24 April, 2011

There used to be a guy who went to my school, named James, who was blind. One reason I thought James was cool was because of his competence and confidence in asking people for help. He would walk into a room and ask what he needed to know about what was in the room. (I don't mean to act like this is some kind of unusual quality in a blind person, but I hadn't met anyone who was blind before so it seemed really cool to me.)

Once I was talking to Noah about James and Noah told me something he had heard from James's former roommate. James's roommate had asked, "What do you imagine it would be like to be able to see?" and James said, "It would be like having a hand that could feel everything in a room all at once." This has always stuck with me and I don't think I realized why until I watched this video that's been going around tumblr.

The video is an ad for a marketing firm, called "The Power of Words." It depicts a blind guy begging on the street and not getting very much money. A woman comes up, grabs his sign, turns it over, and writes a new message on it. For the rest of the day, the blind guy makes tons of money, and when the woman comes back later he asks, "What did you do to my sign?" She says, "I wrote the same thing with different words."

This would obviously be patronizing no matter what the sign said, but I found the words on the sign to be the most interesting part of the video. The guy's sign originally says, "I'M BLIND, PLEASE HELP." The woman changes it to, "IT'S A BEAUTIFUL DAY AND I CAN'T SEE IT."

This illustrates exactly what non-disabled people want from disabled people.

A lot of blind people are unemployed either because they weren't taught the skills they need to be independent, or aren't given the proper accommodations for getting and keeping a job. I think it's reasonable in our society for a disabled person to express frustration that their disability keeps them from getting the things they want, and to ask for help from other people because of their situation. So although I find a blind beggar to be a questionable subject for an inspirational video, the existence of such a person is realistic and I don't feel that I can condemn the video just because it's about a disadvantaged disabled person asking for money.

However, we're told in the video that the fact that this guy can't work and needs money isn't enough for people to want to help him. People only want to help him when he comes out and says not only, "There are things I can't do because of my disability and that sucks," but, "My experience of the world sucks on an existential level, not just a practical one, because I can't experience the world the way non-disabled people can."

I think one of my Autistics Speaking Day posts was about my desire to always add the phrase, "It's no big deal," after telling people about my disability, even though it actually is a big deal. This is because I don't trust people to understand the difference between the fact that there are some bad things about being disabled, and the idea that my disabledness is tragic in some overarching, objective way. Or rather an overarching, objective, spiritual way, if you know what I mean--the idea that disabled people are less human or less alive due to being disabled.

I think the most negative view you could reasonably have about being disabled is that it makes your life really hard, and it makes you upset a lot, and that sucks. This isn't necessarily my view but I would never criticize another disabled person for having it. But that isn't enough for non-disabled people. They have to feel that disabled people are missing not just the ability to have a job or feel secure, but that we're actually missing a vital part of being alive on the pure basis of our impairment.

I realize now that what James said stuck out to me because I heard it in the context of a society where stories about blind people are often about how they don't get to look at sunsets, or colors, and how tragic that is. I think I remember reading a children's book about a kid who "helps" his blind friend by describing different colors to him in terms of emotion. But if you're blind, the really cool, lovely details of life don't have to do with visual information because that just isn't a part of your life. Not getting to look at a sunset really isn't a big problem. What I liked about James's quote was that he thought of problems due to blindness in very practical terms--because he was blind, he didn't immediately know what was in a room the way sighted people did.

But for sighted people, this isn't enough.

Blind people have to say that their day is worse on an experiential level because they are blind.

And I think this duality--objective impairment, and the nebulous, often unlikely connotations of misery that are attached to it--explains a lot of the things non-disabled people do to disabled people, and why they seem so ridiculous when you look at them straight on.

7 comments:

  1. I remember seeing the documentary "Sound and Fury." There's a scene where a hearing woman and a Deaf woman are arguing about whether or not deafness should be considered tragic, basically. The hearing woman says something to the effect that it would be awful to never be able to hear music. The Deaf woman responds, "I don't care about music. I can't hear it."

    That line really made me think. If I've never been able to experience something, it's not possible for me to miss it. Like, I can't fly, but it doesn't bother me that I can't fly because I've never been able to fly (leaving aside the fact that no one can). I also think the music thing is kind of a red herring, since tone-deaf people can't really experience music either, and nobody acts like that's a huge tragedy, AFAIK.

    I thought I had some kind of point here, but I'm having trouble finding it. Sorry about that.

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  2. " The woman changes it to, "IT'S A BEAUTIFUL DAY AND I CAN'T SEE IT.""

    Oh wow. I wasn't actually planning to comment now but that is just awful. I don't know where people get the idea that it is even vaguely reasonable to say this, let alone make an add about it. On the other hand this is a really good post talking about it.

    "I think one of my Autistics Speaking Day posts was about my desire to always add the phrase, "It's no big deal," after telling people about my disability, even though it actually is a big deal. "

    When I talk about some of my bigger problems or even some of the medium sized problems I often either get the reaction that I must be lying and I'm not disabled enough for that to be true, or people start asking me why I'm living on my own and telling me to move back in with my parents (ie that I'm too disabled to make my own choices). An example of one of the bigger problems is that when I first moved here, I got lost very easily because I have trouble adapting to new places (maybe even new buildings sometimes) and it got to the point where I was wandering around for hours trying to find somewhere I could get food (I wasn't eating much at this point because I couldn't) and then, after giving up on finding food, spending hours just trying to figure out how to get back to my apartment. When I talk about things like this, I tend to get the first reaction I talked about more ("I don't believe you!" or the cousin "You're exaggerating") and some people get the second more, but they're actually both ways of dismissing people and can end up having similar effects.

    I think the "Well that's really awful" tends to accompany that second reaction that comes when people believe me and take me seriously about the problems I'm having, but still want to dismiss me. And so I end up saying "It's not THAT bad" after I've just spent a huge amount of effort trying to get people to take me seriously. It is pretty ridicoulous. I mean, yeah, I don't particularly like wandering around without having eaten and worrying that that I'm going to start acting weird enough that someone calls the police on me, but it's not like even at the very hardest points of my life that this is all that my life consists of. It also seems pretty worthless to focus on the things I can't do when there are so many things I CAN do, some of them things that most people don't get the opportunities to do.

    (Oh, if anyone is wondering, someone online eventually suggested that I call a taxi and ask them to bring me to the nearest grocery store, which I did. It was about two miles away and near somewhere I knew how to walk to, so I walk there now when I need to buy groceries. I also more recently found out that there's a sort of convienence store about 5 minutes walking behind my apartment. In addition to all this, I started keeping an emergency supply of flour in my freezer after that taxi ride, so I successfully eliminated the chance of future starvation and learned a few things about moving to a new area.)

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  3. d-d-d-double comment (sorry I write so much, maybe I should have my own blog even though I don't want/intend to)

    "That line really made me think. If I've never been able to experience something, it's not possible for me to miss it. Like, I can't fly, but it doesn't bother me that I can't fly because I've never been able to fly (leaving aside the fact that no one can). I also think the music thing is kind of a red herring, since tone-deaf people can't really experience music either, and nobody acts like that's a huge tragedy, AFAIK."

    Not being able to hear music would be a big problem for me becuase it is basically what I am basing my life around, but even I know that I could find other things to base it around. But before I started playing music I wasn't even that interested in listening to it, I did sometimes but much less than most people. When I was in elementery school a teacher had a worksheet were we were supposed to write our favorite kind of music, and I said I didn't have one. She said that was impossible. If I hadn't learned about playing music I probably still wouldn't be very interested in listening to music and wouldn't view it as a big loss if I lost the ability to do that.

    There is still that huge condescencion about not being able to be aware of something or about how people have a "small life" or something. But that misses that there are things that the people saying this are completely unaware of.

    This reminds of me of what Amanda Baggs wrote about in "Views from Above," here:
    http://ballastexistenz.autistics.org/?p=203

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  4. sorry I'm a bitch and don't respond to comments (or emails for that matter), I like all 3 of these comments a lot.

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  5. One time in elementary school one of our teachers asked us how it would feel to be blind. I said it would mean my eyes would never hurt again. She was surprised. (I'm light-sensitive and myopic and I sometimes get awful eye headaches when my prescription's wrong.)

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  6. The root of the word "disabled" is "able". So, a person who is not disabled is able. There is no such word as "non-disabled."

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    1. That doesn't really make sense to me. The word disabled isn't exactly a literal description of a group of people you know? I'm probably an "able" person in a lot of ways but I belong to the group of people called disabled people.

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