Hi Phil and anyone with idle time on their hands,
Sorry if I gave the impression that I was dumping on you. Actually, your thoughts merely made me clamber up on my little soap box and beat the drum for Interdependence. My impression was that you were actually talking down the same road.
Like you, I came into the world of the blind believing that I must prove myself to be Super Blind. In part this came from life as a sighted person looking with pity upon those less fortunate sightless folks bumbling about in darkness, and in part it was due to my immersion into the National Federation of the Blind. In the NFB, we "knew who we are, and we'll never go back". Never go back to that beggar on the street corner who represented *All blind people to me. We were the Independent Blind. Never mind that in those days, we couldn't type a report without sighted help, that our fearless leader was guided everywhere by sighted attendants, that at our conventions we shamelessly used sighted folks to do all of our errands. We were Independent, by God!
But I did come to understand that the over emphasis on Independence was an effort to drag blind people out of years of conditioning to believe themselves inferior on the basis of sight.
Nevertheless, I continued plowing ahead, proving that I was indeed the Super Blind Man. I never took a cab to any organizational function, always traveling by public transportation or if none were available I would hire a driver in a private car. I always refused sighted help at conferences, preferring to bounce off walls and wander down long winding corridors to prove to me that I was just as good as them thar sighties.
I mowed my grass, planted my gardens, painted my house...inside and out...and later blazed trails and fell trees, bucking them up and splitting them for firewood. All in the name of proving that blind people were Independent.
And finally I realized that what I was proving was that as a blind man I was just as dependent on others as I'd been during my sighted life. Only different. Each of us are interdependent upon others. It is just a matter of our individual needs, our personal talents, strengths and weaknesses.
I honestly have come to believe that in attempting to prove that I was Super Blind, I actually set myself further apart from others. I did not achieve equality, I achieved isolation. "My goodness Carl, you are certainly a remarkable person"...for a blind man...
My co-workers and sighted friends did not view me as their equal. They held me up as some sort of miracle man. And I know that in those early years I turned off as many students as I turned on. Who wants to have to measure up to some Super Blind Tin God?
Slowly, because I am a slow learner, I began to realize that we needed to get off the super blind kick and get down to figuring how we fit into our society.
Look, we accommodate ourselves as a society. Windows in buildings, lights in hallways, traffic signals, heck, cars themselves are an accommodation. We zoom through the air, zip underground in our subway trains, float along on top of the water, safe and dry...usually. We "discovered" fire, wove clothing, invented the printed word, created music, built warm caves and named them "houses".
But somehow we get all tangled up when it comes to adapting a computer or an iPhone for use by blind people.
If my sighted neighbor is provided with a stop light at the end of the block, to give him safe passage, why shouldn't I have a safe way of crossing that same street? If my wife can point and click her way through on-screen menus in order to select the programs she wishes to view, why can't I expect to be able to point and hear the same choices? Why should it be expected of me to adapt to the world when all sighted people have gone about accommodating themselves?
Are we so traumatized by the word Blind, that we can't see that there is no difference? And yet, have you heard a single candidate for the presidency, or the president himself mention the needs of the blind?
Carl Jarvis
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