[Nfbc-info] Fwd: [humanser] On Blindness from the Light Dependent Perspective

[Lisa Irving]

Here's an article that will create a great deal of discussion at chapter meetings.

I hope you enjoy the article as much as I enjoyed reading it

From, Lisa Irving

Sent from my iPhone

Begin forwarded message:

> From: Judyth Leavitt via humanser <humanser at nfbnet.org>
> Date: October 5, 2015 at 2:59:26 PM PDT
> To: "'Human Services Division Mailing List'" <humanser at nfbnet.org>
> Cc: Judyth Leavitt <leavitt at together.net>
> Subject: Re: [humanser] On Blindness from the Light Dependent Perspective
> Reply-To: Human Services Division Mailing List <humanser at nfbnet.org>
> 
> Thank you, JD.  This is beautiful.
> 
> Judyth
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: humanser [mailto:humanser-bounces at nfbnet.org] On Behalf Of JD Townsend
> via humanser
> Sent: Monday, October 05, 2015 4:36 PM
> To: Human Services Mailing List
> Cc: JD Townsend
> Subject: [humanser] On Blindness from the Light Dependent Perspective
> 
> 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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