The Way We Think of Ourselves

The Way We Think of Ourselves

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The Braille Monitor – February, 2001 Edition

The Way We Think of Ourselves

by Peggy Elliott

Peggy Elliot

From the Editor: One of the hallmarks of maturity is honesty with oneself.
We pretend with children, young teens, and those of diminished responsibility
that they are what we are perfectly certain they are not--grown up and responsible.
With kids the strategy is, I think, that we can help the youngster grow into
adult behavior. With adults whom we believe to be incapable of assuming responsibility
for themselves, the mechanism is different. When we see no hope of eliciting
the responses of an equal, we tactfully ignore the inappropriate, assume responsibility
when we can, or in extreme cases simply treat the person like the child he or
she resembles.

I have observed this reaction in myself when confronted with immaturity
or inappropriateness in others, and I have seen others behave in the same way.
I have also been on the receiving end of such treatment from those who assume
that a blind person has no business out alone and had better be protected. Fending
off intrusive efforts to help, invasions of privacy and space, and assumptions
of incapacity are things that all independent blind people get lots of practice
doing.

What may be even harder to master is devising effective methods for getting
controlled amounts of information or assistance when it is needed. Tactfully
setting limits for would-be helpers is not easy and requires patience and a
sense of humor. But the fundamental necessity for responsible blind adults is
honesty with oneself.

My Braille skills are not what they should be. That is not because Braille
is too difficult for me to master. It is that I did not bother to work on my
skills when I was young enough for it to come easily to me. If you have trouble
figuring out where you are or getting where you need to go, perhaps you have
trouble making and keeping mental maps, or maybe you need practice paying attention
to your surroundings. There is some reason for your problem, and it is not simply
that you are blind, for many blind people know exactly where they are when they
are traveling. We accomplish nothing but self-delusion and headaches for everybody
else when we refuse to admit the truth about our skills to ourselves, particularly
when the truths in question have to do with blindness.

Peggy Elliott, Second Vice President of the National Federation of the
Blind, has been doing some serious thinking along these lines. Those who believe
that blind people should be shielded from unpleasant truths will not care for
her conclusions, but the rest of us would do well to think hard about what she
says. Here it is:

I have known for a long time that there are two basic ways of thinking about
blindness. One way, simply put, is that the blind person is responsible. The
other way is that someone other than the blind person must be responsible.

I think we have all become familiar over the years with this second view. It
is most commonly exhibited in two places: blindness service providers and potential
employers. Those blindness service providers who believe that someone else is
responsible for the blind person commonly assign the responsibility to themselves,
make decisions which the blind person should make, and try to get his or her
agreement either by convincing the blind person that blindness is a barrier
to decision-making or by use of the power of withholding services to get the
agreement. It's never pretty to see a blind person either willingly or by coercion
giving up control of basic decisions, but it's more common than we would like
to think.

The other place where we too often find the attitude that someone else is responsible
for the blind person is in potential employers who do not inquire about the
blind person's qualifications to perform the job but focus on ability to arrive
at work, plans for finding the rest room, and other tasks of daily living that
such employers assume the blind person cannot perform. The assumption of these
employers is that, since the blind person cannot possibly perform such tasks
independently, he or she cannot become a valued and efficient employee. The
potential employer fails to hire the blind person without ever articulating
the reasons why.

We in the Federation have long recognized both sources of the basic misconception
that blind people cannot function responsibly. While we have often criticized
specific instances of this attitude, our major thrust for years has been to
focus on blind people ourselves. We have talked with each other, explained our
ability to be responsible for ourselves, given each other demonstrations, offered
tips for more efficient performance of a myriad of tasks without sight, and,
most important, stressed the learning and mastery of basic blindness skills
such as reading and writing Braille and learning to move safely and independently
through our environment as the cornerstones of our ability to take responsibility
for ourselves.

It's working. More and more of us every year move with confidence, offer invaluable
role models to others, read our speech and work notes in Braille, get computers
with Braille displays, and build lives of independence and dignity based on
these foundations. By doing so, we're changing what it means to be blind and
changing the future for all blind people.

Just in the last few years, I have noticed a third source for the notion that
someone else is responsible for blind people. As I have said before, I think
the fountain of this attitude often resides in the Americans with Disabilities
Act (ADA), which has all too often been interpreted as a federal instruction
to the able-bodied to take care of all disabled people. Much good has come from
the ADA, especially in the area of accessibility for people using wheelchairs.
But I detect a distressing whiff of custodialism developing in the public perception
of the ADA as it applies to blind people and not much of a diminishing effect
on those potential employers' attitudes. They still think we need someone else
to take care of us. They now know that they have been nominated for the duty,
and they are not excited about it.

The truly distressing recent development is among blind people ourselves. It
revolves around the word "need." I have dutifully perused the terms
of the Americans with Disabilities Act once I noticed this trend, and I can
find no single use of the word "need" among the many words of this
eighty-page law. Yet I hear it commonly used to describe what individual blind
people want. In the minds of such blind people, turning a personal desire into
a "need" somehow seems to endow the desire with the force of law.

It has long been my experience that, for every personal desire or need--whichever
way you term it--that one blind person may utter, you can find a blind person
expressing exactly the opposite personal desire or need and a whole range of
blind people articulating an infinite range of variations on the opinions of
the first two.

This has always led me back to a contemplation of the fundamental role of the
Federation as defined in its constitution as a vehicle for social action for
blind people. Individual blind men and women can and do express a variety of
opinions about what blind people need that is as wide as the galaxy. The Federation
applies logic to the situation and seeks through discussion and experience to
determine the maximum degree of independence for blind people and the minimum
degree of intervention by other people that will bring about the best result
for blind people. The answers aren't always obvious, and we often discuss issues
for years, sometimes heatedly disagreeing while we work out the terms of the
problem and the framework of the solution. But we carefully do it together,
using our common knowledge and experience rather than that all-too-often erroneous
personal opinion based on a constituency of one: "what I want" or
"what I need."

But back to this newest development: the blind person as source of the opinion
that someone else is responsible for the blind. I suppose it's always been around.
I even suppose that most blind people have passed through a stage in which they
devoutly hope that someone else will take responsibility for them. Most of us
who belong to the Federation have passed beyond that stage, have realized that
we are responsible for ourselves, and have set about to acquire skills and practice
them toward mastery that sets us on the road to independence. Most importantly,
we have studied and practiced the mindset of responsibility. We have watched
other blind people, asked advice, quietly challenged ourselves to do things
we once thought impossible, cheered others who are making such tries, and gradually
come to the realization that, looking back, for quite a time we have relied
upon ourselves for decisions and used as our method of making choices the fact
that we are responsible for ourselves. But it appears that some of us blind
people do not seek to change and grow, do not seek personal responsibility,
have quite literally decided that it is easier to have someone else be responsible
and that the Americans with Disabilities Act can be used to enforce this decision.

For example, I have noticed an increasing emphasis by blind people not in the
Federation upon their "needs" being met by transportation providers.
I recently read a description by one blind person of what he thought had been
a nightmarish experience in an airport and another by a woman who felt that
her treatment on a train trip was inexcusable. As I absorbed the details of
each story, characterized by their authors as failures of the transportation
providers to meet their "needs" appropriately, I felt greater and
greater astonishment. It appeared to me that both blind people seemed to believe
that they could enter the transportation system without travel skills or effort
on their part to try, simply expecting one-on-one entry-to-exit personal-attendant
service by employees of the transportation system. In the mind of each, it seemed
to me, was the unspoken belief that a blind person cannot travel independently
in an airport or on a moving train--a fact that should be so obvious to all
that employees of the companies should have leapt to their sides at any point
when the passenger was in motion, offering an elbow and a smile, pleased to
be able to serve and delighted to do it without a request or demonstration of
need, which should at all times, according to these blind people, be assumed.

I was astonished. I have traveled internationally through the air transport
system and throughout the country on trains. Personally I have never needed
or wanted assistance from airline or airport personnel or train employees. In
fact, I have found it a rather tedious descant to my travels that I must continually
refuse help I didn't ask for and then refuse it again and again, often from
the same person, often as the person puts his or her hands on me and begins
to move me bodily in some direction--never the one I have chosen but one the
sighted employee has decided upon for me.

So here is a perfect instance of that difference of opinion I mentioned a
minute ago. I want no help unless I specifically ask for it. When I ask, I am
prepared to help the person I am questioning to give me useful information (that
is, no pointing) so that I can achieve my goal of getting where I am going.
I want the people I ask to know I am blind because that's the only way I can
get them to provide useful information.

On the other hand, these two stories I recently read were written by people
who wish help as the default setting--everywhere, every time movement is required,
without their request and without anyone mentioning that they are blind. In
fact, one of the authors reported with disapproval that the person who was supposed
to help him told him that "you people always expect us employees to drop
everything and do whatever you want, regardless of other duties"--just
what I thought of the blind person's request. He obviously thought this was
not only rude but a near-breach of the unspoken agreement he hopes for that
no one will mention the reason he "needs" this help.

I am tired of hearing blind people say they have "needs." So does
everybody else. The special use of this term by and about blind people is supposed
to help all of us avoid the nasty little task of mentioning that the blind person
"needs" something because he or she is blind. The reason for the "need"
is supposed to be obvious, and politeness should keep all people in our vicinity
from mentioning it. Moreover, our "needs" are assumed by all who use
this formulation to be very specific and well-understood and to involve not
only silence on the subject of why the need exists but also silence on any aspect
of the blind person's situation he or she doesn't want discussed.

For example, the story about the blind person in the airport involved his
returning to his home airport late at night when the airline employee was charged
with locking up after that flight. Walking the blind person to the baggage carousel,
finding his luggage, and then walking him and the luggage to the curb to find
a cab for him were not in the employee's expectation and were being added to
his duties of closing up the gate to which he would then return after having
left it unattended. I could certainly see why the employee was irritated. But
the thing I really couldn't understand was why the blind person, returning to
his own home airport in a city where he had lived for a number of years, couldn't
perform these tasks for himself and wanted an airline employee to do them for
him.

Instead of taking the time to learn how to get around the airport for himself,
this blind person expected others to help him every time he entered the airport
and further expected that the help would be provided without his having to ask
for it and with a smile.

The woman who rode the train told of being placed in the handicapped car. I
didn't even know there was one, and I certainly wouldn't ride there. Her criticism
of the train employees involved their not responding when she pushed her button
for help and their not coming to tell passengers when food was being served
since the intercom was not working. I think I would have found out about the
food myself. And I can't imagine wanting to summon a train employee to my seat.
If I for some reason want a train employee, I get up out of my seat and go find
one, just like everyone else. Why should they come to us and to no one else?
Apparently this blind train rider wanted assistance not accorded to any other
train rider, wanted it instantly, and wanted it without having to call attention
to her blindness. As far as I can tell, she had a long, hungry trip, but to
her the problem was lack of train-employee focus on "meeting her needs."

Then there was the story written by the woman who was dropped off at the corner
she requested by the bus company. The only complaint I hear from blind people
about buses involves being able to find the right corner with the driver's help.
But this woman found the right corner on the first pass--no question about it.
But that wasn't the problem, according to her. You see, she couldn't figure
out how to cross the street. That seems clear enough to me--bad training, lack
of confidence, whatever. Do some brush-up work.

But the woman who wrote this story saw it differently. She asked the bus driver
to get off his bus and to "line her up" to cross with the traffic
light. The bus driver, quite reasonably in my opinion, declined to get out of
his bus and "line up" a blind person. As she writes the story, then,
due to the bus driver's cruel refusal to help her, she could not get across
the street and so was compelled to begin a forced march along the sidewalkless
side of the street upon which she was stranded with snow and mud underfoot as
companions in a futile search for another traffic light she could figure out.

This woman diagnosed the second problem, in addition to the cruelty of the
bus driver, as one of lack of buzzing traffic lights telling her when to cross.
She is now on a campaign to fix both problems. It has apparently never occurred
to this woman that her own skills are the deficiency in this story, not the
cruelty of the bus driver nor the lack of buzzing traffic lights.

That's not a world I would choose to live in. I believe that my needs are my
own to take care of and my responsibility, not that of someone else. Furthermore,
I don't want other blind people to stamp their feet and demand that we all be
helped every time we move more than an inch or two, without question and without
any conversation about it. I don't want train employees hovering over me, shoving
me into handicapped cars, and jumping to serve my every need or want. I don't
want traffic engineers and bus companies leaping to help me whenever I turn
up, even to the point of leaving an idling bus with other passengers to "line
me up" and making traffic lights buzz in case I might pass by.

And I have worked too long and hard to be able to pass through the airline
system as just another passenger treated just as badly as all the others and
no differently to want to go back to the bad old days when, the minute my nose
appeared in an airport, airline personnel were leaping out to put their hands
on me and move me about according to their decision about what I needed as a
blind person. In other words, I specifically and exactly want precisely the
opposite of what the blind airline passenger, the blind train rider, and the
blind bus rider say they want.

Most of all I do not want to live in a world in which everyone else is constantly
responsible for meeting my "needs." In fact, I don't want anyone in
the world to worry about my "needs" to try to meet them, or even to
think about them. They're mine, not public property. They have not been federalized
with the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act. And I think we have
enough trouble with the blindness service providers and the potential employers
who presume we are not responsible. The last thing I want is for blind people
to start standing up and saying that they're right, that we blind people--all
blind people--have "needs," the exact same "needs," which
must be met by somebody else, anybody else but the blind person. If that's what
the ADA gives us, it will be a long, long step backward for blind people. There
are now blind people abroad in the land advocating exactly that.

I continue to believe that the Federation has been right all along. Sure, it
takes work. What in life worth having doesn't? But I refuse to believe, as an
official of the American Council of the Blind told me recently, that most blind
people cannot get around very effectively or safely right now and moreover never
will. My own personal need is for blind people with those kinds of attitudes
about the capabilities of blind people to re-examine them and to realize that
claiming we blind people have "needs" is just a cop-out, a way of
refusing to learn and to grow. I hope that thousands of my fellow Federationists
need the same thing. Are you out there?

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