad case that you somehow missed this media storm let me catch you up to speed really quickly.

First, the two tweets from 50 Cent that started the uproar were:
"yeah i saw your picture fool you look autistic" & "i dont want no special ed kids on my timeline follow somebody else".

Wow did those comments blow up.  The tweets, letters, articles, news stories, blogs, vlogs, status updates, etc, about this have been non-stop.  With this onslaught of bad media 50 Cent quickly deleted these awful tweets and later even apologized.  He even had an event cancelled because of his "seriously ignorant” tweets.

So now you are up to speed on what happened I want to talk about the lesson I think the autism community needs to learn from this whole thing.

We need to learn about the strength of our numbers.  We know there are hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people all across the world who will flock together and stand for autism.  But did you know there are probably dozens of people who will flock together for autism in your neighborhood? 

Let’s start with your house – I mean obviously if you are part of the autism community you are going to stand up for autism.  But have you realized that your neighbors might stand behind you as well?  What about the person two blocks over who has a grandchild with autism and their neighbors?  What about your child’s friends and their neighbors?  With 1 in 88 children nationally affected by autism how many of your neighbors are closely related to someone with autism? 

If you start visually following this train of thought through you can make a huge web starting from your house spreading for miles and miles in all directions.  Do you know those connections?  Do you know who around you supports autism?  Because if you don’t – it is time to find out.

There are many reasons this is important.  Let’s start with the basic ones.  If some kid is bullying your child does your neighbor know to step in?  If your child is wandering alone does your neighbor’s neighbor know they should help out?

Now let’s move in the direction of the bigger picture – if the state legislator that represents your neighborhood is stopping critical autism legislation – like, let’s say, Autism Insurance Coverage – do you know who you can mobilize in your neighborhood to action to change their opinion? 

Now to a comment such as this I frequently hear something like “they won’t change their opinion – they have their politics to keep up.”  Oh yeah?  Do you know how many insensitive comments 50 Cent has taken heat for and yet NEVER deleted or apologized for?  When his recent autism comments first starting making news someone told me “50 Cent will never apologize – he has his imagine to keep up.”  Guess what – he apologized.  And guess what?  Your legislator will change their opinion too. 

All we need to do is remember our strength in numbers – because we ARE strong in numbers.  I think one of the best things about autism is the amazing community.  So we need to remember how strong we are, remember there are people on all sides of us who support us and are affected by autism too.  We need to start, or continue, advocating passionately for the needs of the autism community.  Then we need to mobilize all those people around us to advocate too.  If we, as the autism community and those around us who care about the autism community, continue coming together to make a difference at events like: town hall meetings, legislative hearings, small group meetings, PTA meetings, city council meetings, school district meetings, etc, etc, etc, we will continue to see the changes we need happen. 

So let’s remember how we brought 50 Cent to apologizing and let’s start bringing legislators and others who are hurting our community to changing their ways as well.  
We are strong - now let's change the world!