Just a heads up, I will be talking about autism and hate towards the autistic community. I don’t normally, so if I word something wrong and it’s damaging/ hateful, please kindly let me know and I will edit the post to fix my mistake
One of my younger cousins is on the autism spectrum. He’s lower on the spectrum, he still has troubles reading social cues and has some other symptoms but they aren’t so bad that he genuinely struggles because of them. He’s my aunt’s oldest and she and her ex did struggle a bit to adjust so they could properly help and nurture my cousin when he was younger.
In comes in my great aunt. She’s very opinionated and sometimes hard to reason with. When my previously mentioned cousin was little, like just out of toddler age, my great aunt was talking with my grandmother, aunts and my mother. None of us kids were around because we were little balls of energy and probably playing outside.
My great aunt had the audacity to tell my aunt that her (at the time) only child would not and could not succeed in life because of his autism. She said he would not go far in life. Probably be lucky to keep a menial janitor job for the rest of his life.
It doesn’t matter that at the time we had no idea were in the spectrum he was. It doesn’t matter that we now know he’s high functioning. What matters is that my great aunt said something extremely hateful to my aunt about her only child. Needlessly to say, we really stopped seeing her after that. We only saw her when she INSISTED on being there (mostly when my grandmother was in the hospital).
Now dear old great aunt is constantly sharing on Facebook about how hate is a choice. She shared a post about how race, sexuality, place of birth and having autism isn’t a choice, but hate is. And she remembers what she said to my aunt. She refuses to talk about it, but she remembers. She won’t even apologize and now she’s going on about how hate is a choice and how we should embrace everything that makes us different. About how people with autism are doing some amazing things, like it’s shocking. I so badly want to smack her and make her talk about what she said about my cousin, who graduated high school, witch excelled grades, this spring and has been accepted into college. ( The college part doesn’t have any serious meaning, I’m just proud because he got into the school he really wanted to go to)
Is my anger justified? Like I’m not trying to be offended on my cousin/ aunt’s behalf, I’m just mad that she won’t even apologize for her hateful comments from the past and is now preaching about how being hateful is wrong
