[Nfbf-l] Here is an interesting Article about what I thought was aBlind Role Model

[Kirk]

Hello Dwight, I have been following this man ever since the day he was 
placed into the Governorship of New York and the National limelight. I also 
have been apalled at what he has been doing in reference to his Blindness, 
or  should I say not doing as well! This man has, however, shown all of us 
that are blind that just because one of us reaches such a level of success 
does not mean  they are worthiness of our support or endorsement! This man 
through his rise to the top of New York Politics, has not given us any 
reason to be Proud of him or his attitude toward his disability! He did have 
the opportunity to put us in a positive light to so many of the sighted 
community in our Nation but instead has caused us to feel the need to have 
to scramble to disavow all that he has said, done, and accted in the name of 
our Blind community! What a discrace to us all! He has set us backwards in 
so many sighted people's minds that when he had such a great opportunity to 
advance our capabilities and  worth to our Nation, communities, and such, he 
took us backwards in  time instead! What a shame! Your friend in the cause, 
Kirk Harmon
  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: repcodds at aol.com
  To: nfbf-l at nfbnet.org ; nfbf-leaders at yahoogroups.com ; JPare at nfb.org
  Sent: Friday, January 22, 2010 8:54 PM
  Subject: [Nfbf-l] Here is an interesting Article about what I thought was 
aBlind Role Model


  Article from the INDEPENDENCE TODAY Newspaper

  October 2009

        N.Y. Governor Paterson
        Blind to Tools of Success

        By Deborah Kendrick

        Several years ago, when I received some mystifyingly bad treatment 
at the hands of other people who shared my disability, a friend who was both 
black and blind comforted me with her insight. “Blind people can sometimes 
be like a basket of crabs,” she told me. “When one of them makes it to the 
top, the others scramble to pull him down.” Folks I thought to be my peers, 
in other words, were attacking me out of envy.

        I vowed I would never do that. I would fervently support anyone with 
any disability who achieved success in any field. We should all be one happy 
family, right?

        Then, following the 2006 elections, alarms went off that challenged 
that personal pledge. The good news was that New York state had elected a 
lieutenant governor who was both black and blind. The more troubling news 
was that David Paterson, that newly elected official, by declaring that he 
didn’t use any of those blindness tools – Braille, assistive technology, a 
white cane – indicated to those who don’t have disabilities that he was too 
cool for all that nonsense. Those of us who proudly use the tools of 
blindness, who depend on them to give us a competitive edge in a host of 
professional and educational environments, tried to be tolerant. I wanted to 
be first and foremost proud. A blind guy – a sort of brother to me in the 
disability family – was rising to the top, and it was cause for serious 
celebration.

        Of course, when Eliot Spitzer was caught with his pants down, so to 
speak, and Paterson rose to the very top of his state, sworn in as New York 
governor on March 17th, 2008, the media made even more noise about how this 
brilliant guy didn’t need Braille or talking computers or any of that blind 
nonsense. He had a superhuman memory, we were told, and relied heavily on 
staff. His staff read important memos and documents into voicemail messages 
that he listened to at all hours.

        Voicemail messages? What?

        He’s governor of one of our most important states, and he doesn’t 
use a computer? Still, I reminded myself to be tolerant. Each of us has 
different techniques, different ways to accomplish the same goal. One deaf 
person reads lips. Another uses American Sign Language. Another uses Signed 
English. And on it goes. The man was governor, after all. He didn’t have to 
do things the way other blind people do them to earn our support. He was one 
of us, and we should stand behind him.

        Then Paterson started doing really dumb things. He didn’t always 
know the facts. He made decisions and then, under pressure of one kind or 
another, reversed them. He appointed a lieutenant governor when nobody was 
sure he was even allowed to do that and who, to add insult to injury, had 
trampled with dirty boots on transportation prospects for New Yorkers with 
disabilities.

        He seemed to “get it” when he responded with disdain to the 
"Saturday Night Live" skit that ridiculed his blindness. And yet, he didn’t 
hesitate to grab a few laughs himself at the possible expense of people with 
disabilities when he appeared in a wheelchair for a charity gig.

        More recently, he has vetoed one bill that would prevent 
discrimination against people with disabilities in public facilities in his 
state and another that would require all polling places to be made 
physically accessible.

        OK, we could argue, just because he has a disability doesn’t mean he 
has to always agree with us, supporting every bill that comes down the 
political pike to improve the quality of life for New Yorkers with 
disabilities. Shouldn’t we still support him? He’s both black and blind, 
after all.

        The proverbial “last straw” in struggling to hang on as a 
cheerleader for this New York governor came when I started seeing references 
in the press linking his failures to his blindness. One New York state 
senator, Diane Savino, was widely quoted as saying, in effect, that hey, 
even though the guy is brilliant, he’s blind, after all, and being blind 
means he can’t use the same digital tools -- such as e-mail or a 
Blackberry -- as his peers.

        Wait a New York minute! And let me do some deep breathing so as not 
to do anything undignified like spew bad words in my own e-mail or 
Smartphone messages!

        One headline read: “It’s not his race, it’s his blindness.” Let me 
set the record straight: “It” -- his failure to lead -- is not because of 
his race or his blindness. It’s the man himself. But blindness is something 
I know well and know more than a little bit about with regard to tools and 
techniques, so let me tell you now what I was suppressing all along.

        His avoidance – since childhood – of tools related to blindness, don’t 
make him superior to other blind people, but rather inferior. He can’t read 
print but refused to learn Braille. That’s denial to the point of masochism. 
In other words, he’s illiterate by choice! Why, I wonder, if he’s so 
“brilliant” did it take him 12 years to get two advanced degrees, when lots 
of “ordinary” blind people have obtained those same two degrees in six? And 
even though the second of those two degrees is a law degree, he never went 
into practice as a lawyer because he couldn’t pass the bar exam. Why was 
that? Was it because he couldn’t read Braille or use a computer? Now, in all 
fairness, I don’t know the answer to that question, but his explanation is 
that he didn’t receive adequate accommodations. But what would those 
accommodations be, anyway, for a man who is blind but doesn’t know how to 
use any of the tools that similarly educated blind people avail themselves 
of daily?

        You could say it’s not his fault. When he was a child, New York City 
schools couldn’t promise that he wouldn’t receive any special education, and 
his parents moved to a suburb where he could go to public school 
 “unhindered” by special ed. Now, maybe that was a good thing. I wasn’t 
there. But it sounds to me like being perceived as sighted was more 
important to the family than getting the best education possible.

        And so, here we have a 21st-century governor – the first legally 
blind governor to serve in any state longer than 11 days – and he’s using 
1960s or '70s tools to do his job. Staffers read materials onto tapes and 
into voicemail for him. He has no means of prompting himself with notes, 
which would be effortless had he taken the time to learn to read and write 
Braille.

        Had he been governor in 1975, the tools he now uses would have been 
adequate because sighted people at the time were using them at the same 
level of sophistication. But those tools now are inadequate.

        Why doesn’t Paterson use a computer with one of the popular 
screen-reading programs, such as JAWS or Window-Eyes or System Access? If he 
did, 99 percent of all documents generated by other computers could then 
simply be e-mailed to him. If he wanted to travel light, he could carry a 
netbook (a small laptop computer) or a thumb drive, into which staffers 
could pop anything he needed to read. With practice, he could do what blind 
professionals all over the world do – crank their reading speed up to 
several hundred words a minute and get through material as quickly as any 
sighted politician. Add that to his amazing memory, and he could have been a 
governor to make us proud.

        Why does he have staffers read newspapers to him? For free, he could 
sign up for the National Federation of the Blind's NEWSLINE, a telephone 
service that would enable him to read any of 220 newspapers around the 
country, from any phone anywhere, at any speed he chose. He could zip 
through articles at his own speed as quickly or even quicker than his 
sighted peers.

        Now, this “brilliant” guy is using tools that were state of the art 
when Jimmy Carter was president, has an approval rating that has dropped at 
a staggering rate, and against even the advice of President Obama, said he’ll 
run again in 2010. It’s pitiable, really, but I’m not feeling sorry for him. 
How can I when, along with his own failure, he’s pulling the overall 
acceptance of and employment opportunities for other blind people down with 
him?

        I’m not saying I could do his job. I don’t think I could. But I am 
saying that lots of people who are blind could and do it brilliantly. He 
wanted so much to hide his blindness that now, in his appalling 
unpopularity, it’s the one thing that outsiders are interpreting as his 
weakness. It hasn’t been. His weakness has been his own arrogance and denial 
of reality. It’s a shame. With proper training, he might have done a good 
job.

        But he isn’t doing one, and I’m OK with having broken my promise to 
myself. I know now that just because he has a disability doesn’t mean I have 
to like him. And if he’s going to fall headlong into the basket, I don’t 
want him to kick the rest of us down to the bottom as well.

        Deborah Kendrick is a newspaper columnist, editor and poet. She is 
currently working on a biography of Dr. Abraham Nemeth.





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