<div dir="ltr">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! <div>
<br></div><div>Blessings</div><div>Sue H.</div></div><div class="gmail_extra"><br><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Tue, Jan 14, 2014 at 9:17 PM, Nathanael T. Wales <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:ntwales@omsoft.com" target="_blank">ntwales@omsoft.com</a>></span> wrote:<br>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">
<div dir="ltr">
<div dir="ltr">
<div style="font-size:12pt;font-family:'Calibri'">
<div>And this is, I think, even worthy of the Braille Monitor.</div>
<div> </div>
<div>Nathanael</div>
<div> </div>
<div style="font-style:normal;font-size:small;display:inline;font-family:"Calibri";text-decoration:none;font-weight:normal">
<div style="FONT:10pt tahoma">
<div><font size="3" face="Calibri"></font> </div>
<div style="BACKGROUND:#f5f5f5">
<div><b>From:</b> <a title="elevegnale@sbcglobal.net" href="mailto:elevegnale@sbcglobal.net" target="_blank">Esther Levegnale</a> </div>
<div><b>Sent:</b> Tuesday, January 14, 2014 9:08 AM</div><div class="im">
<div><b>To:</b> <a title="ct-nfb@nfbnet.org" href="mailto:ct-nfb@nfbnet.org" target="_blank">NFB
of Connecticut Mailing List</a> </div>
</div><div class="im"><div><b>Cc:</b> <a title="ct-nfb@nfbnet.org" href="mailto:ct-nfb@nfbnet.org" target="_blank">NFB
of CT list serve</a> </div>
</div><div class="im"><div><b>Subject:</b> Re: [Ct-nfb] {Disarmed} Sunday Review
Article</div></div></div></div>
<div> </div></div>
<div style="font-style:normal;font-size:small;display:inline;font-family:"Calibri";text-decoration:none;font-weight:normal"><div><div class="h5">
<div>Hi, Everyone,</div>
<div> </div>
<div>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.</div>
<div> </div>
<div>Esther<br><br>Sent from Esther's Amazing iPhone!</div>
<div><br>On Jan 13, 2014, at 2:45 PM, <<a href="mailto:llee@nfbct.org" target="_blank">llee@nfbct.org</a>> wrote:<br><br></div>
<blockquote type="cite">
<div><span style="font-size:12pt;font-family:verdana">
<div>Hi all,</div>
<div> </div>
<div>Carolyn Dodd called and suggest that I try to find this article on the
internet and pass it along. Please find below.</div>
<div> </div>
<div>Lucia</div>
<div> </div>
<div> </div>
<h3><span><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/pages/opinion/index.html#sundayreview" target="_blank">SundayReview</a></span><span>|</span>Opinion</h3>
<h1>Why Do We Fear the Blind?</h1>
<div>
<div><span>By <span>ROSEMARY
MAHONEY</span></span></div>
<div><span><span></span></span><u></u>JAN. 4, 2014<u></u> </div></div>
<div>
<div>
<div> </div></div></div>
<div>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 <em>talk</em> to your students?”</div>
<div>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 <em>talk</em> to them?”</div>
<div>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?</div>
<div> </div>
<div>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.</div>
<div> </div>
<div>A majority of my blind students
<em></em>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. </div>
<div> </div>
<div>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. </div>
<div> </div>
<div>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. </div>
<div> </div>
<div>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.</div>
<div> </div>
<div>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. </div>
<div> </div>
<div>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.” </div>
<div> </div>
<div>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.</div>
<div> </div>
<div>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.</div>
<div> </div>
<div>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. </div>
<div></div>
<div> </div>
<div>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.”</div>
<div> </div>
<div>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. </div>
<div> </div>
<div>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.<u></u><u></u></div>
<div> </div>
<div>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. </div>
<div> </div>
<div>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. </div>
<div> </div>
<div>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.”</div>
<div> </div>
<div>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.</div>
<div><u></u><u></u></div>
<div>
<div>
<div> </div>
<div>Rosemary Mahoney is <a href="http://www.rosemarymahoney.org/" target="_blank">the
author</a> of the forthcoming book “For the Benefit of Those Who See:
Dispatches From the World of the
Blind.”</div></div></div></span></div></blockquote>
<blockquote type="cite">
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