acting normal

What is 'acting normal' for, anyway? Is it to keep away the people with syringes, the men in white jackets? Is that why, like Pratchett's quote, we all march in straight rows and allow ourselves to be 'weeded' like so much mindless corn? Makes me think of 1984 or Brave New World. Scary stuff. Like that cop who stopped me for looking around or for running while not wearing running clothes. Are people born with minds that narrow? Or is the narrowness cultivated by progressively trimming off or pruning any bit that doesn't fit social expectation, until finally we are bonsai'ed into near non-existence? Drones. My very own brother, when we were talking recently about 'progressive' schools for the girls, said, Diversity is overrated.

Looking for others who find 'unresponsive people' as annoying as I do, came across this from ballastexistenz, Exactly who is unresponsive here, describing a public service video on autism:

One thing that struck me was that the children in the video were described as unresponsive, over and over again. And yet the children were responding to their parents and to their environments in general, and they were doing so in incredibly clear ways.

However, by the way the parents were acting, it might as well not have been happening. They went right on doing whatever it was they had been doing, as if the children were not communicating anything. The body language of the parents did not change in the slightest in response to their children, it stayed constant, and very very socially smooth.

Then, in order to get their children to “respond” to them (as if the children had not been responding already), they’d do things like try to force eye contact. As if eye contact is “connection” and “response”. There was also some grabbing and moving them around, as if they were objects, but without any responsiveness to the reactions of the children. I even saw children being driven into overload and then parents sitting there looking “sad” that their children did all these “behaviors”.

Maybe these so-called 'normal' parents have deadened their own empathy systems to such a degree that they can't perceive anything subtler than a hammer blow, so by comparison their children's non-verbal cues are 'invisible' to them. They've trained themselves (the parents) not to use, or perceive, the body language and gestures of others because it's too painful. So they've deafened and blinded themselves to a large percentage of the 'information' that the human body/mind evolved to operate on, and in the process have essentially killed off anything remotely resembling intuition. And apparently compassion died along with it.

Maybe a typical so-called 'normal' American is just one who's so numbed out that s/he expresses nothing more powerful than a blank mask? As if all of life were a poker game, and you can never let the other guy see what you're thinking or feeling. Weird.

Ooh, ooh - reading further in the comments thread on the above-linked post, came across this gem from a commenter:

I think what some people call responsiveness is actually more like obedience. My son is very responsive, he often does the exact opposite of what we’ve asked :-)