Barb Rentenbach and facilitated Communication

I was not able to go to either of the Barb Rentenbach talks, so I watched the two videos on the internet. Some first impressions of Rentenbach. She impresses and surprises with her vocabulary and often flavorful prose. Her writing also seems like rambling. I try to follow some of her thoughts that appear to be more than skin deep, but I just get lost in it. The video has several people reading selections of her writing for her. She seems very interested in Abraham Lincoln and seems to be trying to form some kind of symbolism, but it is mostly lost on me. I certainly applaud her efforts though. Unfortunately it feels a bit like listening to that friend who has a complaint about everything, but never an answer or suggestion. I get lost in the non-sequiters. She may not be a Faulkner, but Rentenbach at the very least shows us that people who may look or sound simple can have very complex though processes.
Along this line, I got even more out of the other video, Here We Are World. This was very enlightening. I have seen devices like the one Stephen Hawking has that read text, but I did not know about the full potential in this kind of technology. It makes me wonder how many autistic people I have interacted with, thinking there was not much going on in their brain and yet they may have had the same or greater level of reasoning capabilities as I, just not the auditory processing abilities to vocalize their thoughts. I think this conference is very cool. When you think about human communication, and how much we take that for granted, a video like this really reminds you what a great gift we have. For these people to be able to communicate is aa wonderful thing, as our social abilities are part of what makes us human. I was struck by the sharp whit some of the guys had. It was truly impressive. I was also particularly interested in the guy who would write and then read his own writing. It makes my mind wander in thoughts of how our brain works, and wonder if reading his own writing was so helpful for him, what the same practice could do for other students. What I learned in this video made me happy, but it also made me sad to think about how many smart and mute people there are out there in the world that nobody knows about because they lack the technology to express themselves. I hope that the work people are doing continues and this knowledge becomes commonplace.