Jones Beach Autism Walk

[mortonfox]

Today, I did a mascot gig with jbadger, rukario71, foxwell, rapidtrabbit, and skyfirefox for Walk Now for Autism at Jones Beach on Long Island. It was a rainy morning but the rain cleared up by 10am so the event wasn't delayed by too much and we were able to put in a decent amount of costumed appearance time.

I must say that the charity event organizers really gave us a lot. Last year, there were tents for us but this year, the tents were in the parking lot right in the volunteer parking section. The upshot is we were able to park mere steps away from our tents and that made unloading/loading our fursuit stuff easy. Also this year, they assigned charity volunteers to be our spotters/assistants, which was a great help and something that no other event has done for us yet. Aside from that, we had the usual volunteer perks. I got a t-shirt and a bagel.

What I did was roughly as follows: I was the last one in the group to get suited up because I needed the chairs and table space. First, I headed out to the field area behind registration to interact with the crowd. Took a break. Headed out to the starting line near the stage area to wave the walkers on. Took another break. Then went to the boardwalk to interact with the returning walkers and after that, the gig ended. Post-gig lunch was at East Bay Diner in Seaford. I had the big platter with 3 kinds of fish.

Did a bit of geocaching afterwards with jbadger and foxwell. Then I went off on my own, grabbed another geocache in Long Beach at sunset and went home.

Micro by the Sea (New York)
RPA-4K LOG CABIN (New York)
Long Beach Boardwalk (New York)

Comments

The Walk's Sponsor...

[jeremiasvk.livejournal.com]

Autism Speaks...many individuals on the autism spectrum, such as myself, actually feel that they're doing us a huge disfavor by basically dehumanizing the condition and people with it. Plus, they have no board members with the condition, and forbid autistic individuals from speaking at their conferences. Their end game, basically, is to establish prenatal screening for autism and thus prevent more of us from existing, and I personally fear that, if it were available in my time, that my mother would have taken advantage of it.

There are actually many people in history speculated to have been autistic such as Thomas Jefferson and Albert Einstein, and individuals alive today with the condition such as comedian Dan Aykroyd, Nobel Laureate Vernon L. Smith, and Satoshi Tajiri, creator of the Pokémon games. And many adults with the condition such as myself actually don't want to be "cured," since we somewhat fear it would change us into completely different people (and the book Flowers for Algernon) somewhat expresses this theme). Plus, considering that I did much better in school than most neurotypical (people who aren't autistic) students, I fear that being cured would deprive me of my intellect. I know groups like them want to help the low-functioning people with autism, but I personally feel there are more low-functioning neurotypicals than low-functioning people with autism.

There are other charities that actually seek to help individuals with autism (and are run by individuals with the condition, no less) such as The Autism Acceptance Project and the Autism Self-Advocacy Network (http://www.autisticadvocacy.org/).

Just my two cents... (http://www.taaproject.com/)