[Ohio-talk] New York Times article

[Paul Dressell]

Hi Shelbi,
Thanks for making the article accessible. Paul
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Shelbi Hindel" <shelbiah1 at gmail.com>
To: "ohio talk" <ohio-talk at nfbnet.org>
Sent: Sunday, January 05, 2014 7:48 PM
Subject: [Ohio-talk] New York Times article


> Here is the article I think Kaiti is referring to. It is interesting!
>
> Shelbi
>
>
>
> Opinion
>
> Why Do We Fear the Blind?
>
>
>
> Skip Sterling
>
> By ROSEMARY MAHONEY
>
> Published: January 4, 2014
>
> . 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.
>
>
>
> Rosemary Mahoney is  <http://www.rosemarymahoney.org/> the author of the
> forthcoming book "For the Benefit of Those Who See: Dispatches From the
> World of the Blind."
>
> A version of this op-ed appears in print on January 5, 2014, on page SR8 
> of
> the New York edition with the headline: Why Do We Fear the Blind?.
>
>
>
>
>
>


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------


> _______________________________________________
> Ohio-talk mailing list
> Ohio-talk at nfbnet.org
> http://nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/ohio-talk_nfbnet.org
> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for 
> Ohio-talk:
> http://nfbnet.org/mailman/options/ohio-talk_nfbnet.org/pmdbmd%40fuse.net
>