[Ct-nfb] {Disarmed} Sunday Review Article

Wed Jan 15 02:35:05 UTC 2014

This article says it all.  It is worthy of note for many reasons.  It is
said, "The eyes are the window into the soul."  When God closes a door, he
opens another window.  There are so many different kinds of windows.  The
joy of those windows is that some are stained glass, may favorite.  They
are different.  It is a great article!

Blessings
Sue H.

On Tue, Jan 14, 2014 at 9:17 PM, Nathanael T. Wales <ntwales at omsoft.com>wrote:

>   And this is, I think, even worthy of the Braille Monitor.
>
> Nathanael
>
>
>  *From:* Esther Levegnale <elevegnale at sbcglobal.net>
> *Sent:* Tuesday, January 14, 2014 9:08 AM
> *To:* NFB of Connecticut Mailing List <ct-nfb at nfbnet.org>
> *Cc:* NFB of CT list serve <ct-nfb at nfbnet.org>
> *Subject:* Re: [Ct-nfb] {Disarmed} Sunday Review Article
>
>  Hi, Everyone,
>
> This was a great article.  Perhaps the editors of the Federationist could
> obtain permission to reprint this for our next issue?  Just a suggestion.
> Thanks.
>
> Esther
>
> Sent from Esther's Amazing iPhone!
>
> On Jan 13, 2014, at 2:45 PM, <llee at nfbct.org> wrote:
>
>  Hi all,
>
> Carolyn Dodd called and suggest that I try to find this article on the
> internet and pass it along. Please find below.
>
> Lucia
>
>
> SundayReview<http://www.nytimes.com/pages/opinion/index.html#sundayreview>
> |Opinion Why Do We Fear the Blind?
> By ROSEMARY MAHONEY
> JAN. 4, 2014
>
> BRISTOL, R.I. — A FEW years ago, when I mentioned to a woman I met at a
> party that I was teaching in a school for the blind, she seemed confused.
> “Can I just ask you one question?” she said. “How do you *talk* to your
> students?”
> I explained that the students were blind, not deaf. Raising the palms of
> her hands at me, as if to stem further misunderstanding, she said: “Yes, I
> know they’re not deaf. But what I really mean is, how do you actually
> *talk* to them?”
> I knew, because I had been asked this question before by reasonably
> intelligent people, that the woman didn’t know exactly what she meant. All
> she knew was that in her mind there existed a substantial intellectual
> barrier between the blind and the sighted. The blind could hear, yes. But
> could they properly understand?
>
> Throughout history and across cultures the blind have been traduced by a
> host of mythologies such as this. They have variously been perceived as
> pitiable idiots incapable of learning, as artful masters of deception or as
> mystics possessed of supernatural powers. One of the most persistent
> misconceptions about blindness is that it is a curse from God for misdeeds
> perpetrated in a past life, which cloaks the blind person in spiritual
> darkness and makes him not just dangerous but evil.
>
> A majority of my blind students at the International Institute for Social
> Entrepreneurs in Trivandrum, India, a branch of Braille Without Borders,
> came from the developing world: Madagascar, Colombia, Tibet, Liberia,
> Ghana, Kenya, Nepal and India. One of my students, the 27-year-old Sahr,
> lost most of his eyesight to measles when he was a child. (Like many
> children in rural West Africa, Sahr had not been vaccinated.) The residents
> of Sahr’s village were certain that his blindness — surely the result of
> witchcraft or immoral actions on his family’s part — would adversely affect
> the entire village. They surrounded his house and shouted threats and
> abuse. They confiscated a considerable portion of his parents’ land.
> Eventually, the elders decreed that Sahr’s father must take the child out
> to the bush, “where the demons live,” and abandon him there. The parents
> refused and fled the village with their son.
>
> Many of my students had similar experiences. Marco’s parents, devout
> Colombian Catholics, begged a priest to say a Mass so that their blind
> infant son would die before his existence brought shame and hardship on
> their household. The villagers in Kyile’s remote Tibetan village insisted
> that she, her two blind brothers and their blind father should all just
> commit suicide because they were nothing but a burden to the sighted
> members of the family. When, as a child in Sierra Leone, James began to see
> objects upside down because of an ocular disease, the villagers were
> certain that he was possessed by demons.
>
> In these places, schools for blind children were deemed a preposterous
> waste of resources and effort. Teachers in regular schools refused to
> educate them. Sighted children ridiculed them, tricked them, spat at them
> and threw stones at them. And when they reached working age, no one would
> hire them. During a visit to the Braille Without Borders training center in
> Tibet, I met blind children who had been beaten, told they were idiots,
> locked in rooms for years on end and abandoned by their parents. These
> stories, which would have been commonplace in the Dark Ages, took place in
> the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s. They are taking place now. Nine out of 10 blind
> children in the developing world still have no access to education, many
> for no other reason than that they are blind.
>
> The United States has one of the lowest rates of visual impairment in the
> world, and yet blindness is still among the most feared physical
> afflictions. Even in this country, the blind are perceived as a people
> apart.
>
> Aversion toward the blind exists for the same reason that most prejudices
> exist: lack of knowledge. Ignorance is a powerful generator of fear. And
> fear slides easily into aggression and contempt. Anyone who has not spent
> more than five minutes with a blind person might be forgiven for believing
> — like the woman I met at the party — that there is an unbridgeable gap
> between us and them.
>
> For most of us, sight is the primary way we interpret the world. How can
> we even begin to conceive of a meaningful connection with a person who
> cannot see? Before I began living and working among blind people, I, too,
> wondered this. Whenever I saw a blind person on the street I would stare,
> transfixed, hoping, out of a vague and visceral discomfort, that I wouldn’t
> have to engage with him. In his 1930 book “The World of the Blind,” Pierre
> Villey, a blind French professor of literature, summarized the lurid
> carnival of prejudices and superstitions about the blind that were passed
> down the centuries. “The sighted person judges the blind not for what they
> are but by the fear blindness inspires. ... The revolt of his sensibility
> in the face of ‘the most atrocious of maladies’ fills a sighted person with
> prejudice and gives rise to a thousand legends.” The blind author Georgina
> Kleege, a lecturer at the University of California at Berkeley, more
> tersely wrote, “The blind are either supernatural or subhuman, alien or
> animal.”
>
> WE take our eyesight so much for granted, cling to it so slavishly and are
> so overwhelmed by its superficial data, that even the most brilliant
> sighted person can take a stupidly long time to recognize the obvious:
> There is usually a perfectly healthy, active and normal human mind behind
> that pair of unseeing eyes.
>
> Christopher Hitchens called blindness “one of the oldest and most tragic
> disorders known to man.” How horribly excluded and bereft we would feel to
> lose the world and the way of life that sight brings us. Blindness can
> happen to any one of us. Myself, I used to be certain I’d rather die than
> be blind; I could not imagine how I would have the strength to go on in the
> face of such a loss.
>
> And yet people do. In 1749, the French philosopher Denis Diderot published
> an essay, “Letter on the Blind for the Benefit of Those Who See,” in which
> he described a visit he and a friend made to the house of a blind man, the
> son of a professor of philosophy at the University of Paris. The blind man
> was married, had a son, had many acquaintances, was versed in chemistry and
> botany, could read and write with an alphabet of raised type and made his
> living distilling liqueurs. Diderot wrote with wonder of the man’s “good
> solid sense,” of his tidiness, of his “surprising memory for sounds” and
> voices, of his ability to tell the weight of any object and the capacity of
> any vessel just by holding them in his hands, of his ability to dismantle
> and reassemble small machines, of his musical acuity and of his extreme
> sensitivity to atmospheric change.
>
> The blind man, perhaps weary of being interrogated by Diderot and his
> friend as if he were a circus animal, eventually asked them a question of
> his own. “I perceive, gentlemen, that you are not blind. You are astonished
> at what I do, and why not as much at my speaking?” More than any of his
> sensory skills, it was the blind man’s self-esteem that surprised Diderot
> most. “This blind man,” he wrote, “values himself as much as, and perhaps
> more than, we who see.”
>
> I’ve learned from my blind friends and colleagues that blindness doesn’t
> have to remain tragic. For those who can adapt to it, blindness becomes a
> path to an alternative and equally rich way of living.
>
> One of the many misconceptions about the blind is that they have greater
> hearing, sense of smell and sense of touch than sighted people. This is not
> strictly true. Their blindness simply forces them to recognize gifts they
> always had but heretofore largely ignored.
>
> A few years ago, I allowed myself to be blindfolded and led through the
> streets of Lhasa by two blind Tibetan teenage girls, students at Braille
> Without Borders. The girls had not grown up in the city, and yet they
> traversed it with ease, without stumbling or getting lost. They had a
> specific destination in mind, and each time they announced, “Now we turn
> left” or “Now we turn right,” I was compelled to ask them how they knew
> this. Their answers startled me, chiefly because the clues they were
> following — the sound of many televisions in an electronics shop, the smell
> of leather in a shoe shop, the feel of cobblestones suddenly underfoot —
> though out in the open for anyone to perceive, were virtually hidden from
> me.
>
> For the first time in my life, I realized how little notice I paid to
> sounds, to smells, indeed to the entire world that lay beyond my ability to
> see.
>
> The French writer Jacques Lusseyran, who lost his sight at the age of 8,
> understood that those of us who have sight are, in some ways, deprived by
> it. “In return for all the benefits that sight brings we are forced to give
> up others whose existence we don’t even suspect.”
>
> I do not intend to suggest there is something wonderful about blindness.
> There is only something wonderful about human resilience, adaptability and
> daring. The blind are no more or less otherworldly, stupid, evil, gloomy,
> pitiable or deceitful than the rest of us. It is only our ignorance that
> has cloaked them in these ridiculous garments. When Helen Keller wrote, “It
> is more difficult to teach ignorance to think than to teach an intelligent
> blind man to see the grandeur of Niagara,” she was speaking, obviously, of
> the uplifting and equalizing value of knowledge.
>
> Rosemary Mahoney is the author <http://www.rosemarymahoney.org/> of the
> forthcoming book “For the Benefit of Those Who See: Dispatches From the
> World of the Blind.”
>
>  _______________________________________________
> Ct-nfb mailing list
> Ct-nfb at nfbnet.org
> http://nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/ct-nfb_nfbnet.org
> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
> Ct-nfb:
>
> http://nfbnet.org/mailman/options/ct-nfb_nfbnet.org/elevegnale%40sbcglobal.net
>
>  ------------------------------
> _______________________________________________
> Ct-nfb mailing list
> Ct-nfb at nfbnet.org
> http://nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/ct-nfb_nfbnet.org
> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
> Ct-nfb:
> http://nfbnet.org/mailman/options/ct-nfb_nfbnet.org/ntwales%40omsoft.com
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Ct-nfb mailing list
> Ct-nfb at nfbnet.org
> http://nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/ct-nfb_nfbnet.org
> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
> Ct-nfb:
> http://nfbnet.org/mailman/options/ct-nfb_nfbnet.org/griswoldjp%40gmail.com
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://nfbnet.org/pipermail/ct-nfb_nfbnet.org/attachments/20140114/3b18efbc/attachment.html>