As long as the blind define themselves as "disabled," they will have this problem. It's paradoxical, because as I said, I don't really like to be around lots of blind people all together in a group, and yet we, the blind people, need some sort of cohesive teaching / enabling power that will allow us to not be disabled any more. It's idealistic as hell to think that every single blind person can escape from the disability of blindness without some cohesion, but also it's just as dangerous to try and develop a "blind culture," as the deaf have done. If we allow others to see us as disabled, then we will be, but how do you change an attitude which I believe to be literally hard- wired into the brain stem, which says that if a stranger can't meet your eyes, then they are not to be trusted but instead are to be ostracized and shunned, cast out? I personally don't have an answer, except for myself; I do not allow people to act toward me as if I were disabled, as much of the time as is feasible. Of course I ask for help when I need it, directions or, in the case of a mailing label the other day, the help of a sighted person to ensure the label she printed for me went on right--I'm not naive, but I struggle constantly to escape from the "disabled box," that people on the street put me in.
Growing up as an only child, born blind, with things like Braille a fact of life, rather than the exception, in a small town, in a very constricted and confined environment where I didn't even need a cane to get around, I could literally forget that I was blind--to this day, when people come up to me and start talking to me like a blind man, it often takes me a few moments to realize what's happening; until then, things people say to me sound nonsensical or outright rude. Until I remember that they're talking to my blind eyes, not to the man before them. It causes me no end of social hassle because I don't know that a person is "helping," me when I'm just doing my thing, and so I respond as a "normal," person would to someone who came up out of the blue and made a random comment about steps, or the curb, or whatever. The other day, someone in the post office thought they were helping by repeating everything the clerk said to me after she was done saying it. I turned and snapped, "Wait your turn!" and it was only when the person in question started yelling at me about how ungrateful I was that I remembered that, "Oh yeah; this is probably someone trying to help me the blind guy, not talking to me the guy." By then, as in numerous other instances, it was already far too late. (Eventually they had to call security to get the woman to leave me alone...) Whether that's a sign of my near-complete adaptation to blindness, my ADHD rearing its ugly head again, or what, I don't know, but I personally don't think of myself as disabled, don't act as if I expect people to give me a handicap. What would happen if every blind person, instead of going out the door with the assumption that "I'm blind, and people who come up and talk to me are talking to the blind me, not the true me," instead walked out the door with the assumption that "I'm just doing my thing, I'm as able as the next person, more or less, just different, and people who come up and talk to me as if I'm blind are rude?" This is the kind of universal change that I think needs to be made, and which I despair will ever be made. If thousands of blind people got on the phone to Microsoft, for example, and said, "What's wrong with this computer that I can't use it!? what's wrong with you for not making a computer I can use?" instead of waiting for an agency or a specialized software company to fix the problem for them?... Mark BurningHawk Baxter Skype and Twitter: BurningHawk1969 MSN: burninghawk1...@hotmail.com My home page: http://MarkBurningHawk.net/ -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "MacVisionaries" group. To post to this group, send email to macvisionar...@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to macvisionaries+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/macvisionaries?hl=en.
