We’ve hurtled over
the financial cliff. It’s been front
page news. Yet for us it seems like old
news. As parents of twins in college
and living in New York City, we went over the financial cliff years ago. We invested in early intervention for our
daughter on the autistic spectrum. We
paid for special schools, speech therapy, occupational therapy, vision and
conceptual therapy, Applied Behavioral
Analysis, you name it. Nobody in
government twenty years ago thought much about autism or the suffering of
parents or siblings because it had not yet become an epidemic ; thus there was
no political pressure on insurance companies to pay for "experimental
treatments." We were on our own with no
tax breaks, and no medical deductions.
So after years of
sacrifice, it’s a big victory to pay for Sarah’s fifth year of college. Unlike the real estate we could never
afford, or the stock market which crashed,
Sarah has defied the odds and improved beyond the developmental
ceiling many professionals had predicted for her. Always determined to be independent and successful,
Sarah works harder than anyone I know. She also complains less. Sarah
wakes up every day with a smile on her face and the courage to persevere
through a labyrinth of social and academic challenges. She is not one of the brilliant Asperger
kids, nor is she “cured.” Yet somehow Sarah
graduated from Landmark College cum laude with an Associate’s Degree. Now she’s in a special program at Pace
University with a merit scholarship and a 3.4 average. She lives in a dorm, gets along with her
room-mate and keeps busy with a few good friends on weekends. Our daughter was the best investment we
ever made.
If only American
politicians worked half as hard as Sarah, I might not mind paying Obama’s
higher taxes (which apparently are still not high enough to save the country from
going over the fiscal cliff). It may
come as a great surprise to Obama, but earning over $400,000 (and he argued for
$250,000) does not make you “wealthy”—not if you happen to live in one of the country’s
most expensive cities where local and state taxes are especially high. And if you also have a child on the autistic
spectrum or with other serious special needs?
Forget about wealthy. Think
exhaustion, worry and sacrifice, a quantum leap beyond the concerns of most middle
class families.
Meanwhile,
Democrats want more taxes while the Republicans clamor for cuts to Social
Security and Medicare to balance the budget.
Neither side seems willing or able to communicate or compromise. This deadlock among “normal” politicians is
worse than autism. Or could it be that
politicians are born with faulty wiring too?
Aren’t government officials supposed to take care of all their
citizens—the people who elected them to serve, as well as those who voted
against them? Dream on, right? Everyone knows politicians prioritize their
own constituents and the special interest groups who funded their campaigns and
got them elected. An understanding of fairness—supposedly
the normal developmental achievement of a grammar school child—is clearly in
the eye of the beholder.
Of
course almost everyone agrees that sequestration is colossally unfair and a
terrible idea. Jobs will be lost, our
defense budget cut, funds for education will disappear, and our fragile
economy will worsen. Even the
politicians who devised the plan for sequestration never imagined that they
would fail to come up with a better plan.
But fail they did. As terrible as all of this sounds, I’m too exhausted from raising an autistic
daughter for 22 years to imagine that going over another fiscal cliff could create
any more pain for me and other parents
like me than we suffered on the day our child was diagnosed with the A-word.
Labels: ADHD, autism, college, family, finance, government, parenting, politics, twins