Posted by:
blindguy
(
)
Date: March 07, 2023 04:09PM
Henry Bemis Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> "Well, let me turn the tables a bit. If you were
> born in to a society where everybody had the
> function of reading minds which you didn't have,
> wouldn't it be a tragedy because you couldn't read
> minds while everybody else could. When other
> members of that mind-reading society saw you
> walking by, they'd look at you and think, or say
> out loud: "There goes that poor HB! He cannot read
> minds like we can. Maybe we should try to create
> something that would allow him to read our minds
> like we can read his. I mean, he's so different
> from us. Isn't it a tragedy." And the thought
> would steer away from trying to assist you in
> trying to gain social acceptance to trying to
> figure out a way to make it possible for you to
> read minds."
>
> COMMENT: Doesn't this suggest a 'two-pronged'
> (both positive) response to the disabled: (1) To
> address the disability directly; and (2) to
> address the disabled's need for acceptance within
> society or some social group. It would seem that
> some balance is appropriate.
I would agree with you on this point.
> _______________________________________________
>
> "Farfetched, you say? Many people with muscular
> distrophy were not happy with the Jerry Lewis
> telethons and all the money they raised. Why?
> Because practically all of that money went in to
> building new labs and buildings and facilities to
> try to cure the disease (which they haven't found
> a cure for yet) and very little was going to
> assist those who were strugglinb with muscular
> distrophy now to gain full entrance into society.
> Many people who could have been assisted in
> learning how to live with their disease and how to
> be full members of society were instead left to
> die while waiting for a cure that has never
> come."
>
> "I don't mean to begrudge those who are looking to
> cures for muscular distrophy; neither do I mean to
> begrudge those who are looking into cures for
> blindness or polio (we have a preventative vaccine
> for that now but no cure) or any number of other
> disabling diseases. But the question should be
> asked: What about those who have those diseases
> now. Shouldn't we be spending more money training
> them on how to live with their disabilities *and*
> making sure that they have as fair a shake as
> everybody else in society to gain employment,
> raise a family, etc.?"
>
> COMMENT: Again, as you seem to also be saying,
> this is a problem of appropriate balance, and a
> justified frustration when not enough attention is
> given to (2) above, rather than (1). I am
> sympathetic to this objection. Moreover, I would
> add that the disabled (in any given context)
> should have an important voice in how this balance
> is determined.
I *mostly* agree with you here. My only quibble is that the disabled community should be the primary voice for determining this balance. Why? Because, unlike their able-bodied counterparts, they/we are the ones who are going to have to live with the results of that balance.
> ________________________________________________
>
> Now I'm going to contradict something I've said in
> the above paragraphs. If you read the whole
> article at the provided link, you will find that
> society was *not* very accommodating to Ms.
> Heumann and her disability; she was turned away
> from school as a child because her wheelchair was
> deemed as a "fire hazard"; when the 1973
> Rehabilitation Act was passed with Section 504,
> neither the Nixon nor the Ford administrations
> wrote rules to enforce it, and the Carter
> administration only did so after public protest by
> disability civil rights activits led by Ms.
> Heumann in Oakland, California, in 1977; and other
> areas.
>
> COMMENT: In all fairness here--but not to excuse
> pure stupidity or a gross lack of empathy--I would
> point out that accommodating a disabled person is
> often difficult and confusing. For example, a
> teacher of chemistry who is suddenly faced with a
> blind person in her high school or college class
> might well have an initially justified reaction of
> "How am I going to manage this." There may not
> seem to be a way at all to reasonably accommodate
> this student without undue constraints of all
> kinds, involving everyone in the class as well as
> the teacher and disabled person herself. A
> teacher might well honestly feel, in good faith,
> that this just cannot be done.
>
> It seems to me that the disabled need to realize
> that in many difficult contexts the failure to
> accommodate a disabled person is not always due to
> a lack of empathy or a cavalier attitude. There
> needs to be established programs, instruction, and
> methodology to assist teachers, and others, as to
> how to deal with such circumstances. I assume that
> to some extent this is being done.
You assume correctly, particularly with regard to public education. For specifically the blind, every (or nearly every) public school has a person on staff who is a resource teacher. Sometimes, a single district hires one or more resource teachers for all of its schools--and these are called itinerant teachers. In any case, the primary purposes of these teachers are to 1) provide support and instructions to the blind students on blindness skills (skills needed to succeed in life as a blind person); and 2) provide regular classroom teachers (such as the chemistry teachers in your example) with resources and assistance when the latter come to them and say, "I have a new blind student in my class. How can I help him/her to fully participate."
I should probably stop here and explain IDEA. Poster Summer has probably already dealt with this, but it's an acronym that means Individually Determined Education" and I can't remember what the A stands for. In practice, it is where the parent of a blind or disabled child has a meeting with their public school district representatives to draw up a plan for educating their blind or disabled child. If I remember correctly, the law creating IDEA was passed in 1975 and its goal was to assist in mainstreaming disabled students into public classrooms.
> _____________________________________________
>
> Society in and of itself will not look at disabled
> people and say "How can we help them with their
> tragic loss." Some of its members may help some
> but only if it doesn't mean they have to give up
> any of what they have. For example, architects are
> willing to support the rights of the disabled as
> long as they don't have to create or modify
> buildings for them. So expecting society to look
> at the tragedy of a disability and make the
> situation better for the disabled is wishful
> thinking at best.
>
> COMMENT: I don't doubt this. Empathy is much
> easier when it doesn't hit home. That is why
> there needs to be a 'social conscience' that is
> formalized through the establishment of legal
> rights and related laws. But it seems to me that
> it does not aid the disabled by being too cynical
> about this. I truly believe--perhaps
> naively--that most people *do* care about the
> disabled, and *do* want to help. Progress toward
> accommodations bares that out, however,
> imperfectly.
> ___________________________________________
>
> "I can't find it now, but I remember a poll done
> back in the 1990s that was reported by NPR. It was
> a poll of disabled parents, and it turned out that
> a majority of them wanted to have their offspring
> have the same disability they did. To me, poll
> results like that make sense--especially when you
> realize that able-bodied fathers who are
> carpenters want their sons to grow up to be
> carpenters, too. In short, we want our offspring
> to be exactly like us, even though both history
> and the genetic sciences say that this isn't
> likely to happen."
>
> COMMENT: I just don't get this at all! It is one
> thing to want a child to 'follow in one's
> footsteps,' and quite another to want a child to
> 'suffer' the same disabilities. Those disabled
> who have such extreme views seem to me to have
> lost perspective. And it seems to relate to an
> insistence that the disability itself is not the
> problem, but rather the reaction to it. But the
> disability *is* the problem. It is not *all* of
> the problem, but at bottom it is the main problem.
> Honestly, I do not know how one can view it
> otherwise--whether disabled or not.
Here is the area where the lyrics I quoted from at the top of my initial response matter most. It *always* depends on your starting point. I get the impression that you believe that everything you have is perfect (or good) because it works for you. It does not, or has not, occurred to you that what you have for yourself may not be the best for everyone else, nor what they want. The reason that a disabled person might want a child who has their disability is the belief (rightly or wrongly) that they can more easily relate to or teach somebody who is just like them and who (presumably) has the same problems they do.
But, you might argue, "Our offspring don't necessarily want to hear what I say or learn from my experiences." And I'd say you would be right. However, we humans, probably for survival reasons and very much like the rest of the animal kingdom, tend to think in the short term and from our own perspectives. So I think it's natural, though certainly short-sighted, for a disabled person to wish to have a child with his/her disability.
> ___________________________________________
>
> "There is one other point about viewing one's
> disability as a tragedy that I will make here. If
> you view yourself as a tragedy because of a
> condition that you have that is not shared by
> others, then you are lowering your personal
> expectations of yourself. You cannot say "I'm
> going to try to find work even though I am
> tragically blind." The vast majority of potential
> employers are going to turn you away (they need
> someone who can actually do the job and not some
> poor blind schmuck who thinks that his sight loss
> is a tragedy). Those who are interested in hiring
> you often a) fail to recognize your potential or
> b) have some nefarious use for you in mind (like
> paying you below the minimum wage and absconding
> with the rest because they figure you won't
> complain.)"
>
> COMMENT: That is a great point! The word "tragedy"
> is like the word "pity." They are laced with
> negative connotations, especially psychological. I
> totally get why a disabled person would react
> against the use these words in the context of
> their disability. But we can preserve my point by
> softening this by changing "tragedy" to
> "unfortunate" and "pity" to "empathy." With such a
> change, my point in this thread would be for the
> disabled not to lose sight of the fact that
> regardless of accommodations, any disability
> remains inherently "unfortunate" and not just
> different. It is this 'unfortunate' part of being
> disabled that drives empathy, drives social
> consciousness, and at the end of the day drives
> accommodations. At least that is the way it seems
> to me.
I will go halfway with you on this one. I think empathy for others, whether they are disabled or not, is preferred over pity. I would, however, draw the line at the use of the word "unfortunate," as that word, though weaker than tragic, still has negative connotations, especially for the blind person who attempts to use it to describe him/herself. If you want to have equal access to society, you cannot go around telling others how unfortunate it is that you are blind; rather, you must be prepared to say how you will be able to accomplish the same things that your sighted peers do though perhaps by different methods.
It is good for all, both blind and sighted alike, to have a social consciousness--it can, in some instances, assist in the lives of some individuals. But make no mistake. While there have been some changes made, the system under which we all live must be changed to more fully recognize that blind and other disabled people can live a full and happy life.
> ____________________________________
>
> > (3) So, aren't there really two potential
> > tragedies here; the disability itself, and the
> > moral failure of society to respond to it?
>
> I'll give you a maybe on that response. As I've
> just stated (and stated before), I cannot afford
> to view my personal disability as a tragedy.
> Society is not going to be able or willing to meet
> all of my accommodation needs on those terms *and*
> it will leave me depressed for the rest of my
> life, however long that may be.
>
> COMMENT: Well said! Nonetheless, I am reminded of
> Stephen Hawking, who suffered from ALS for most of
> his adult life. Clearly the initial diagnosis was
> "tragic" in every sense of the word. I suspect
> that when you first realized that you were going
> blind you experienced a similar sense that such a
> prognosis was tragic in a very personal way. In
> Stephen Hawking's case, he had every accommodation
> money could buy, coupled with the highest level of
> professional accomplishment, wealth, and fame.
> Did all that take away the "tragedy" of his ALS
> that plagued him throughout his life? Did your
> own subsequent accomplishments take away the
> tragedy--or unfortunateness--of your being blind?
First, a quick note on my background. I was born blind. While I had some light and shadow perception until the 1990s, all of that is gone now. Because my residual sight when I was young was so limited and because those who taught me insisted that I learn to do things the way that totally blind people did, I was as prepared as I could be when I gradually lost what little sight I had. I read braille well and I knew how to use the long white cane to find out what was ahead of me. I really didn't miss what I could barely see in the first place.
That said, you are partially correct. When a person who has been sighted loses all of his/her sight, it seems like a tragedy to them because they don't know how to do what they could do before using sight. And *if* they never learn blindness skills, then that sense of tragedy or unfortunateness may come to rule or dominate their life and outlook. However, if you become proficient in the skills of being blind, then many of the negative consequences of the loss of sight go away for you
>
>
> In either case, it is not for me to say. But when
> I think about Hawking and am inspired by what he
> accomplished *scientifically*, the context of his
> ALS does not simply go away. The inspiration he
> projects comes not from his success in making
> something originally tragic not tragic anymore,
> but in rising above such tragedy. From Judy
> Neumann's statement in your OP, for Hawking at
> least, there was no tragedy at all, because all of
> his accommodation needs were met. Yet, when I see
> a photo of him later in life, with his useless,
> dilapidated body, slumping over in his high-tech
> wheelchair, it is hard for me to view the matter
> in this way.
The big question (and I haven't read the late Mr. Hawking's thoughts on this) is whether he viewed himself as being unfortunate or a tragedy. My guess is that he didn't, though others did. I would argue that if Mr. Hawking had allowed himself to think about how unfortunate he was compared to able-bodied people, he would have been unable to come up with the many scientific theories and explanations that he did.
>
> Thanks for this exchange, blindguy. I am going to
> watch Ms. Heumann's speech in its entirety and
> think about all this much more. Notwithstanding
> any perceived 'pointedness' on my part, when it
> comes to experiences of the disabled, and any
> related analysis of facts or psychology, I defer
> to you. In this context, I am only seeking
> understanding.
And I enjoy responding to your posts. For though we may agree on some things and disagree on others, it is always important to keep an open mind.
Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 03/07/2023 05:16PM by blindguy.