Angry Blind Girl (er, or something)

Yes, I need this cane.

Yes, I can get around with it, and I can see well enough to do things like read a book or respond to a street light, at least for the most part. I can even fire a gun with a reasonable degree of accuracy and navigate in strange cities. These abilities, however, do not mean that I should be forced to go through life without the aids available to visually impaired/blind people.

I find that there is an attitude that is pervasive in Western society about the abilities of those who are impaired. I believe it is the same attitude that spurs people to come into work with pneumonia rather than suffer the guilt of missing a day of labor. We are, whether we like it or not, a country founded on Puritanical values. One must master the flesh, and if one does not, then that is a failure on the part of the impaired person. Therefore disabled people country wide are pushed to look as ‘normal’ as possible. I myself went through life without any visual correction for nearly nighteen years. There was a benefit in that my burning desire to be ‘normal’ forced me to learn many alternative techniques for doing sighted activities, but the disadvantage was that I was never taught what the National Federation of the Blind calls the skills or tools of blindness.

Because the value of conformity was so clear in the cramped halls of disrepute known as American public school, I fought all of the feeble attempts to teach me non sighted mobility. I thought the instructors who tried to inform me were calling me retarded. And anyway, there were plenty of people with less sight than me, so why learn these things when I could already get around? If mobility instructors truly want to bring about change for school children, the issues that fester in the shadows at public schools will have to be dragged out into the light and forcibly slain. A mobility instructor is hampered from the moment she steps foot into the room with the impaired child, hampered by the inherent humiliating nature of public schools, hampered by ineffetive intervention for bullying, hampered by a social system so cutthroat it would make the boardrooms of major coorporations look like ice cream socials. When the mobility instrucotr is called in to help a child who has gone many years with no aid, they are facing a task of Herculean proportions. Not only is the school culture in place (not to mention the opinions of parents, oft well meaning, who do not want their child labeled as disabled) but years of resentment and rage may be in effect, a bulling elephant smack dab in the middle of the room.

The point is, those people like myself who use the tools of blindness (and my use of these things is imperfect. I am that angry child, grown up now yes, but still struggling with the reversal of attitudes. My whole life I have tried to appear as a sighted person. So much energy has gone into fueling this illusion that it is hard to admit that I am an Other.) are not lying. We aren’t out to get your sympathy or your money. The word blind encompasses so many conditions and levels of vision that even a person who is partially sighted can be classified as blind.

As for me, I will say this. It used to be that if I lost my glasses I couldn’t do even basic things until I found them again. I couldn’t get around at all. It was always a scary experience that was disorienting and panic laced. Now as I learn to use a cane, the fear receeds because I know I can get around now should something happen. Glasses, after all, are not a permanent fix. They aren’t part of my body and can be easily be rendered inoperable by a variety of circumstances. The cane is not a part of my body either, of course, but the skills it imparts to me remain even when I don’t have it.

So, next time, think before you ask “do you really need that?”