Lots of food for thought in this stream.
I do agree with Miriam that blind couples have a tougher time than do
either sighted couples or mixed blind and sighted. I say tougher
because our world is set up to accommodate sighted people. A blind
couple might be independent, but need sighted assistance for certain
basic tasks. Things such as how to get spots out of clothes when you
can't see them yourself. Or stains on rugs or counters. Streaks on
freshly washed windows. Grocery shopping.
Even though sighted people also need assistance, it is in ways that
many sighted people need help. But because the sighted person uses
sight to accomplish a task which a blind person needs help doing, the
sighted person feels superior. Yet, that same blind person may be
highly skilled at tasks at which the sighted person is unskilled. Of
course the sighted person usually retreats to the old traditional
statement, "How marvelous. You do so amazingly well."
Both the blind person and the sighted person might be equally
independent, but the blind person is measured by how they function as
a sighted person, even though they are not. The blind person does not
judge the sighted person by blind standards, because as I said, the
world is set up for sight. We blind people are certainly able to set
conditions to allow ourselves to live independently, especially if we
have plenty of money. Money is the great equalizer. But even so, a
rich sighted person, who employs help to do all their daily activities
is seen as Independent, while a rich blind person employing the same
help is seen as Dependent. So, even though I have felt most of my
life as a blind man, that I am able to function independently, I
understand that this is not the way sighted folks see me. It comes
down to the fact that perception separates us. And in that sense, no
matter what my perception is, I will always be measured by the sighted
persons perception. And no matter how we try to "educate" the world,
it is, after all, the world as created by sight. Therefore, how I see
myself is the most important opinion that matters. I strongly
encourage support groups of blind people. We need to build upon our
collective belief that we can live complete lives. Since, like our
Mass Corporate Media, hammering the beliefs of the Ruling Class down
our throats, the sighted beliefs are pounded into our heads, teaching
us that we are unable to be as independent and as successful as are
sighted people.
For certain my life as a husband and father are different now that I
am blind. But I and my wife make trade-offs so that we share equally
as partners.
Just as in any endeavor, we need to assess our abilities, our
strengths and weaknesses. Knowing ourselves and learning to accept
ourselves is what independence is all about, to me.
Roger's comments brought to mind the years before TV. I had very
clear mental pictures of the people on the radio, disk jockeys,
announcers and the variety of actors. I don't think I ever came close
to accurately picturing people from just their voices. When I could
see, the most beautiful part of the girls I fell for was their eyes.
I really believed that I could tell what sort of a person they were by
looking into their eyes. After I became blind, I felt cheated. But I
soon learned to judge beauty by voice. I fell for several women on
the basis of their sound. Even when friends would describe some of
them as plain, or homely, or fat, or scruffy, if I was drawn to their
voice, then none of that mattered. So after divorcing my first wife,
I fell in love with the gentle, sweet voice of the woman who assisted
me in the Braille and Taping Service. We dated, married and had two
children. After 8 years, she had an affair with a man where she
worked, and after some stormy months she ran off with her girl
friend.
Once again I learned life's lessons the hard way. Pretty eyes or soft
voices are not a good way to determine who will make a good mate. And
it is as foolish to seek approval from the guys at the local bar, or
at the gymn. I think that our society leans far too heavily on sight,
when it comes to deciding who we will associate with. Looks tend to
begin sagging with stress and age. Once known as "the silver fox", my
"silver hair" has turned a whispy white, and my tight stomach seems to
have developed some blubber, and even the firm jaw line has developed
a wobble under the chin. Anyway, it's a good thing that Cathy loves
the "inner Carl". Because the wrapper is not holding up so well.
Carl Jarvis
On 4/28/17, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
I remember that when blind young people, especially guys, became interested
in people of the opposite sex, they would ask people with sight to describe
them. I gather that they felt like they needed sighted validation for their
attraction. I think that's pretty sad. It shows how dependent blind people
are on the opinions and standrds of sighted people. Those standards are
visually relevant. I don't see why they should be relevant to the blind
unless it's a matter of pride and wanting respect and adulation from the
sighted world. I also remember, from when I was young, although people on
this list have argued with me, that the tendency is for sighted women to go
with blind guys, but for very few sighted guys to be sexually interested
in blind women. Often the sighted guys who became involved with blind women,
had a personality of physical disability.
Miriam
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Roger Loran
Bailey (Redacted sender "rogerbailey81" for DMARC)
Sent: Friday, April 28, 2017 4:27 PM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: For White America, It's 'Happy Days' Again
Here is something else you might wonder about in your choice of a wife.
Being one of those strange people who read textbooks for recreational
purposes I came across an experiment of interest in a psychology textbook.
They allowed subjects to just sit down and talk a few minutes to a number of
members of the opposite sex one after another and then asked the subjects to
rate their conversation partners for attractiveness. Then they did the same
thing again with a different set of members of the opposite sex, but with
the subject blindfolded. It turns out
that their assessments of the attractiveness of their conversation partners
were radically different when they were blindfolded. They rated as
attractive people whom they would have rated as unattractive without their
blindfolds. It makes me wonder about myself. Whenever I meet someone new I
always form a mental image of them. I don't have a conscious basis for my
mental images, but I think it may be based on perceived similarities with
others whom I met in my sighted days with similar voices or personalities.
Undoubtedly my mental images are all wrong. I noticed that when I was first
becoming blind. I was hospitalized for eye surgery and I would ask the
nurses to describe themselves to me. Then the bandages would come off and I
could see that they gave me accurate descriptions, even good enough to have
picked them out in a crowd, but they still looked nothing like I had them
pictured.
Also I know that it is very common for sighted people to hear a radio
personality and hen see the person in a picture or in person and be shocked
that he or she looked nothing like one expected. All of this leaves me
wondering. There are so many women I have met after losing my eyesight who
strike me as highly attractive. I just wonder if I would recoil in revulsion
if I could see them. I think that might be the case because I think I
identified such a case once. There was a certain female bartender who did
strike me as attractive. Then I got into a conversation with a man in that
bar and the small talk turned to a bit of guy talk and he said that he did
not consider the bartender to be attractive at all and then he described
her. It had not been all that long at the time since I had lost my eyesight
and I recognized the description as matching that of a bartender I had seen
around before I became blind. Indeed, I did not consider her to be in the
least attractive. So, Carl, I think that it is a pretty good bet that both
of us have entirely different standards for female beauty than we did when
we were sighted.
On 4/28/2017 12:52 PM, Carl Jarvis wrote:
Interesting how so many of us blind men, and some blind women wind up
marrying sighted partners. Of course we might conclude that this is
so because there are so many sighted candidates as opposed to blind
ones, but I think that this is only part of the answer. After my
divorce from my first wife, whom I'd married as a sighted man, I dated
several women, some sighted and some blind. I came close to becoming
serious with two blind women, one who has remained a close friend for
nearly 50 years, and the other who was far to smart to get serious
over me. But then along came a young woman, a sighted woman, who
worked as my secretary in the Braille and Taping Service, and I
gravitated toward her, and subsequently married her. Looking back,
there were compelling reasons that I did not even think about at the
time. While I have blind friends who are married to other blind
partners, and they lead successful lives, nonetheless, the lack of
sight does create challenges that are not part of a sighted/sighted,
or a sighted/blind partnership. At the time, choosing between two
women, I would have said it was strictly a matter of love. But
looking back, did I fool myself? Probably. After all, sighted for
nearly 30 years, carrying the unspoken stereotypes about blindness,
still uncertain if I could carry my own weight, live independently, be
attractive to sighted women. Lots of social and cultural issues that
lurked just below the surface, ignored by me at the time.
The example you gave about the man, blind from birth, building his
mental image of Black people through the often unspoken inferences of
people around him, with no understanding of how deep prejudice toward
Black people is, he most likely felt he had a true mental picture,
without his being prejudiced.
No one ever sat me down and said, "Blindness will make you inferior",
but that is what I knew, down in my heart. No one told me that Gay
men were not real men, but that is what my view had been as a young
man. But I did receive enough conversation at home to help me avoid
being racially prejudiced. In fact, what finally helped me understand
prejudice, was the constant drilling by my parents that each person is
unique, and we accept or reject them based upon the sort of values,
the sort of person that they are. This finally got through to me
regarding my youthful prejudice toward Gays. While many of my school
chums judged people through stereotypes, I saw each person as just one
more human being, and accepted them, or rejected them on an individual
basis.
Sure, in all of that I had my prejudices, learned through living in
the neighborhood I grew up in. And I am still a work in progress,
learning new stuff about what jerks my chain or rings my bell. In
fact, I would like to be in the process of altering my belief on some
matter, the moment I leave this life behind.
Carl Jarvis
On 4/27/17, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
I may have mentioned this before. When I was in college, in my senior
year, I took an honors seminar in the Social Sciences, and I think it
was for the final, I had to organize a sociological study, perform
it, and write up the results. At the time, I had a part-time job in
the Lighthouse recreation program, teaching guitar and autoharp to
people of various ages. I decided to study the racial attitudes of
the teenagers with whom I worked. I composed a set of questions which
I asked them in order to elicit their racial attitudes. There was one
boy, just a few years younger than I, who'd been totally blind since
birth. What stands out clearly in my memory was that He described
what he believed, black people looked like. His description included
every stereotype you've ever heard. He'd learned what black people
look like from the culture which surrounded him. He had no visual
knowledge which might correct his beliefs. Interestingly, he became a
social worker, ended up working for our county hospital, eventually
became president of the Nassau County Chapter of the National
Association of Social Workers. He married a sighted woman, and was also
President of our local chapter of NFB.
Miriam
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Carl
Jarvis
Sent: Thursday, April 27, 2017 9:32 PM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: For White America, It's 'Happy Days'
Again
"It ain't easy being Green", or Black or Brown or Female or Gay. One
solution would be to provide every person with sleep shades, and
force the to be worn at all times. But then, I know some very
prejudiced totally blind people...
Carl Jarvis
On 4/13/17, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
"It is not the responsibility of the federal government to manage
non-federal law enforcement agencies," Jeff Sessions wrote in a memo
last week. (photo: Michael B. Thomas/Getty)
For White America, It's 'Happy Days' Again
By Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone
13 April 17
Jeff Sessions rolls the clock back on civil rights enforcement
Two recent news stories crossed like ships in the night, without
much public discussion of how they were related.
Last week, Attorney General Jeff Sessions ordered a review of all
agreements between the Justice Department and local police
departments around the country. Sessions wrote that "it is not the
responsibility of the federal government to manage non-federal law
enforcement agencies," and said the DOJ might "pull back" on federal
oversight responsibilities under Donald Trump.
The news came after the revelation by the New York Daily News that
Daniel Pantaleo - the officer who used a chokehold in the killing of
Eric Garner - had repeatedly been disciplined by the Civilian
Complaint Review Board
(CCRB) prior to the Garner case. New York City had fought like a
tiger to keep this information out of the public eye, and when it
finally was released, it was only through an anonymous leak.
The story about Pantaleo shows why the Sessions story is so unsettling.
People laughed when Donald Trump had to get Scott Baio to serve as
an opening-day speaker at the Republican National Convention. But
the Happy Days symbolism officially takes a darker turn with this
Sessions news. What Sessions is suggesting means literally going
back to a Fifties-era conception of the Justice Department's role in
preventing local police abuse.
If Sessions has his way, he will holster the most powerful weapon
the government has in addressing tragedies like the Garner incident:
federal civil rights laws.
The key statute is 18 USC 242, which gives the federal government
the right to intervene if a person has been harmed by a "deprivation
of any rights, privileges, or immunities secured or protected by the
Constitution."
An example of when this law comes into play would be a police murder
in which the officer is acquitted in a sham trial by an unabashedly
corrupt local government. The federal government is supposed to then
use its powers to step in and file charges for civil rights
violations, correcting the local wrong.
It took decades of hard-fought legal battles to get the government
to actually use this tool.
Back in 1959, during the days that Donald Trump once recalled fondly
to Michele Bachmann as the time when "even my Jews would say Merry
Christmas,"
a deputy attorney general named William Rogers wrote a memo very
similar in tone to the one Sessions just wrote. He declared that the
federal government should not intervene in local controversies and
file civil rights charges absent "compelling circumstances."
In practice, the Rogers memo meant that, provided there had been
some kind of local due process, no matter how flawed, the feds
wouldn't step in and take a second whack at an offender in a race
killing or a police brutality case.
This prohibition against "dual prosecutions" was the law of the land
for nearly 20 years. It didn't change until after an egregious
incident involving an unarmed African-American man named Carnell Russ.
In 1971, Russ was shot in the head by a policeman named Charles Lee
Ratliff at point-blank range in Star City, Arkansas, after being
pulled over for speeding.
Ratliff was acquitted in a joke of a trial in which an all-white
jury in Star City took less than 15 minutes to deliberate. Years
later, the NAACP sued the federal government - specifically the
attorney general under Gerald Ford, Edward Levi - for failing to use
its civil rights authority to investigate the obvious problems in the
Russ case.
The case went before a Nixon-appointed judge named Barrington
Parker, who would later become famous as the judge in the trial of
would-be Reagan assassin John Hinckley. Parker was African-American.
He ruled in the NAACP's favor. Although the federal government
appealed, a deal was later struck between the NAACP and Jimmy
Carter's attorney general, Griffin Bell, whereupon the federal
government would look at "each and every allegation of a violation of
the civil rights laws ...
on its own merits."
The 1977 Bell memo gave birth to the modern civil rights investigation.
That
means it took until the late Seventies, over 110 years after the
Civil War, for the government to finally accept its responsibility
to police local police. That the federal government still needs to
use those powers is self-evident. Just look at the Garner case and
countless others like it, where local governments routinely fail to
investigate and/or secure indictments against brutal cops.
After the Garner case, three out of four Americans believed there
should be charges for Pantaleo. There were protests around the
country, and the onslaught of high-profile brutality cases that
followed - from Michael Brown in Ferguson to Tamir Rice in Cleveland
to Walter Scott in North Charleston to Freddie Gray in Baltimore to
Sandra Bland to Dajerria Becton, the 15 year-old girl in a bathing
suit thrown to the ground by police in McKinney, Texas - led some
people to hope that there would finally be some kind of national
discussion on the issue that would result in positive changes.
With the Sessions news of last week, things have officially gone the
other way. The Trump administration is pushing for steep cuts to the
Justice Department budget, including the outright elimination of
funding for the Legal Services Corporation and Violence Against
Women grants, as well as slashing up to a third of the Civil Rights
Division's budget.
Sessions has already hinted that he will stop investigating local
police departments. Coupled with the budget cuts, we can probably
expect the feds to get out of the business of policing cops entirely.
Add cuts to legal services, and what we get is a clear message from
the people who elected
Trump: Their response to all of these awful films of local police
beating or strangling or shooting unarmed black people is to worry
that there's too much federal oversight of police, and too much
advocacy for people who come in contact with police.
The facile conclusion to all of this is that white America wants to
go back to the Fifties. But it's worse, and weirder, than that.
Seventy years ago, affluent white people could huddle in the
suburbs, watch Leave It to Beaver, and pretend that cops weren't
beating the crap out of people in East St. Louis or Watts or
wherever the nearest black neighborhood was. But these days, the
whole country regularly gawks at brutal cases of police violence on
the Internet. Nobody can pretend it's not going on, but millions of
people clearly don't want to do anything about it - just the opposite,
in fact. They want more.
Is this a twisted country, or what?
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