"Equity Is The Root"
And DIVISION is the fruit.
When my first son was born, we had a lot of what I would imagine were normal expectations for him. I really never thought too far ahead of where he was developmentally. Things for a new mother are very hard. You pretty much get little rest and are on 24/7 survival duty. You can’t seem to find any time to shower or think much less pee. I think like all new moms, I loved each stage. I was kind of sad as each was coming to an end, but I was always thankful that with each graduation, my son developed more independence. I, as a mother, would gradually get my bodily autonomy back with each stage of development. It’s a huge moment for a mother when you can start going to the bathroom with the door closed again. My kids are 7 and 9, and I am just there. I obviously missed my big moment. You laugh, but it just became a habit to leave the door open a crack in case of an emergency. My husband recently pointed out I was doing it, and I wasn’t even aware. The phase, though, was over a solid 4 years ago.
With my oldest, it became apparent that some of those transitions to independence weren’t happening on schedule. He was diagnosed at first as having several common developmental delays. Many signs of autism spectrum disorder were there. We wanted to figure out the best ways to help him develop in ways that made his life functional and independent. We wanted him to be able to read and learn and progress in ways that opened up the world of education to him. What we were given through the various early childhood development programs was speech therapy. The problem was, he never had an issue with speaking. He had an issue with functional language which has nothing to do with the ability to form words. It had to do with his brain understanding thoughts and converting them into sounds that we distinguish as meaningful language.
The speech therapist came in and showed us ways to help him start using words that were behavioral. So, instead of saying “cheese” which was his word for any food and “juice” which was his word for any drink, she would have him say, “I-want-cheese.” Then, we would give it to him. The problem was, he had no idea what “I” indicated, much less “want,” so he was just being programmed like a robot to repeat meaningless (to him) phrases on command to get what he wanted. He sounded more like he knew what he was doing. So, we tricked strangers into thinking he was more “normal” than he was. Sad to say, many parents are excited for these little “achievements” and praise behavioral therapy on account of them as a win. I saw through it straight away. “Kimbel, point to I. Who is I?” “Who is you?” “Point to you.” I would ask him various questions. If he acknowledged I was speaking at all, his face demonstrated bewilderment.
We tried sign language. Thank goodness sign language is somewhat more intuitive for children on the spectrum. The sign for want is hands grabbing out to something and closing them while bringing the invisible item in toward the body. This made language make a little more sense to him. We did the “Signing Time” program with Rachel. We even met her when she came to DC. I admit I almost cried meeting her. My mother was there looking very cool over the event, so I held back out of embarrassment for what she would think of her 40 something year old, grown daughter crying over the fiasco that was the live stage show. It was really chaotic. I’m crying now a little recalling how I felt, though, in that experience which I had nearly forgot. The stages go by much quicker now leaving little time for reflection.
The long story short is that in the year my son spent with a speech therapist, he made little progress. What developmental spurts he had seemed to come directly as a result of being sick, speech therapy being canceled and a healing diet of soups implemented for the interim until he got better. When therapy would resume, the therapists would say they could see that we were keeping up with all the homework better. In truth, we were not thrilled with behavioral therapy, and we were much less inclined to fiddle with it when he was sick. At the end of our year, we started to believe he was struggling with autism. All the other signs were there: echolalia, lining up cars and toys, laughing at inappropriate times, watching kids play with interest but never engaging in the play, zero eye contact, still no functional language, zero pain tolerance or responses to getting hurt (in a cause and effect sort of natural repercussion development of fear that thriving beings possess), and he was repeating meaningless phrases at random in all sorts of situations.
Looking back, “Junah broke a light” was something he heard me say likely in some heightened emotional situation when I was spinning out of control from severe sleep deprivation and emotional overwhelm. It became the thing he said everywhere. People would talk to him to say “Hi,” and he’d respond, “Junah broke a light.”
I don’t know that he wanted to tell everyone about that experience so much as that there was some synaptic misfire that routed every bit of thought he had about anything at all to the mechanics of speech portion of his brain and it just performed that one task. It would be like sending a computer system set up for home maintenance a request, and it sent back an automated response saying, “we heard your sink needed repair and we are sending someone out to look at your sink very soon.” Your carpet could have caught fire, your roof might be leaking, your walls may have earthquake damage, whatever you need help for, you get an automated response about a sink, and then, plumbers show up to look at your sink. You call and try to put in new requests but all you get is more of the same response and more plumbers. You want to know why autistic children get frustrated and emotional? Any time he wanted to say any thing, that one phrase would come out. It took him hard concentration and effort to break that pattern and ask for food in his pre-programmed, packaged, “I want cheese” phrase he eventually memorized.
We started the GAPS protocol after recognizing diet had been more productive in giving my son ways to communicate independently using functional language. In four days on the protocol, he was telling me stories of woodpeckers he heard in the trees eating bugs. He broke the cycle of saying “Junah broke a light” every time he wanted to talk. It still came out, but GAPS is a long process taking a minimum of 18 months to start to see the extent of its effectiveness. In about 18 months, he stopped saying that for good.
GAPS Diet is based on the teachings of neurosurgeon turned nutritionist, Natasha Campbell McBride’s work on Gut and Psychology Syndrome. It suggests that what is known as leaky gut syndrome has a strong causal relationship to several mental maladies such as autism spectrum disorders, Alzheimer’s, ADHD, depression and even schizophrenia that keep people dependent on modern, insufficient drugs and other Pavlovian style and draconian behavioral therapies.
This is how we get to this very popular buzzword, “equity” today. My friend, Sean Malone shared this hilariously incoherent, likely, tolerance campaign slogan/calendar cover photograph which he took at his local Target. If you understand the meaning of the word “equity,” you’ll know it has just about nothing directly to do with diversity outside of the implications of a violently imposing communist government’s manipulative claims of settling imperceptible debts with other people’s stolen money. It’s kind of like using the made-up words “taxes” and “legal” to justify theft, rape, murder, kidnapping, abduction and a host of other completely abhorrent behaviors when the state does it. Now, “equity” these days is being misused or ironically culturally appropriated, much like “law” has been misused to suit the needs of agents of a would be ruling class.
Equity according to Merriam Webster is “justice according to natural law or right specifically : freedom from bias or favoritism.”
That’s very ironic as equity in modern terminology is used to set an absolute value, and I mean a precise proportional value at which some bias is happening in society based solely on skin color and compensate for it arbitrarily. There are plenty of exceptions among individuals to this absolutism of values derived to ascertain amounts of proportional detriment come to broad brushstroke collectives of people based solely on the color of their skin. I’m wading through a kafkatrapping minefield here, so bear with me in trying to phrase this without soliciting “liberal” much less libretardian shrieking.
At some point, unfairness is being created by the very laws intended to rectify it. The problem is, it’s virtually impossible to determine the effect of privilege in a slum or a cancer ward. It’s rather callous to claim that certain people among the sick or impoverished are more personally responsible for being in such a state as their alleged privilege should have afforded them enough opportunity to not be there. In many ways, this is a sort of “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” mentality aimed solely at people for merely appearing a certain way, genetically speaking. If you never liked the phrase or mentality behind it being leveled against the poor, you certainly shouldn’t appreciate it when leveled against only one race of the poor. Those who dare to mention the disproportionality and inequity of this type of injustice end up being labeled as a pejorative term “fragile.”
The problem as I see it, is that we now have people born with very light skin having to constantly justify their “blackness” to their peers to attain a certain amount of acknowledgement and acceptance. A person with lighter skin shouldn’t automatically be cast as an outsider or seen as not having struggled. Obviously, this proves that one’s skin color should not be the metric upon which we assign sweeping equity based policies. Certainly, assuredly, this proves that nothing about such policies engenders a harmonious fruit of diversity. If anything, it engenders constant division, rather than diversity, over whom is entitled to more artifacts of equity based how much suffering one has endured. It has people of various ethnic origins fighting among themselves as much as others. Some fruit… Divided and ready to be conquered. Ripe for the picking, I guess.
If you are wondering what on earth this has to do with my family’s journey with functional language, autism, GAPS diet and leaky gut, I’m here to the point, now. If you teach a person to hold out his hand and say, “I want cheese” and the net result is he gets some sort of food placed in his hand, he may never really come to understand what any of those words mean, much less how others may use his lack of understanding to harm him.
As for my son, I saw this leading to a life of dependency because knowledge is power. His knowledge to use one trick to get whatever I felt like feeding him at a given moment was only going to take him so far and always be contingent on what I was willing to give him on a given day. Luckily, he enjoyed avocados, soups, liver, fish, soft-boiled eggs and broccoli. I am proud to say, of all my failures as a mother, I never once served my kids rice when they didn’t have the enzymes in their guts to process grains, never a Cheerio on a highchair table nor a Goldfish, much less a rainbow artificially colored Goldfish cracker in their lives. In fact, I got him tiny, freeze dried little fishes from Asian markets to eat for snacks during the Keebler Goldfish phase. He LOVED the fishes, just like Asian children raised on a healthier, superior diets with more natural fish oils do. How privileged my kids were…
However, we hired a babysitter once and failed to mention this little quirk of language to her after showing her what in our refrigerator she should feed our son as we were going out for a date night. She ended up ignoring our recommendations and feeding him a HUGE block of cheddar cheese we had set aside for small garnishes and all the juice his body could consume which we gave sparingly and always watered down to the point of juice essence. When I got home, I asked how preparing dinner went, and she seemed pleased. “He kept saying he only wanted cheese and juice. I figured since there was raw, organic cheese and organic juice in the fridge, I should just give him that.”
If you train people to repeat stupid phrases, like the slogan above or merely buzzwords such as “equitable” without any clear understanding of the meaning of the words between who is doing the asking and who is presumably doing the giving, one might get something good, one might get what one desires, one might get something equitable that is highly unsatisfactory to either party or both. Ya never know. The bottom line here is that, any lack of knowledge that promotes dependency in this high stakes game of mind control which we are living will be exploited to the greater advantage of someone, and if you believe that someone is the one without the knowledge, you have not studied your history. You might have even missed The Walking Dead like reality of the past two years.
My calling in this world seems to be to liberate people. If I’m talking about boundaries or I’m talking about values or your vision or bodily integrity or acquiring knowledge and deeper understanding of communication, it’s all in the same vein. If you want to be free, you can’t be a mouse in a cage dependent on clicking a lever to get cheese. There aren’t a lot of entirely self-sufficient people in this world. I suspect very, very few. Even those may desire to make trades and barters with relatively local village folk for goods which they don’t personally produce. However, every step we take in the direction of that knowledge of how to get our own cheese and to work with others who share our values to align and create more independence can only be seen as a progressive move forward. Any, suggestions to this end should never be seen as belittling or undermining but rather a faithful investment of encouragement.
At this end, I’d like to recommend checking out another Substack writer whom I collaborate with in liberating people. Her name is Starr O’Hara and this is her blog. She’s currently sharing the initial steps one can take toward gardening and farming, even just a small supplemental bit to get oneself gradually off the lever of the ever precarious “supply chain” based food system.
If you received value from this submission, or Starr’s, please consider becoming a Substack supporting subscriber. I appreciate as ever the value of your attention. It is my firmest belief that this is the most valuable asset you possess.
Keep putting good stuff in your boundaries.