Notes from a Time Traveller by Elke Stevens

Every age needs a monster to chase. In medieval times, it was witches who were marked and burned, as if fear could be turned to ash. In the twentieth century, it was communists, with lists and sweeps that promised safety and delivered suspicion. And now, in the twenty-first century, the sweep is for autism.

Presidents stand on podiums and declare certainty that science cannot provide. They point to TP and vaccines; any simple villain will do. The story repeats: there must be a cause, there must be blame, there must be a cure.

But history says differently. What we now call neurodivergence is as old as humanity itself. It is in the monks who copied manuscripts until their fingers bled, in the inventors who saw machines before steel existed, in the children who lined up stones on the riverbank in patterns that only they could understand.

Without them, no da Vinci sketches.
Without them, no Tesla sparks, or Edison lightbulb.
Without them, no Jules Verne imagined ships beneath the sea before steel could hold the pressure.

It is in Emily Dickinson, alone in her room, turning silence into crystalline poems that would outlive her century. It is in Lise Meitner, who split the atom with her mind and watched the world take the credit away from her.

These names are not exceptions. They are the rule that history hides: difference drives imagination.

Autism unsettles power because it refuses the neat categories that leaders love: us/them, sick/well, normal/abnormal. Neurodivergence cuts across every family tree, every border, every century. It will not stay in the boxes it was built for.

The presidential hunt is not about health. It is about control. It is about reasserting a fantasy where every child is predictable, every citizen manageable, every difference erased. But there is no cure, because there is no disease. There is only us: humanity, in all its patterns and breaks, its noise and silence.

The sweep will pass, as every hunt does. Witches, communists, now autism. And when it does, the truth will remain that history moves forward, not despite the autistic mind, but because of it.

©️Elke T.B. Stevens 27/09/2025