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</o:shapelayout></xml><![endif]--></head><body lang=EN-US link="#0563C1" vlink="#954F72" style='word-wrap:break-word'><div class=WordSection1><p align=center style='text-align:center'><strong><span style='font-size:18.0pt;color:black'>THE COST OF A GIFT</span></strong><span style='font-size:13.5pt;color:black'><o:p></o:p></span></p><p style='font-variant-ligatures: normal;font-variant-caps: normal;orphans: 2;text-align:start;widows: 2;-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px;text-decoration-thickness: initial;text-decoration-style: initial;text-decoration-color: initial;word-spacing:0px'><span style='font-size:13.5pt;color:black'>An Address Delivered by<br>Marc Maurer, President<br>National Federation of the Blind<br>At the John F. Kennedy School of Government<br>Harvard University<br>December 9, 1987<o:p></o:p></span></p><p style='font-variant-ligatures: normal;font-variant-caps: normal;orphans: 2;text-align:start;widows: 2;-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px;text-decoration-thickness: initial;text-decoration-style: initial;text-decoration-color: initial;word-spacing:0px'><span style='font-size:13.5pt;color:black'>The blind, the halt, and the lame have traditionally been objects of pity and charity. This has meant a certain degree of kindness, but the generosity has always been a mixed blessing. In physics it is said that for any action there is an equal and opposite reaction. In social affairs the same concept applies. There is no such thing as a free lunch. Those who receive charity are (contrary to the popular belief) always obliged to pay for it.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p style='font-variant-ligatures: normal;font-variant-caps: normal;orphans: 2;text-align:start;widows: 2;-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px;text-decoration-thickness: initial;text-decoration-style: initial;text-decoration-color: initial;word-spacing:0px'><span style='font-size:13.5pt;color:black'>One of the greatest problems faced by the blind today is that we are the objects of charity. The society at large feels that it will be called upon to give something to the blind. There is no law which requires equal treatment for the sighted. Such a law is unnecessary. However, there is a law which demands that the handicapped shall not be subjected to discrimination—at least part of the time. This law is mostly ineffective. The general public is expected to give equality to a class of persons which it regards as not being entitled to it.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p style='font-variant-ligatures: normal;font-variant-caps: normal;orphans: 2;text-align:start;widows: 2;-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px;text-decoration-thickness: initial;text-decoration-style: initial;text-decoration-color: initial;word-spacing:0px'><span style='font-size:13.5pt;color:black'>How do we pay for charity? What can be offered in return for the "gifts" we receive? How are the scales balanced? What is taken from the blind (or, for that matter, from other groups) in order to reach equilibrium? To answer this question contrast the position in our culture maintained by the local banker or entrepreneur with that customarily associated with the blind. As I have already said, nondiscrimination laws apply to the blind. They don't apply to the banker. Reasonable accommodation is required for the blind. It is not for the banker. Charitable fund drives are conducted for the blind. It is inconceivable that they would be for the banker. Generosity and pity are felt for the blind. The banker gets something else. For the banker there is sometimes a little envy, occasionally a touch of fear, and almost always a substantial measure of respect. The reason for the difference is that the banker has something that most people in society want. The blind are not regarded in the same way.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p style='font-variant-ligatures: normal;font-variant-caps: normal;orphans: 2;text-align:start;widows: 2;-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px;text-decoration-thickness: initial;text-decoration-style: initial;text-decoration-color: initial;word-spacing:0px'><span style='font-size:13.5pt;color:black'>What pays for the charity? For a large segment of the population the income tax deduction is insufficient to induce a gift. Instead, there has to be another reason. Charity salves the conscience. It is a tangible reminder for those who have done something which they regard as less than good that their lives are not without redeeming features. But there is something even more powerful than the need to compensate for past misdeeds. It is the wish to feel secure in the knowledge that the donor is helping those less fortunate. This, of course, may be restated. If I can regard you as an object of pity and charity, I am in a position superior to yours. Therefore, if I make you a gift from charitable motives, I am necessarily your superior. The blind and handicapped pay for the charity. The gift necessarily connotes inequality. This means that one of the most serious problems faced by the handicapped today is that we are the objects of charity. If we permit these circumstances to continue, we give tacit consent to the two-class system.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p style='font-variant-ligatures: normal;font-variant-caps: normal;orphans: 2;text-align:start;widows: 2;-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px;text-decoration-thickness: initial;text-decoration-style: initial;text-decoration-color: initial;word-spacing:0px'><span style='font-size:13.5pt;color:black'>In a relatively free society when two parties transact business, one sets the price, and the other determines the quantity. It never happens that one party decides both price and quantity. If the buyer says that fifty items are required, the seller will establish the price. If the seller indicates that the price for a specific commodity will be one hundred dollars, the purchaser will determine the number to be bought. The number may be zero or some quantity higher than that. If, on the other hand, the purchaser says that the price of the commodity will be not a hundred dollars but fifty, the seller may decide to take the merchandise and go home. In other words the quantity may be zero.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p style='font-variant-ligatures: normal;font-variant-caps: normal;orphans: 2;text-align:start;widows: 2;-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px;text-decoration-thickness: initial;text-decoration-style: initial;text-decoration-color: initial;word-spacing:0px'><span style='font-size:13.5pt;color:black'>The blind (just like others) have always needed certain basic commodities. Food, shelter, and clothing are essential. In the past governmental institutions, charitable organizations, or benevolent individuals have provided these necessities. But price and quantity are never controlled by the same party. The blind demanded a certain quantity; those who made the gifts controlled the price. Only when blind people began to have sufficient resources to meet basic needs, did these circumstances begin to change. If a group of individuals within society never has the opportunity to choose whether it will determine price or quantity, it lacks the essentials for freedom. Until fairly recently, the blind have been in this position. Blind people determined quantity, and someone else set the price. Because blind people were not regarded as having any trading stock—goods or services that could be sold—payment had to be made in other coin, and the price was always high.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p style='font-variant-ligatures: normal;font-variant-caps: normal;orphans: 2;text-align:start;widows: 2;-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px;text-decoration-thickness: initial;text-decoration-style: initial;text-decoration-color: initial;word-spacing:0px'><span style='font-size:13.5pt;color:black'>Blacks in America constitute a minority. As this group began to move from second-class status to full equality, it faced almost the same economic circumstances that now confront the blind. But there was one significant difference. Blacks were regarded as having the capacity for manual labor. The blind are ordinarily not considered suitable to perform the ordinary job in the ordinary place of business. Therefore, in the effort to become a fully integrated part of our society, blind people are at a greater disadvantage than blacks have ever been. This is true despite the absence of blind slavery. The difference is that the blind are thought of as having nothing to offer. Not only are the skills and talents possessed by the blind not sought in the job market, but often those blind persons who volunteer to give their time without cost find their offer rejected. In the minds of many the final summation for blindness is: nothing to sell and nothing that will be accepted as a gift—complete worthlessness.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p style='font-variant-ligatures: normal;font-variant-caps: normal;orphans: 2;text-align:start;widows: 2;-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px;text-decoration-thickness: initial;text-decoration-style: initial;text-decoration-color: initial;word-spacing:0px'><span style='font-size:13.5pt;color:black'>Of course, this understanding of blindness is completely false.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p style='font-variant-ligatures: normal;font-variant-caps: normal;orphans: 2;text-align:start;widows: 2;-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px;text-decoration-thickness: initial;text-decoration-style: initial;text-decoration-color: initial;word-spacing:0px'><span style='font-size:13.5pt;color:black'>The blind represent a cross section of the general population. All of the talent and all of the virtue that can be found among ordinary human beings is possessed by the blind. All of the abilities that others possess (except the ability to see) are possessed by the blind. The blind people I know are as bright, as energetic, as willing to give without counting the cost, as anxious to do a good job, and as trustworthy as anyone else in society. They are also as dull, as boring, as willing to take without giving, and as lazy. In other words blind people have all of the characteristics of the general population, except one --sight. The problem is that blindness has been regarded as the only meaningful attribute. After it has become clear that the individual in question is blind, nothing else matters. In the minds of many this one factor is the final summation.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p style='font-variant-ligatures: normal;font-variant-caps: normal;orphans: 2;text-align:start;widows: 2;-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px;text-decoration-thickness: initial;text-decoration-style: initial;text-decoration-color: initial;word-spacing:0px'><span style='font-size:13.5pt;color:black'>Do I state the case too strongly? Recently a blind man in St. Louis, Missouri, approached the ticket counter in a Trailways bus depot. He wanted to buy a full-fare bus ticket. The ticket agent told him that he must produce a doctor's certificate because this was necessary for a "handifare" ticket. A "handifare" ticket costs less than the ordinary bus ticket. The blind man (a member of the National Federation of the Blind) responded that a "handifare" ticket was not needed. He wanted to pay full fare for an ordinary ticket. Nevertheless, the agent refused to sell him one. When the blind man insisted on his right to pay full fare, and when he refused to leave the counter until such a ticket was issued to him, personnel at the Trailways bus station called the police and had him arrested. The language used by the police and their behavior at the depot is reminiscent of the ugly confrontations in the black civil rights movement.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p style='font-variant-ligatures: normal;font-variant-caps: normal;orphans: 2;text-align:start;widows: 2;-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px;text-decoration-thickness: initial;text-decoration-style: initial;text-decoration-color: initial;word-spacing:0px'><span style='font-size:13.5pt;color:black'>Last March a blind man in Washington State bought a ticket to ride on an Amtrak train. After boarding, he tried to ascend the stairs to the upper level of the observation car. The conductor told him that blind people were not permitted on the upper level. Amtrak (just like Trailways) sells tickets to the handicapped at a reduced rate.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p style='font-variant-ligatures: normal;font-variant-caps: normal;orphans: 2;text-align:start;widows: 2;-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px;text-decoration-thickness: initial;text-decoration-style: initial;text-decoration-color: initial;word-spacing:0px'><span style='font-size:13.5pt;color:black'>Last spring I received a letter from a woman in Rochester, Indiana, which is all too typical. It describes in miniature the problem. The writer's mother is blind. Inadequate training, segregation, and lack of opportunity are the result. The life portrayed in this letter is dismal. Here is what it says:<o:p></o:p></span></p><p style='font-variant-ligatures: normal;font-variant-caps: normal;orphans: 2;text-align:start;widows: 2;-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px;text-decoration-thickness: initial;text-decoration-style: initial;text-decoration-color: initial;word-spacing:0px'><span style='font-size:13.5pt;color:black'>Dear Sir:<o:p></o:p></span></p><p style='font-variant-ligatures: normal;font-variant-caps: normal;orphans: 2;text-align:start;widows: 2;-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px;text-decoration-thickness: initial;text-decoration-style: initial;text-decoration-color: initial;word-spacing:0px'><span style='font-size:13.5pt;color:black'>My mother has been legally blind for about twenty years. During all that time she has been in a nursing home in Rochester, Indiana, and she is only forty-three years old. She has not in all that time had any training that the blind need, such as how to read Braille. The nursing home has been her only world because of her inability to get around. I feel my mother desperately needs help. She needs to be taught the things the blind need to function in society. She is much too young to be in a nursing home.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p style='font-variant-ligatures: normal;font-variant-caps: normal;orphans: 2;text-align:start;widows: 2;-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px;text-decoration-thickness: initial;text-decoration-style: initial;text-decoration-color: initial;word-spacing:0px'><span style='font-size:13.5pt;color:black'>I wonder if the National Federation of the Blind can help in this matter. I don't have money or the know-how to assist her, and I was told maybe you could help. She's wanting to get out of the nursing home.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p style='font-variant-ligatures: normal;font-variant-caps: normal;orphans: 2;text-align:start;widows: 2;-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px;text-decoration-thickness: initial;text-decoration-style: initial;text-decoration-color: initial;word-spacing:0px'><span style='font-size:13.5pt;color:black'>Sincerely yours,<o:p></o:p></span></p><p style='font-variant-ligatures: normal;font-variant-caps: normal;orphans: 2;text-align:start;widows: 2;-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px;text-decoration-thickness: initial;text-decoration-style: initial;text-decoration-color: initial;word-spacing:0px'><span style='font-size:13.5pt;color:black'>Twenty years of a person's life is a long time—and for this woman (and many others like her) those twenty years are a bleak memory of twisted hell—of desolation, pain, and lack of opportunity. We in the National Federation of the Blind are organized to make absolutely certain that blind men and women have something better to do with their lives than go into nursing homes in their twenties. I wonder whether the bonds of steel and leather traditionally associated with captives and slaves have caused more desolation in the lives of those who have been forced to endure them than has been caused by the kind of "compassion" which consigns blind people in their twenties to nursing homes.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p style='font-variant-ligatures: normal;font-variant-caps: normal;orphans: 2;text-align:start;widows: 2;-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px;text-decoration-thickness: initial;text-decoration-style: initial;text-decoration-color: initial;word-spacing:0px'><span style='font-size:13.5pt;color:black'>What should we do to promote a more realistic approach? I do not recommend that all charity come to an end. Nor do I recommend that the blind stop accepting all gifts. Instead, I urge all of us to try to understand the nature of what we do. For all human beings everywhere there are times that demand charity. However, there also comes a time when responsibility must be accepted. Full participation in society will produce more and cost less than dependence upon charity. If we, as a culture, systematically refuse to permit a group of people to reach its potential, then we have set the stage for conflict. Such behavior creates an inferior class. When the group that is regarded as inferior discovers that the two-class system is a lie, it will insist upon its rights. When this happens, there will be confrontation.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class=MsoNormal style='font-variant-ligatures: normal;font-variant-caps: normal;orphans: 2;text-align:start;widows: 2;-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px;text-decoration-thickness: initial;text-decoration-style: initial;text-decoration-color: initial;word-spacing:0px'><span style='font-size:13.5pt;color:black'>The blind of this nation (organized in the National Federation of the Blind) are committed to achieving equality and first-class citizenship. We regret that there is apparently a certain amount of conflict built into the transition from second- to first-class status. But we know that blind individuals, blind people as a group, and our entire society will benefit if the worth we represent is recognized and given its proper place. We are appreciative of the kind words, the good wishes, and the donations of those who have joined us to ensure that our struggle for freedom comes to fruition. But we are also committed to ending forever the philosophy which says that the proper role of the blind person is the recipient of someone else's charity. The proper role for the blind is the same as it is for the sighted. There should be charity given and received on both sides. There should also be responsibility and opportunity.</span><o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>Bonnie Lucas<br>President<br>National Federation of the Blind of Alaska<br>Cell: 907-301-6808<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>Email: <a href="mailto:lucas.bonnie@gmail.com">lucas.bonnie@gmail.com</a><br><br><o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>Web: <a href="https://alaskanfb.org/">alaskanfb.org</a><a name="_Hlk16627103"><br></a><span style='mso-bookmark:_Hlk16627103'>The National Federation of the Blind knows that blindness is not the characteristic that defines you or your future. Every day we raise the expectations of blind people, because low expectations create obstacles between blind people and our dreams. You can live the life you want; blindness is not what holds you back.</span><span style='mso-bookmark:_Hlk16627103'></span><o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><span style='color:#BFBFBF'>[Delegate-BML]<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p></div></body></html>