{"id":1211,"date":"2006-05-14T14:51:34","date_gmt":"2006-05-14T14:51:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/?p=1211"},"modified":"2006-05-14T14:51:34","modified_gmt":"2006-05-14T14:51:34","slug":"uncle_sam_wants","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/?p=1211","title":{"rendered":"Uncle Sam Wants You"},"content":{"rendered":"

The US Army is the target of much media flak for recruiting 18-year-old Jared Guinther, who has autism<\/A>.  The Army released Jared from his contract, but I’m a little troubled by the way the press is portaying people with autism.  Autism is shorthand for describing a whole spectrum of capabilities.  Asperger’s Syndrome, sometimes referred to as the Geek Syndrome<\/A>, is thought to be a mild form of autism.  People who fall on the more significant end of the autism spectrum are not necessarily any less intelligent than the rest of us.  Autism generally describes how a person perceives and interacts with the world; it doesn’t say much about one’s cognitive functioning. <\/DIV>
 <\/DIV>
If I was the parent of this kid, I would certainly not want him shipped off to Iraq.  But I’m willing to bet thousands of people with autism have served in the military over the decades, many of them quite capably.  We should not assume that people with disabilities should be automatically excluded from any facet of public life in America, including service in our armed forces.  <\/DIV><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The US Army is the target of much media flak for recruiting 18-year-old Jared Guinther, who has autism.  The Army released Jared from his contract, but I’m a little troubled by the way the press is portaying people with autism.  Autism is shorthand for describing a whole spectrum of capabilities.  Asperger’s Syndrome, sometimes referred to […]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"sfsi_plus_gutenberg_text_before_share":"","sfsi_plus_gutenberg_show_text_before_share":"","sfsi_plus_gutenberg_icon_type":"","sfsi_plus_gutenberg_icon_alignemt":"","sfsi_plus_gutenburg_max_per_row":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1211","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","category-1-id","post-seq-1","post-parity-odd","meta-position-corners","fix"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p9Iwau-jx","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1211","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1211"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1211\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1211"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1211"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1211"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}