[nfbmi-talk] a bill of rights for the blind

[joe harcz Comcast]

Agreed. Now if we look at what our founder wrote here and what he and others
did to form our movement we will see the road map.

First his critical writings led to many of the civil rights laws we need
enforced including Section 504 and the ADA. They are forty years old and 25
respectively. The goal of both is to provide the "equality of opportunity"
written about here and in the Right to Live in the World protections against
overt discrimination and provisions of reasonable accommodations.

Then throughout our history to the present we've collectively organized, and
"manned the barricades" in protest and sought redress in court when needed.

We still do that nationally and in other states with the 14 c protests and
numerous lawsuits as examples.

I'm afraid contrary to such actions increasingly in Michigan we often put
our heads in the sand, wash our hands of action, and content ourselves with
becoming increasingly a social organization. In addition there are those who
have a sense of entitlement who think it is our affiliate's role to fund
some of these social or other activities without accountability for those
funded. It is not for example a problem with follow up to engaging our youth
in activities including chapter engagement to be put on the head of the
students when they aren't even encouraged or engaged, and indeed when it
isn't required that they become members and are giving back to the movement.
It is the problem of each of us when we don't require that! In fact this
goes to unnamed youth who as recently as yesterday I called and talked with
to become an active member of our chapter, and by the way of which he
agreed. So contrary to the sentiment full of personal agendas recently bled
upon this list it is up to each of us to follow up and bring people in. We
do not live up to our philosophy if we encourage a sense of entitlement
without also requiring responsability as well.

Increasingly there are those who undercut and undermine activists and even
call for censorship. Now these are things not to do.

What I think we must do first as an organization is to fully examine our
resolutions which are the supreme authority and are indeed the policies of
this state affiliate and pledge to implement both the letter and the spirit
of them.

I also contend that those who are not members are welcome to become members,
but until they are they have no voice.

Finally, in brief here the problem with BSBP and other scofflaw entities in
this state are not my posts and exposes, but rather the problem is that
these agencies openly, blatantly and with malice of forethought discriminate
against blind Michiganders with impunity and viciousness. And much of what
is being done is to shoot the messengers and not to address the issues.

That is what must stop and directly if we are to survive as an organization
let alone address the seminal issues.

Thank you for what you do Terry to keep our eyes on the prize.

Warmly,

Joe


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Terry D. Eagle" <terrydeagle at yahoo.com>
To: "'joe harcz Comcast'" <joeharcz at comcast.net>; "'NFB of Michigan Internet 
Mailing List'" <nfbmi-talk at nfbnet.org>
Sent: Thursday, November 06, 2014 6:37 PM
Subject: RE: [nfbmi-talk] a bill of rights for the blind


> The challenges and barriers of the past for equality, opportunity, 
> security
> and independence for we the blind still exist, and have just taken on a 
> new
> identiy.  Without giving a long list of examples constrasting past and
> present identities of challenges and barriers, suffice it to say that 
> there
> is need and room for a variety of avenues to achieve the purposes of the 
> NFB
> in Michigan and across the nation.  What is needed and lacking here in
> Michigan is a vision (no pun intended), and a plan that will  lead us to
> achieve the NFB purpose and mission.
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: nfbmi-talk [mailto:nfbmi-talk-bounces at nfbnet.org] On Behalf Of joe
> harcz Comcast via nfbmi-talk
> Sent: Thursday, November 06, 2014 9:50 AM
> To: nfbmi-talk at nfbnet.org
> Subject: [nfbmi-talk] a bill of rights for the blind
>
>
>
>
>
> So we have to know where we've been if we are to know where we are going.
> Check out what our founder wrote in 1948. Now over the years we've in the
> NFB fought for access laws and civil rights laws which makes inclusion in
> employment etc. even more possible then in 1948. But, fast forward to now 
> in
> Michigan where the BSBP itself in spite of federal funding and mandates
> discriminates directly against the hiring of people who are blind 
> including
> the documented fact that BSBP has hired dozens of new administrative 
> layers,
> dozens upon dozens of so-called student assistants and the one thing they
> have in common is that not a one of them with the exception of Rob 
> Essenberg
> who is paid $104,000 to steal from the blind are indeed blind!
>
>
>
> The other thing that Tenbroek shows us here is he is highly literate, and
> articulate, and he didn't "dumb down" his speeches. He worked to lift 
> people
> up to his level and not to drag them down because he had expectations of 
> and
> for people who are blind.
>
>
>
> I've quoted his same quotes from Shakespeare herein in addresses at
> convention while I was an officer of NFB and I think we should take them 
> to
> heart:
>
> "Prick us do we not bleed?"
>
>
>
> And,
>
> "Poison us do we not die?"
>
>
>
>
>
> Joe Harcz
>
>
>
>
>
> A Bill Of Rights For The Blind
>
>
>
> A BILL OF RIGHTS FOR THE BLIND
>
>
>
> An address delivered by Professor Jacobus tenBroek
>
> President, National Federation of the Blind
>
> at the Banquet of the Annual Convention
>
> Baltimore, Maryland, July, 1948
>
>
>
> I have a serious question to ask the sighted persons present would you 
> swap
> vision for a good chicken dinner? On the face of it this is an absurd
> question,
>
> for no one who has vision would swap it for anything. But for those of us
> who are blind, this question is not necessarily absurd. It is not that we
> prefer
>
> to have lost our eyesight, but having been deprived of it, we have
> discovered it is dispensable. There are even some blind among us who 
> assert
> that blindness
>
> is a joy; for, as they point out, those who lose their heads are
> decapitated; those who lose their clothes are denuded; does it not follow,
> therefore,
>
> that those who lose their eyesight are delighted?
>
>
>
> Let us suppose that as we leave this meeting our sighted guests were to be
> involved in an accident which destroyed their vision. This is not an idle
> supposition.
>
> Every year, without regard for social or economic background, color or
> creed, through accident and illness, blindness is forced on thirty 
> thousand
> men
>
> and women in the United States. What problems would you face as a newly
> blinded person? What needs would be yours? You would probably spent months
> or years
>
> consulting doctors and eye specialists in futile efforts to regain your
> precious vision. But after your patience and certainly your pocketbook had
> been
>
> exhausted, you probably would wish for death. The world we live in is a
> visually oriented world, and for the sighted eternal darkness seems
> unthinkable.
>
> You probably would resign yourself to be set aside from ordinary pleasures
> and accustomed pursuits. But if you were lucky enough to know something
> about
>
> blindness or were properly guided in the early days of your sightlessness,
> your adjustment would be swift. After initial orientation to 
> self-locomotion
>
> and self-care, the world would become familiar through the auditory and
> tactual senses.
>
>
>
> There are a quarter of a million blind persons in the United States, but
> this statistic fails to tells us that the blind man or woman has the same
> feelings
>
> and desires, the same sorrows and joys as sighted persons. You would
> probably be no different after adjustment to blindness from what you had
> been before
>
> you became blind. To be sure, there are physical limitations to blindness,
> but most of these are of no more than nuisance value. You bump into 
> things;
>
> you occasionally lose your way home; you even, in the mistaken notion that
> you are following the clicking of high heels out of a crowded railroad
> station,
>
> wind up in the ladies' restroom. But with proper orientation you would
> develop techniques for overcoming this physical limitation in blindness. 
> The
> Braille
>
> system would replace script in your books, tape measures, thermometers,
> carpenters' levels, and speech notes.
>
>
>
> What I have said so far will illustrate the wide-spread misconceptions 
> about
> the nature of the physical handicap of blindness. If sighted people find 
> it
>
> hard to get an accurate notion of what blindness is in its relatively
> obvious physical aspects, how much more must they misapprehend its subtler
> psychological,
>
> social, and economic ramifications? It may, therefore, be worthwhile to 
> try
> to clear up some of these misconceptions; for us to say what the principal
>
> problems of blindness are; for us to tell the story of blindness as we 
> live
> it daily. Since we do it without bitterness or malice and knowing full 
> well
>
> that the sighted community bears towards us nothing but the best will in 
> the
> world and the most generous impulses, it might not be inappropriate to do
>
> this in the form of a Bill of Rights which we ask the sighted community to
> grant usa Bill of Rights, not declaring our independence from society but
> our
>
> need of being integrated into it; a Bill of Rights, not guaranteeing 
> special
> favors and position, but equality of treatment; a Bill of Rights, not
> glossing
>
> over our weaknesses or our limitations, but recognizing us for what we 
> are,
> normal human beings, or at least as normal as human beings are; a Bill of
> Rights
>
> according us a fair chance to live socially useful lives.
>
>
>
> First among the rights which we seek from our sighted friends is the right
> to their understanding. Of their willingness to work for our welfare and
> their
>
> activity on our behalf we are assured. But what we need is their
> understanding. This is an assertion of our normality (if I may disagree 
> with
> President
>
> Harding about a suffix). We are ordinary peoplesome little, some average,
> some great. But, in any event, we have the same strengths, the same
> reactions,
>
> the same desires, the same ambitions as the rest of humanity.  In 
> California
> in recent years two of our blind people have been inmates in the state
> penitentiary,
>
> one convicted of embezzlement, the other of second-degree murder. At the
> same time another blind man was Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of
> Illinois;
>
> two others were Senators of the United States. The vast majority of us
> achieve neither of these extremes of success. Like most other people, we 
> are
> neither
>
> criminals nor political leaders nor anything else that the average man is
> not.
>
>
>
> I cannot speak of the right to your understanding that we are normal 
> people
> without recalling the well-known lines from The Merchant of Venice, spoken
> in
>
> another context but applicable with equal force here: Have we not organs,
> dimensions, senses, affections, passions? Fed with the same food, hurt 
> with
> the
>
> same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, 
> warmed
> and cooled by the same winter and summer. If you prick us, do we not 
> bleed?
>
> If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die?
>
>
>
> The normality of blind people has an important bearing on the second right
> we would wish to see sanctified in a Bill of Rights for the Blind, namely,
> the
>
> right to security. What happens to normal people when they are permanently
> without business or employment, when they are subjected to unremitting
> economic
>
> dependence on others? The answer is that in the course of time their
> initiative disintegrates; they lose their social, political, and spiritual
> independence;
>
> they either suffer unendurable privation or become the easy victims of the
> hand that feeds them. This is what happens to normal men whether blind or
> sighted.
>
> But in the case of the blind an additional element is present. Over and
> above the economic problem, they face the necessity of making adaptations
> psychological,
>
> social, and physicalto blindness. Anything which tends to hamper the 
> process
> of individual personal reconstruction weakens the personal integrity and
> reliance
>
> of the blind individual.
>
>
>
> Now all of this is something more than abstract social doctrine. It has an
> immediate and a significant application to programs of public assistance. 
> A
> program
>
> of public assistance which is to be consistent with these facts must be so
> arranged as to leave the recipient's independence unimpaired. He must be
> free
>
> to spend his grant as he pleases. He must be left to make his own 
> decisions
> about where and how he shall live and what he shall do. He must have the
> divine
>
> election, so far as social existence and his own talents permit, of making
> the choices which determine his own worldly destinies, not without 
> guidance,
>
> if he wishes it, but without intrusion, if he does not. Man does not 
> forfeit
> the rights of individuality and the dignity of the person by economic
> necessity
>
> or physical handicap; and the injunction to be thy brother's keeper is not
> an order to become his master.
>
>
>
> The public assistance acts of the various states and the Social Security 
> Act
> of the Federal Government, as administered, violate and degrade these
> principles.
>
> Under them too often the blind are virtually made wards under social 
> worker
> guardianship. The means test, individual budgeting, and social worker
> discretion
>
> on which all of these acts are based, strike down the very independence 
> and
> self-respect of the recipients which must be developed if they are to 
> build
>
> a personality and character which will enable them to live with a 
> reasonable
> degree of usefulness and assurance. These acts first assume that blind
> people
>
> are necessarily paupers and then perpetuate them in that condition. The
> principle of individual need individually determined opens the way to, if 
> it
> does
>
> not require, an inquisition into the most intimate affairs of the 
> recipient
> of blind aid. This archaic system of pauper relief not only fails to
> stimulate
>
> recipients to become self-supporting, which should be a primary aim of any
> system of public assistance to the blind, but it also continually 
> impresses
>
> upon them a sense of their own helplessness and dependence. This treatment
> of the blind is all the more remarkable since aid has been increasingly
> granted
>
> to other groups in our economy on an alternative basis, quite regardless 
> of
> individual needto farmers by price support and parity payments, to
> industrialists
>
> by tariffs, to laborers by minimum wage and maximum hours provisions, to
> youth by public education. Blind persons as a class, no less than these
> other
>
> groups, require the helping hand of government to carry them to a healthy
> life embodied in active contribution to their communities.
>
>
>
> The third right that we would seek to establish in our great charter of
> liberties is one that is not peculiar to the blind, but one which is 
> common
> to allequality;
>
> but the special circumstances of blindness, particularly the lack of
> understanding about it, make it desirable to re-assert the right and show
> its relevance.
>
> The idea of equality has been associated with all the great struggles of 
> the
> masses of mankind to better their lot in the history of Western
> civilization.
>
> It is viewed by the philosophers of democracy as the most enduring impulse
> and authentic demand of the human spirit. It has been established by our 
> own
>
> national experience as the indispensable condition of liberty. It was 
> placed
> at the base of our constitutional system from Lockean and Jeffersonian
> sources
>
> and placed in the Constitution as the culmination of the greatest
> humanitarian movement in our history, namely, abolitionism. It reaches 
> back
> deeply into
>
> ethical, religious, humanistic, and libertarian origins.
>
>
>
> Yet this fundamental part of our system and our heritage is daily denied 
> to
> the blind. We are denied equal treatment under the rule of law, equal 
> right
>
> to the self-respect which derives from a sense of usefulness, and equal
> opportunity to compete for the normal means of livelihood. More often than
> not
>
> a denial of equality involves a denial of opportunity, and this, the right
> to equality of opportunity is the fourth and the last of the rights we
> should
>
> seek to have included in our Bill of Rights.
>
>
>
> "Full and equal membership in society entitles the individual," says the
> report of the President's Committee on Civil Rights, "to the right to 
> enjoy
> the
>
> benefits of society and to contribute to its progress. . . . Without this
> equality of opportunity the individual is deprived of a chance to develop
> his
>
> potentialities and to share in the fruits of society. The group also 
> suffers
> through the loss of the contributions which might have been made by 
> persons
>
> excluded from the main channels of social and economic activity."
>
>
>
> Exclusion from the main channels of social and economic activity and there
> by a lack of opportunity for self-support these constitute the real 
> handicap
>
> of blindness, far surpassing its physical limitations. The government
> service is frequently closed to us through groundless discrimination on
> account of
>
> blindness. In some states this has been ameliorated by corrective
> legislation not so, incidentally, in the federal government but even in
> those states
>
> enforcement is spotty, difficult, and almost non-existent. In some
> professions, at which the blind have excelled, such as osteopathy and
> chiropractic,
>
> there have been persistent efforts to exclude the blind by administrative
> ruling. Teaching, especially in junior colleges and universities, where
> blindness
>
> is not a factor in performing the work, has as yet opened up only to a
> relatively few. In private employment the same story is to be told; the
> usual experience
>
> is for the blind man to be brushed aside as incompetent, as unable, as the
> fellow you could never expect to perform that job unless he could see. 
> With
>
> respect to self-employment, which almost always involves some capital, the
> investor regards the blind man as a bad financial risk.
>
>
>
> The absence of economic opportunity is more than the absence of economic
> security.  It is the disintegration of the personality. It is men living 
> out
> their
>
> lives in social isolation and the atrophy of their productive powers. The
> curse of blindness is idleness--idleness which confines the blind to the
> sidelines
>
> of life, players warming the bench in the game that all should play.
>
>
>
> For equality of opportunity to be a reality to the blind, competent blind
> persons must be admitted without discrimination to the common callings and
> professions
>
> as well as to positions in the Civil Service. We do not ask that blind men
> should be given jobs because they are blind; we do not ask that they be
> given
>
> preferential treatment or handicap allowances. We ask only that when a 
> blind
> man has the training, the qualifications, the dependability, and the
> aptitude,
>
> he be given an equal chance with the sighted that the bars to public and
> private employment interposed by legislative enactment, administrative 
> whim,
> and
>
> managerial prejudice and misunderstanding be removed.
>
>
>
> These problems too have a significant and an immediate application to the
> public assistance laws. Those laws, once again, are not geared to meet the
> real
>
> needs of blindness. It should follow from what has been said that every
> effort needs to be made to rehabilitate the blind into active endeavor,
> social
>
> contribution, and remunerative employment. Far from achieving these ends, 
> or
> even from permitting them, the public assistance acts generally tend to
> perpetuate
>
> the blind permanently on the relief rolls. Earnings and other income are
> automatically deducted from the amount of the grant made, and thus much of
> the
>
> motive for rehabilitation, self-improvement, and active endeavor is 
> removed.
> If the blind recipients of relief were permitted to retain a reasonable
> portion
>
> of their earnings and to accumulate a small amount of capital, they would
> have incentive to be active, to do something; their rehabilitation and
> productive
>
> effort would be encouraged; and the ultimate goals of self-support and
> independence of the public assistance rolls would open up to the realistic
> vision
>
> of men who cannot see.
>
>
>
> Nor is this hope a dream of the future. The Congress of the United States
> unanimously passed a measure, unfortunately vetoed by the President,
> allowing
>
> the states, without loss of federal funds, to exempt forty dollars of the
> monthly earnings of blind aid recipients. For this measure we do honor to
> Congressman
>
> Reed of New York, Senator Martin of Pennsylvania, and Senator Ives of New
> York. They took the lead and put it across. They deserve and do receive 
> the
> eternal
>
> gratitude of the blind. As Senator Ives explained on the floor of the 
> United
> States Senate, this was but a short step in the right direction; but of 
> all
>
> the steps, it is the most important, for it establishes a principlea
> principle whose ultimate fulfillment will drive to the shambles the
> soul-stifling
>
> conception of the needs basis a principle which, with public 
> understanding,
> with security, equality, and opportunity, will convert blindness into a 
> mere
>
> physical nuisance and blind men into social assets.
>
>
>
> back to top
>
> Source:
>
> https://nfb.org/images/nfb/publications/convent/banque48.html
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