Thunder Dog - Michael Hingson [75]
I think, however, that blindness is not exactly like left-handedness. I think there are some things that are inherently easier to do with sight than without it. For instance, you can glance down the street and see who is coming. You can look across a crowded room and tell who is there.
But here, it seems to me, most people go astray. They assume that, because you cannot look across the room and see who is there or enjoy a sunset or look down the street and recognize a friend, you are confronted with a major tragedy—that you are psychologically crippled, sociologically inferior, and economically unable to compete. Regardless of the words they use, they feel (deep down at the gut level) that the blind are necessarily less fortunate than the sighted. They think that blindness means lack of ability. Such views are held not only by most of the sighted but by many of the blind as well. They are also held by many, if not most, of the professionals in the field of work with the blind. In the Journal of Rehabilitation for January-February 1966, an article appeared entitled: “Social Isolation of the Blind: An Understated Aspect of Disability and Dependency.” This article was written by none other than Dr. D. C. MacFarland, Chief of the Office for the Blind, Social and Rehabilitative Service, Department of Health, Education, and Welfare. Dr. MacFarland says:
Let me repeat a statement which I violently oppose. There is a slowly evolving fiction which can be summed up in the generalization, “Blindness is a mere inconvenience.” I do not agree with this, and I do not know what to call such exaggeration in reverse. I think it has done its share of harm, throwing some very well-intentioned people off the track about what blindness really amounts to in people’s lives.
It seems to me that Dr. MacFarland is as far off the track as the person who would contend that blindness is not even important enough to be considered a nuisance. I think it would be pleasant to look at a sunset. I think it would be helpful to look across a room and see who is there, or glance down the street and recognize a friend. But I know that these things are peripheral to the major concerns of life. It is true that it is sometimes a nuisance to devise alternative techniques to get the same results I could have without effort if I were sighted, but it is just that (a nuisance), not a tragedy or a psychological crisis or an international incident.
It seems to me that many of the problems which are regarded as inherent in blindness are more like those of the left-handed—in other words, created as a natural side effect of the structuring of society for the sighted. It seems to me that the remaining problems (those that are truly indigenous to blindness) are usually vastly overrated and overdramatized.
Blindness can, indeed, be a tragedy and a veritable hell, but this is not because of the blindness or anything inherent in it. It is because of what people have thought about blindness and because of the deprivations and the denials which result. It is because of the destructive myths which have existed from the time of the caveman— myths, which have equated eyesight with ability, and light with intelligence and purity. It is because the blind, being part of the general culture, have tended to accept the public attitudes and thus have done much to make those attitudes reality.
As far as I am concerned, all that I have been saying is tied up with the why and wherefore of the National Federation of the Blind. If our principal problem is the physical fact of blindness, I think there is little purpose in organizing. However, the real problem is not the blindness but the mistaken attitudes about it. These attitudes can be changed, and we are changing them. The sighted can also