Kid Hero Saves Teacher is a headline that was just pointed out to me.

Brendon quickly came to Kenser’s rescue.

“I just ran over when she passed out,” said Brendon. He got to her purse and grabbed her inhaler, gave it to his groggy teacher and saved her life. He says he knew what to do from a scene in the movie “Are We There Yet.”

“If I didn’t see that movie, I wouldn’t know what to do,” said Brendon.

“After the event he said ”You know Mrs. Kenser, TV’s not so badhuh?'” said Kenser.

Brendon’s family is very proud of him. His mother and teachers point out something that makes this young hero even more amazing. Brendon has autism, something that usually affects communication and social skills. Kenser and Brendon’s mother hope others will see autistic kids, like Brendon, are full of potential and capable of incredible things like saving a life.

This is the actual definition of doing something heroic. Not “overcoming a disability,” but doing something to save another person’s life, or putting yourself on the line for the sake of others, and other things like that. (See We can be heroes… just having a beer for a more in-depth discussion of the putting of disabled people on undeserved pedestals as heroic. A quote from it, “We don’t need the false praise. We’ve earned the real thing.”)

There’s one thing that’s wrong in the article though. It isn’t that heroic acts on the part of autistic people are amazing. I’d imagine we’re no more or less likely to do so than average, and even a study awhile back showed we cared just as much about other people as anyone else, as long as we could understand the social situation. What’s amazing is that people haven’t noticed yet that our “social and communication deficits,” when they exist, don’t prevent us from caring. When we do things like this and are framed as exceptions for doing so, then nobody has to question the rule. The fact is, we’re not exceptions for caring about other people, and for doing what we know how to do to help them. That’s normal, it’s common to both autistic and non-autistic people (once said person understands the situation, which both autistic and non-autistic people frequently misunderstand in various ways). It’s just exceptional whenever anyone happens to notice this about us, to look past whatever stereotypes they have about us to see that this is one area in which we inhabit the same range of caring as anyone else.