[nfb-talk] NY Times Article on Gov. Paterson and Braille

[H. Field]

Hi Joe,
This is a really great topic. I'll share my thoughts and see what 
folks have to say.

I think Steve Jacobson is correct, not much has changed since the 
nineteen fifties with regard to the most central issue for blind 
people. That issue is that blindness is seen to be a cause of 
inferiority. People who can see do a simple mathematical calculation 
and come up with what seems to them to be a logical answer. They say, 
al beit almost subconsciously, the normal person has five senses which 
enable them to function normally. If we take part or all of a 
persons's sense of sight away, then they don't have five senses, they 
have four, or four and a bit. The sighted see it as a no brainer, four 
is less than five. So, just as the man with five hundred dollars is 
seen as having more buying power than the man with four hundred 
dollars, so the man with five senses to use is considered to have 
more, doing power, so to speak, than the man with four senses, or four 
and a bit. Society has a name for the people who have four senses due 
to sight loss, they call them blind. Blind immediately identifies the 
people who have the least, doing power, or fewest abilities. Thus, 
blind is the label to be avoided at all cost. Nobody wants to be the 
person at the bottom of the list. Nobody wants to be the person seen 
as most helpless, least able to do anything.

Unfortunately for those of us who are trying to change beliefs about 
blindness, this way of thinking about blindness is reinforced by the 
sighted to themselves every time they close their eyes and try to do 
something, or they walk around in the house at night with the lights 
out and they stub their toe or bang the shin on the furniture. They 
observe their lessened competence when they aren't using sight and 
they assume that this is what blindness is like and they are so glad 
that they aren't so incompetent, like the blind obviously must be.

Now, we who have thought about such things, and who have learned to 
live full and normal lives as blind people, know that this seemingly 
logical statement, that a person with five of something is more 
capable of doing than the man with four of something, is complete 
nonsense.
 We see this fallacy disproven in a multitude of ways every day. Faced 
with much less money to work with, nonprofit organisations find 
creative ways to make their money do more. Faced with five children to 
feed and only enough stew for three, the enterprising mother will add 
some milk and rice and feed the five. The savvy shopper takes her 
limited funds and hunts for bargains at the outlet malls or the local 
thrift store. Sometimes for a fraction of the normal price she buys 
designer clothes. No one at the office knows that she used an 
alternative method for getting the same stylish clothes as all the 
other women because the outcome is the same. It was only the method of 
obtaining the outcome that was different. When faced with the need to 
achieve the same outcome with less, the sighted are usually very 
creative. Unfortunately their understanding of this principle, that 
many ways exist to achieve the same outcome, doesn't automatically get 
applied to solving the challenge of blindness.

The difficulty for us as people trying to change beliefs about 
blindness is that people who can see don't generally have experiences 
which require them to learn that there are skills and techniques which 
minimise the impact of vision loss. Whereas a person may lose a job 
and have to learn new techniques for making meals, buying clothes and 
entertaining themselves, the average person is not forced to deal with 
living without sight. So, the average man or woman on the street holds 
to what we might call the general view of blindness. Basically that 
view is that blind people are not as competent as sighted people in 
all areas of life except for a few stereotypical areas such as music 
or recognising voices. This being the case, blindness is certainly a 
label that people want to avoid at almost any cost. Parents don't want 
to have the inferior child so the child must be discouraged from 
acting blind, even if it means they must like and say they can see 
things or that they enjoyed something which they did not. and adults 
don't want to be relegated to the sidelines of life because they are 
recognised as being functionally blind, So they look for ways not to 
be blind, because everyone knows that to be blind is to be considered 
as not belonging to the group. Hence, we see all the sad behaviour 
that denying blindness requires. People using terms like sight 
impaired, low vision, vision impaired and everybody's favourite, 
visually challenged. Rather than ask for clarification, a man pretends 
to be waiting for someone until he sees a man or woman go into the 
rest room and then he goes into the men's rest room. Instead of asking 
for assistance at the customer service desk, a woman tells a store 
clerk that she has left her glasses at home and asks if she will help 
her grab a few grocery items. College students say they have to study 
and stay home from the party rather than admit that they need to use a 
white cane at night because they can't see at night. Adults ask family 
to pick up groceries for them saying that their arthritis is so bad 
that they find it hard to walk round the supermarket, push the cart or 
carry groceries. In a thousand little ways, thousands of people with 
impaired vision use whatever self-defense tactics they can devise to 
keep from being called blind and treated the way the sighted treat 
blind people. Braille is blind people's writing and reading method, so 
they reject braille. White canes are what blind people use so they 
reject using a white cane. The independence and life choices that one 
gives up when one rejects the tools of blindness are seen as the price 
one must pay if one is to stay in the sighted world and keep from 
being treated blind.

So, as I see it, our biggest challenge is to educate the average 
sighted person that their views about blindness are completely wrong. 
If we change the belief that blindness means inferior, and replace it 
with one that says blindness simply means that people will do things 
differently, then people won't be so desperate to reject blindness and 
the tools and techniques of blindness.

Now, this is simple to say and very, very hard to do. The biggest 
reason why it's so hard to do is because there are so many sighted 
people and so few blind people with the skills and opportunities to 
educate them. As always with such big jobs with few workers to do 
them, the workers must be creative. Big publicity campaigns like the 
Blind Driver Challenge are great because they focus attention on blind 
people and an area of competence. But, such campaigns don't do much 
for the nitty gritty issues of grandma needing a white cane and good 
mobility training and little Johnny needing to be taught braille 
instead of being forced to use print.

The braille literacy campaign is good because it highlights the need 
for braille literacy, but it doesn't do much for the unemployed, blind 
husbands and wives in middle american small towns. The Bell programmes 
are fabulous but they only impact a relatively small number of 
students at a time and mostly don't change the beliefs and practices 
of their school teachers. Yet, all of these make a difference. The 
local chapters and state affiliates make a difference with every 
activity they conduct that reaches out.

But, we must ask, Are we doing all we can? Now that's the issue that 
we really need to address. There's probably a great deal more that 
could be done at the grass roots level, by motivated, confident, well 
equipped blind people. Is enough attention being given to training and 
equipping Federationists to change community beliefs about blindness? 
Probably not. Are there enough resources to launch a big training 
programme? I don't know. Are there enough willing Federationist, 
willing to give up hundreds of hours in training and in outreach 
activities? I don't know. What I do know is we need to try to find 
ways to find out. And then we need to work very, very hard on changing 
beliefs about people with vision loss. Progress in the area of human 
education is hard won and often tenuous. As we are seeing in those 
African countries which have been plagued with war for a generation, 
just one generation of no school attendance can catapault a nation 
into illiteracy. So, we must work as hard as we can in every 
generation to ensure that gains made in the public consciousness are 
not lost.
What that work looks like is largely up to us. That's why I'm a part 
of the Federation. At least we're doing something. Could we be doing 
better, maybe. I hope I can be a part of improving things.

Regards,

Heather




----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Joe Orozco" <jsorozco at gmail.com>
To: "'NFB Talk Mailing List'" <nfb-talk at nfbnet.org>
Sent: Tuesday, December 28, 2010 4:38 PM
Subject: Re: [nfb-talk] NY Times Article on Gov. Paterson and Braille


David,

The number of entry points to blindness are as plentiful as our 
membership
is diverse.  I completely acknowledge that the issue is vast and that 
there
is no one single approach to eradicating poor education systems,
rehabilitation establishments, and uninformed parents, but I dare say 
there
is more we could do to make the issue a more central part of what the 
NFB as
a whole is accomplishing.  For instance, am I correct that the Bell 
program
only exists in certain states?  Is this also true of the mentoring 
program?
How did the NFB go about procuring the funds to make these programs
possible, and how can states educate themselves on how to make these
programs available in other areas?  How could Affiliate Action play a 
more
vital role in not just recruiting new members, but turning our 
existing
members into informed advocates who can communicate more fluently with
teachers, counselors and relevant providers about higher expectations 
for
their clients?  Is it possible for us to engage a public relations 
campaign
with the magnitude of the Blind Driver Challenge to send a singular 
powerful
message that visual impairment of any degree can and should be 
addressed
with the highest of expectations?  I don't expect all the answers, but 
I
guess I'm also not looking for more reasons why the issue of closing 
the gap
between the so-called partially sighted and the totally blind is so
insurmountable.

Best,

Joe

"Hard work spotlights the character of people: some turn up their 
sleeves,
some turn up their noses, and some don't turn up at all."--Sam Ewing


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