[humanser] BLINDNESS IN THE NY TIMES MAGAZINE

[JD Townsend]

What we face when addressing an interviewer 

New York Times Sunday Review Desk 2014 01 05


OPINION.  Why Do We Fear the Blind?.  By ROSEMARY MAHONEY.  The
author of the forthcoming book 'For the Benefit of Those Who See:
Dispatches From the World of the Blind.  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 had 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.


JD Townsend LCSW
Helping the light dependent to see.
Daytona Beach, Earth, Sol System
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