Battle Fatigue

Regular readers of my blog will have noticed that I've been posting less often for the past several months. At first I thought my lack of interest in blogging might have been caused by seasonal depression over the long, gloomy winter. But it's been sunny and warm in my area all week; the birds are chirping merrily, the daffodils are blooming, and the grass is looking much greener; and now I feel, if anything, even less inclined to blog. For now, I just want to get out and enjoy the beautiful weather and be part of the real world, far away from all the pointless bickering that has been going on in the online autistic community.

I had a conversation last year with a friend who described autistic rights bloggers as "always at the barricades." That observation struck me as very accurate. We've had so many enemies to confront over the years that we have become hypervigilant, always looking for the next threat. And if we don't have a real enemy at close range, we're just as likely to lob virtual Molotov cocktails at each other.

That level of combativeness might at one time have been necessary, in the sense in which Malcolm X used the word; but it is not sustainable, either for an individual or for a community. Supporters of autistic civil rights, within the broader landscape of disability rights, now exist in sufficient numbers so that we can and should shift the focus away from Internet wars and toward the less exciting—but far more important—work of making the constructive real-life changes that we need to see in society.

As of now, this blog is on hiatus. When I come across general announcements that may be of interest to my readers I'll continue to repost them, such as the information about the Campaign for Disability Employment that I posted last week. I may write original articles on occasion, mainly about social and cultural issues, if I feel inspired to do so. There will be no more Molotov cocktail entries, though. I'll decide whether to return to posting more regularly after I've had a good long time to decompress and to consider what might be done with this blog in the future.

Wishing all of my readers a good spring, with plenty of time to enjoy the outdoors, and for those in the Southern Hemisphere a pleasant autumn.