[stylist] question

[John Lee Clark]

Exactly, Judith!

There is absolutely nothing wrong about being left-handed.  I know this
intimately because I am left-handed--and I do crochet!  Making an afgan for
my mother right now.

However, societies have made, and continue to make, a big deal out of this
difference in dexterity.  Our own country, until the mid-1950s, had problems
with left hands.  At schools, they'd force you to write with your right
hand.  Churches said that the left hand was the devil's hand.  We shake
hands with our right hand, not the left.  

Yes, in other cultures it is worse, the stigma is greater.  

But things are pretty good right now for left-handed people now.  It has
mostly ceased to be an issue, to the point that most people don't notice it
or if they do, it doesn't change anything.  

The blackis, they're working on getting our society to take blackiness just
as much in stride.  Feminists are working on getting gender to be as much a
non-issue as possible and still trying to perfect the policies and fair
accommodations surrounding maternity.  It's a work in progress.  Deaf people
are working on it, too, though we have a longer way to go.  Blind is the
same.

But it is entirely possible, because it has happened before, for the
greatest stigma, the greatest curse, the greatest burden that was made such
a big deal out of, out of nothing, to fade into something the society
absorbs as part of its index of normal diversity.  One day we could be
living in a society that thinks nothing of people using wheelchairs or canes
or signing or whatever, for none of these things to stand out at all.  

We want society to gradually change so that differences are no longer
differences in the same ways they were before.  We do not want society to
stay the same while we try to repress or manipulate the differences, because
there's always going to be a gap and it's beyond our power to change.

This is why I like NFB's philosophy, because it's about changing what can be
changed, and in healthy ways.  One thing we can change is society, however
slowly.  Society would benefit greatly from this.  Another thing we can
change is our skills, what we know, the extent of our resources, etc.

This is why I am dead against organizations like the Foundation Fighting
Blindness.  They might have a little control, by medical means, to change
blindness itself, but this is a highly questionable premise, and a most
expensive venture.  Twenty years of billions of dollars that make ten
researchers wealthy may result in restoring a little vision to a few people
who have a specific condition, and the actual life improvements that they
would experience thankis to it are going to be nil or nearly so.  And this
whole thing is going to be very bad for society itself and make it latch on
false hopes of restoring people to the human ideal.  Tthis would impair
society's maturity into one that is able to take blind people in stride.

John

 

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