[nfb-talk] What People Fear About Blindness:

Bryan Schulz b.schulz at sbcglobal.net
Wed Feb 5 00:26:16 UTC 2014


hi,

there has to be a willingness to have a middle ground. there are also some 
who can do no wrong because they attended a school in Iowa in the 60's.
Bryan Schulz


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "sheila" <sleigland at bresnan.net>
To: "NFB Talk Mailing List" <nfb-talk at nfbnet.org>
Sent: Tuesday, February 04, 2014 5:57 PM
Subject: Re: [nfb-talk] What People Fear About Blindness:


that reminds me of an old saying if you stand for nothing you'll fall
for anything. Every organization has a mission statement based on core
beliefs that influence the  way in which an organization of people
conduct themselves. It shouldn't be any different because we are a
blindness related organization.
On 2/4/2014 1:05 PM, Buddy Brannan wrote:
> Sooooo…what you’re saying is that we really shouldn’t have any 
> philosophicalunderpinnings at all? Because having such is bad, 
> destructive, and ultimately divides us? Sure sounds like it. I, for one, 
> object.
> --
> Buddy Brannan, KB5ELV - Erie, PA
> Phone: (814) 860-3194 or 888-75-BUDDY
>
>
>
> On Feb 4, 2014, at 11:08 AM, Todor Fassl <fassl.tod at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Contrast the NFB's approach to that of the AARP. People joke about the 
>> AARP signing them up the day they turned 50. I'm not suggesting the NFB 
>> automatically sign people up the moment they lose their vision. Even if 
>> that were practical, it might not be realistic. My point is to draw 
>> attention to the difference in approaches. The AARP isn't going to have 
>> loyalty oaths and call it's members Aarpers or something like that. I 
>> suppose those things might be done casually but it's not part of the 
>> identity of the organization.
>>
>> The NFB encourages it's members to think of being a Federationist as part 
>> of their identity, right? I'm saying that is ultimately destructive. It 
>> encourages an "us against them" attitude and it drives away casual, 
>> moderate people who might otherwise become members.
>>
>> Probably the best example I can give to illustrate the problem  is the 
>> fact that there are two, often competing,  advocacy groups for the blind. 
>> If just getting things done is the #1 priority, why isn't working closer 
>> with the AC or even merging with it, at the very top of the adjenda? Keep 
>> in mind that this is just an example I chose to illustrate the problem. I 
>> know it would be really hard. My point is that not only is talking about 
>> working with the ACB not on the adjenda, it's  somewhat heretical.
>>
>> Again, that's just an example. I can give many more. The idea that 
>> braille is obsolete is heretical. Anything Dr. Jernigan once said is 
>> sacred. I can't tell you how distasteful it is to a casual member to be 
>> told Dr. jernigan once said something as if that settles the matter. If 
>> you're thinking, "Well, that's just individuals saying those things," --  
>> I'm telling you it's not. While these things may not be official NFB 
>> policies, they are part of the NFB's organizational structure.
>>
>>
>> Get what I'm saying? The NFB is the type of organization that would have 
>> a Dr. Jernigan. Imagine a debate at the convention between people who 
>> think braille is obsolete and those who do not. There would be a good 
>> side and a bad side, right? I'm saying it's a bad thing that there would 
>> be a good side and a bad side. That hurts us.
>>
>> On 02/03/14 16:19, Mike Freeman wrote:
>>> Toder:
>>>
>>> The goal of NFB has always been the complete integration of the blind 
>>> into
>>> society on a basis of equality with the sighted.
>>>
>>> However, it is in the American tradition for people with common 
>>> interests
>>> and/or problems to band together in asssociations to advocate for these
>>> interests or to solve these problems. NFB is in that tradition.
>>>
>>> However, I agree with you that blind people should *also* join in groups
>>> catering to things they -- the blind people -- are interested in.
>>>
>>> Mike
>>>
>>>
>>> -----Original Message-----
>>> From: nfb-talk [mailto:nfb-talk-bounces at nfbnet.org] On Behalf Of Todor 
>>> Fassl
>>> Sent: Wednesday, January 29, 2014 7:52 AM
>>> To: NFB Talk Mailing List
>>> Cc: Kenneth Chrane
>>> Subject: Re: [nfb-talk] What People Fear About Blindness:
>>>
>>> This is why I think it's time for the NFB to move on to the next phase 
>>> of
>>> advocacy. We need to work toward integrating blind people into society. 
>>> We
>>> need to be against anything that tends to seperate us from society and 
>>> for
>>> anything that makes it easier for us to take part in society.  I 
>>> wouldn't
>>> say we need to try to be "normal". I'd say "mainstream".
>>>
>>> You might be saying, "But the NFB already does that." Well, somewhat.
>>> But I think this is a greater paradym shift that it might seem at first.
>>> We tend to think of ourselves as a community onto ourselves. I think it
>>> might be hard for the NFB to shift toward a position where it's telling
>>> blind people to think of themselves as members of society first and
>>> Federationists second. But I think that's where we need to go now.
>>> You're not a blind person. You're a person who happens to have this 
>>> trait
>>> that binds you with the rest of us into a common cause.
>>>
>>> On 01/29/14 01:31, Kenneth Chrane wrote:
>>>> I am way behind with email, but that is nothing new. Just To:
>>>> Undisclosed-Recipient:;
>>>> Subject: [Stitchers] OT why people fear the blind
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> Why Do We Fear The Blind?
>>>> This is an article taken from the New York Times.
>>>> BRISTOL, R. I. - 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 ntrepreneurs 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 other worldly, 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.
>>>>
>>>> Victor Gouveia
>>>> Vice-Presi
>>>>
>>>> --
>>>> --
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