I have worked with people younger than myself since fourth grade. One of the things that I have always found striking was how often I was told by a parent that a kid couldn't do something or didn't like something only to watch the kid prove her wrong within hours. Not always, but often enough. Kids learn quickly, quickly enough to surpass our awareness. I think it has happened most often with kids on the autism spectrum. Kids perform to expectations, and raising expectations has the power of changing behavior. Easy to say but sometimes difficult to do, especially in the face of a diagnosis like autism. So when I encounter a story like that of Jason McElwain I can't help but be touched. I'm a huge fan of stories of human potential. stories like this make me question the ways in which I limit myself. At the end of the report they assume it's his last game, but that just seems silly.
One of the things that prevents me from writing more often is the sense that I'm just writing the same thing repeatedly from a slightly different angle. In a nutshell, all I'm saying is that moral idealism substituted for material goals will not lead to justice, but is an argument against materialism. I'm a dumb person's low rent Adolph Reed Jr. translator. I'm a "class reductionist" who understands that when the discourse is reduced to just class there's nothing as important as food, water and shelter that's left out. I often find myself contending with people who insist that there is, unable to name anything. They don't understand that they're making an argument against economic redistribution, or they don't care. There are no concrete manifestations of systemic racism or any oppression that are not dealt with through economic redistribution. When people say that economic redistribution won't end racism, what they mean is that ...
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