Susan Senator

When the moon is in the seventh house
And Jupiter aligns with Mars
Then peace will guide the planets
And love will steer the stars.
Hair, “Age of Aquarius,” 1967

Talk about Oops, Wrong Planet syndrome. Those of us who have been living with autism for a while can really feel Pluto’s pain. We may be anthropologists on Mars, Jupiter, Venus, Saturn, Mercury, Neptune, and of course, Earth. But not Pluto. Oh, no, not Pluto. He/she/it is no longer even a planet.

We must all grieve, and grapple with the fact that just as sh** happens, so does stuff change. Scientific categorizations are as ephemeral as anything else in this life of ours. If science were static, it might as well be religion! And we know it is not that. Just ask Galileo. Remember him? Well, you can’t, unless you are an Indigo Girl, but still, unless you have been living under a rock (or on Pluto, I guess, which is pretty much the same thing) you must know that Galileo was excommunicated from the Church because he believed that the earth, etc. (including Pluto), revolved around the sun rather than all revolving around the earth. (I bet we have Galileo’s mother to thank for that, actually, because she probably said, as most mothers do, “Hey Galilei, the world doesn’t revolve around you!” And he just never had enough therapy to get that out of his head. But thank goodness for the rest of us!)

But I digress. My point is, things change. Science redefines itself. Just ask Woody Allen. Red wine good, white wine bad. Chocolate is good for you. Sugar’s out, Splenda’s in. Or is it Stevia? Cholestrol should be low/well, not all cholestrol numbers should be low.

Or how about these? Autistics are angels. Autism is caused by funky vaccines. Autism is caused by cold mothers (no way! I have never told Nat that the world doesn’t revolve around him; he believes it does and so do I). Autistics are all geniuses. Autistics don’t like to be touched.

We need science to keep examining itself, for that is how we expand our knowledge of the world. And, to paraphrase another mother, (mine), “to constantly contemplate its navel,” using scientific method and bonafide research, of course. Anecdotal evidence, no matter how warm and intuitively right it may feel, cannot be the basis of science. We feel like mercury in vaccines caused autism and that therefore chelation would suck all the bad chemicals out and leave the child “cured.” But is that scientifically proven yet? We used to feel that leeches would draw out disease (come to think of it, arent’ they using leeches again for some things?) We feel that a needle full of nasty germs will fill our newborns with poison, but it actually is not true; denying a child that needle opens him up to far worse plagues.

We feel like Pluto should be the end of the sentence, “My Very Educated Mother Just Served Us Nine Pickles.” But it cannot be. So let’s try a new one, “Many Vapid Emptyheaded Morons Junk Science Uselessly, Needlessly.”

Eh, not so much.

But — I still have to ask: If we are going to oust a planet, could we at least get rid of — or rename — Uranus?