Positions of blindness organizations.

 

My goodness!  What cynicism! 

You got me to thinking.  We blind people can't even build a decent blind ghetto.  If we could, we would own our VR agencies from top to bottom, peopled by nothing but blind men and women.  Our spokes persons would never be sighted people, nor would we ever allow a sighted person to direct any program or agency of or for the blind. 

 

The several sighted directors of the agency I worked for were fond of saying, "We(Services for the Blind) are not the employer of last resort".  Boy that sure was true.  In fact, we were usually not the employer of first resort. 

For years I was the only blind person in Administration.  Today there is none. 

We blind folk love to sit around and bitch about how those mean old sighted people are running our lives, while we do nothing to put more of our own people in key positions within the agencies that are setting our standards.  Why do we merely accept the belief that nearly 70% of us are unemployed?  Shouldn't that have us pawing the ground and frothing at the mouth? 

Without going on and on, I repeat that I believe that we, all people, are victims of the Universal Blind Stereotype. 

Our job as blind folk is to be happy and passive.  Only in our little groups can we do what we do best, whine and bitch. 

 

Curious Carl

 

From someone on the list.

To: 'Blind Democracy Discussion List'

Sent: Wednesday, March 28, 2012 3:45 PM

Subject: RE: Positions of blindness orgs.

Pardon my cynicism. You just need the existence of a blind population and
money allocated for blindness services and blindness advocacy organizations.
These allow for a blindness system which employs blind people at various
levels, from professional to vending machine operators and a few sheltered
workshops. And it permits a few especially lucky or well connected or
especially talented blind people to be the token success stories, blind
people integrated into the sighted working world. In the past, most of those
blind people worked for government agencies of one kind or another or
religious social welfare agencies like Catholic Charities. And then there
were the blind musicians, the 5 or 6 really famous ones. I'd be delighted if
someone can present evidence to disprove the basic patterns I just
described. As far as I'm concerned, though, nothing has changed. Once upon a
time, we had blind dictaphone typists. They metamorphosed into blind social
workers and blind computer technicians and instructors.