What's wrong with us?

This past winter, the CDC released a landmark report, saying 1 in 166 people in the USA has some kind of autistic spectrum condition. At the time, I didn’t make too much of the report, figuring that most of the increase over past surveys was not an increase at all – it just represented better identification and reporting.

I, of course, am a proud member of the Centers for Disease Control's 2007 "Class of 166."

Their report came out at the same time that I was showing Look Me in the Eye to my publisher for the first time. In our meetings, some of Crown’s editorial people asked me if I thought Aspergers and autism were on the rise, and at that time, my answer was, “I don’t know.”

Now that I’ve learned more, my answer is: Yes, there is a striking increase! And it’s only the tip of the iceberg . . .

In the past four months, I have met many parents with autistic kids. They have shown me things that would have been unheard of thirty years ago. And it makes me wonder: What is happening to our kids? Have we mutated, so that humans are defective? The stories I read about our declining fertility suggest that’s a possibility. Are we feeding our kids things to damage them? As much as we hate to admit it, many of us think we are. Did we ingest poisons ourselves, and damage our offspring as a result?

The range of possibilities is just staggering. Did the DDT sprayed in our yards and neighborhoods damage us, and lead to our damaged children, thirty years later? Is it the mercury in vaccines? Is agribusiness’s reliance on corn monoculture making us weak? Everywhere you turn, decisions that seemed so right in the fifties, sixties, and seventies seem so wrong today. And what about the decision’s we’re making now? Are they any better?

No one knows the answers. Or rather, some people feel they know the answer, and it’s A. Other people, with equal certainty, say it’s B. And there are more folks out there advocating C, D, E, and the whole rest of the alphabet.

Until meeting some of these families, I didn’t realize how lucky I am, having a fairly regular, trouble free kid. I’ve now met people with two, three, and even five deeply autistic kids in one family. How does that happen? Those of you who are 40-50-60 years old . . . think back to your high school days. How many autistic kids did you know? My school had two. Today, the same school has at least twenty. Ten times as many? Why? And several in one family . . . I grew up thinking autism was a one in 10,000 sort of condition. But it's not anymore. It's everywhere. Where did it come from?

And it’s not “just better reporting.” Many of the autistic kids I’m seeing are seriously impaired. These kids are autistic today, and they’d have been diagnosed as autistic in 1970. Better reporting does pick up a few high-functioning folks like me, but we do not make up the majority of these new cases.

The moms I meet are quick to point out that autism isn’t the only thing on the rise. What about the “peanut free” tables in school cafeterias? Does your kid’s school have one? Mine does. And it’s the same high school I attended, 30 years ago. The only difference is, there was no such thing as a “peanut free” table back then. In fact, peanut butter and jelly was a staple on the school lunch menu. Not any more. Now, kids eat the stuff and go into shock? Some even die. Why? What’s gone wrong?

When did peanuts become lethal? All my life, they were FOOD.

And how about asthma? When I went to Amherst high school, there were 700 other kids serving time in my school. I wasn’t friends with them all, but I at least recognized a good many kids. And how many had asthma? One that I knew, Dan Rausch.

Today, there are kids with asthma in every one of my kid’s classes at Amherst high. It seems like half Cubby's friends carry inhalers. Why? There’s no industry here. This is a college town. Where’s it all coming from? Surely it’s not made up. I see it myself. And it even affects me. At 21, I developed asthma, and I’ve had it ever since.

How about all the fat people? They’re everywhere. Even right here. I eat well, exercise, and I’m fat. Look at photos of your family today. Look at photos from the turn of the century. What’s the difference? They aren’t fat.

And diabetes? And who knows what else? Are we falling apart? I thought life was getting better and life expectancy was on the rise. I guess I was wrong.

I don’t have any answers, just questions. How about you? If you’re like me, you may not have even seen what’s happening right under our noses.

Science and technology are moving ahead at such a rapid pace that none of us – however smart and educated we may be – have even a hope of staying on top of all the ramifications of the new things our scientists and engineers create. How can we? The creators don’t know themselves, in many cases.

In most cases, new technology is unleashed upon the world for one reason: Because someone can make money from it. I’m sure most technology is safe, most of the time. But is “most” good enough, when jet planes and the Internet spread technology across the world in hours? Are we allowing ourselves to be sacrificed in the name of profit?

Should our government take a more active role in assessing the impact new technology will have upon us, and our planet? Do we even know how to do that?

I’m no Luddite. I don’t think we should smash the machines. Frankly, I don’t know what we should do. We make our best decisions based upon the available information, and twenty years later, we discover we went terribly wrong. And we’re left with things like asbestos-filled schools. How can we improve our ability to foresee the results of our actions?

I may not have answers today, but I’ll sure be looking for them, now that I see what’s going on.