Of Toothpaste and Shaving Cream

Of Toothpaste and Shaving Cream

OF TOOTHPASTE AND SHAVING CREAM

by Kenneth Jernigan

Almost everybody who thinks about blindness begins with the assumption
that if you are blind, you are at a tremendous disadvantage in dealing with the everyday
tasks of getting along and managing your life. To some extent, of course, that is true.

Regardless of other things, the world is structured for the sighted.
Most books are in print, not Braille; an increasing number of electrical appliances have
lights that flash and flicker instead of knobs that turn and click; and pictures are
replacing words on everything from the cash register at McDonald’s to the sign on the
bathroom door.

Most of these items and appliances could be marked and produced in
nonvisual ways, but the fact that they aren’t (and that they won’t be) is not an
overwhelming problem. There are techniques for dealing with the reading, the flickering
lights under transparent plates, and the pictures that tell you where to go and what to
do.

Functioning as a blind person in a world designed for the sighted keeps
you on your toes, but with a little thought and ingenuity you can manage. In fact, you can
manage quite well.

But that isn’t the way most people look at it. They figure that if
you are blind, your days are miserably bleak and limited. I’ve been blind all of my
life, and I think I am about as happy and successful as most of the sighted people I know.
It is true that I haven’t made a million dollars or been elected president of the
United States-but I get along, pay my bills, and look forward to a good dinner and a
Sunday afternoon. So do the majority of blind people I know. And I know a lot of them-some
successful, some just managing to get by, and most somewhere between.

And let me hasten to add that I am not just talking about people who
have been blind from birth but about all of the other variations-those who became blind as
children, those who became blind as young adults, and those who became blind in middle age
or later.

But if blindness is how I say it is-if you can have as much fun, make
as much money, and be as successful as anybody else-why do people think blindness is so
tragic and limiting? I have given a lot of thought to that question, and I believe the
answer is less involved with the major activities of life than with the insignificant
details.

It is true that over seventy percent of working-age blind people are
unemployed-not because they can’t do the job but because people think they can’t
do it and because they haven’t had opportunity. But most people don’t know that.
More to the point, they don’t think about it, and even if they did, they would simply
take it for granted that the majority of blind people are not unemployed but unemployable,
and then they would pass on to something else.

No, it is not the big things that cause the average member of the
public to think of blindness as tragic and limiting. It is the routine activities, the
details.

More specifically, it is the fact that when there is more than one way
to do a thing and when one of those ways involves using sight, the sighted person will
almost inevitably use the visual technique. It will be done without a second thought, with
the automatic assumption that the visual technique is superior. Some visual techniques are
superior, of course; some are approximately equal; and some are inferior.

Let me give you an example. A few mornings ago, my wife (who,
incidentally, is sighted) expressed some annoyance that her toothpaste had fallen off of
the brush. I was quite surprised, for I realized that something I had always taken for
granted wasn’t so.

"Do you squeeze your toothpaste on to your toothbrush, looking at
it as you do it, and then put the toothbrush loaded with toothpaste into your mouth?"
I asked.

"Why, yes," she said. "Doesn’t everybody do it that
way?"

"I don’t," I said. "I put the tube up to my mouth,
bite off what I want, and then put the brush on my teeth and go at it."

My wife was as surprised by my technique as I was by hers. "It
makes sense," she said. "I’ll try it."

She did, and she said how much more efficient my technique was than the
visual method she had been using. About a week later I asked her if she was still using my
toothpaste technique, and she rather sheepishly said that she wasn’t. When I asked
her why, she thought about it a minute and then said, "I guess I’m so used to
looking at it that it’s just too hard to change."

Here’s a case where the nonvisual technique is clearly superior
but where the visual method is automatically used even though it is not as good. My wife
(along with most of the other sighted people I have asked) has always, without even
thinking about it, taken it for granted that the sighted technique is superior.

If she had considered it at all before our conversation, she would
probably have felt that my method of putting toothpaste on the brush would be the same as
hers except that I would need to feel for the brush, which would be a little harder than
just looking at it.

Certainly the world doesn’t turn on whether you bite your
toothpaste or squeeze it onto a brush, but life is a matter of daily routine, not dramatic
events. So let me move from toothbrushes to razors.

I shave every day (or almost every day), and I do it with an ordinary
razor with a blade. Many of the sighted men I know tell me that they shave in front of a
mirror. Yet, I have known a great many sighted men who have worked at schools or training
centers for the blind and who, after seeing blind boys and men shaving in the shower, have
tried the technique and adopted it. I have never known one of them to return to the visual
technique. In fact, even those who shave in front of a mirror almost always rub their hand
across their face to feel if it is clean shaven. Even so, the average person tends to
think that shaving without sight is difficult. It isn’t. The nonvisual method is
easier and offers more flexibility.

Like most men who shave with a blade, I use shaving cream, the kind
that comes from a can under pressure and makes a big pile of foam. Since I have to wash my
face anyway, I combine the operation with shaving. I get my face (including my forehead)
wet, and I then spread shaving cream all over it. When I am finished, I rinse and am done.

A few years ago, when I was making television announcements for the
National Federation of the Blind, I thought it might be interesting to demonstrate
different techniques used by the blind. I had shots made of me walking down the street,
carrying wood to a fireplace, tying my tie, and shaving.

As the TV editors looked at the pictures, everything was all right
until they came to the shaving sequence. One of them said, "We can’t show that.
It would look like a vaudeville act, like somebody throwing a pie at your face."

I gathered from my questions to them that they were accustomed to
seeing TV commercials about shaving and that in those commercials a small amount of
shaving cream is put on a part of the face. Those commercials, it would seem, had formed
their image of what was normal and acceptable. As with some of the other things I have
been discussing, I had always assumed that other men used shaving cream the way I did.
Apparently such is not the case.

I said to one of the TV editors: "Don’t you wash your face in
the morning?"

"Yes," he said, "but I don’t do it with shaving
cream. I wash my face and forehead with soap. I rinse my face; and then I put shaving
cream on and shave." It seemed to me that this was a time-wasting, inefficient way to
do it, but I thought I would keep my opinion to myself.

When I was director of Programs for the Blind in the state of Iowa, we
bought an old YMCA building for a headquarters and training center. It had seven floors,
and the only way to get from the basement to the top was either by climbing the stairs or
by using the elevator.

It was, to say the least, not a modern elevator. In fact, it was one of
the old-fashioned kind using direct current. It had a grille-work at the front of the cab
and a lever that you pushed one way to go up and the other way to go down. There was no
way to tell when you got to a given floor except by looking-or, at least, that’s what
we thought when we moved in.

But those of us who were blind had the strongest possible incentive to
devise a nonvisual technique, for we couldn’t afford to hire an elevator operator-and
we didn’t want to walk up and down the stairs between the seven floors all day.

My first thought was that if we couldn’t see the floors, perhaps
we could string a cable from the top to the bottom of the elevator shaft with some kind of
tabs on it that would brush the elevator car and make a noise at each floor. That would
have been expensive and complicated and we never got around to it. In the meantime we
walked-at least, those of us who were blind did.

Then, one of the blind trainees found that he could stick a knife or
comb through the grille-work and touch the bar on the elevator door at each floor, thus
allowing a blind person to operate the elevator easily and efficiently. A little later we
learned that we had been going about the whole thing wrong. If we paid attention, we could
feel the air currents coming off of the floors as we passed them and could level the
elevator without any mechanical devices at all.

Why did it take us so long to discover this technique? I believe it was
because it never occurred to us to think in any other way except in visual terms. We
thought that if we couldn’t see the floors, we needed to devise a substitute to do
the same thing, to touch them in one way or another. Only when we opened our minds and let
our imaginations run free did we get the solution.

The elevator technique we developed was not superior to the visual
technique used by the sighted occupants of the building, but it was just as good. The fact
that it was different didn’t make it inferior. It just meant that it was different.

There is more opportunity for blind people today than there has ever
been in the history of the world, and we are only beginning to realize our possibilities.
We are truly changing what it means to be blind, and one of the ways we are doing it is by
coming to understand that visual techniques are not necessarily superior to nonvisual
techniques. And it isn’t just blind people who are learning this. It is also an
increasing number of the sighted public. We who are blind must lead the way and do for
ourselves, but we must do it in partnership with the sighted. And we must do it with
imagination and new ways of thinking.

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