When a guide dog joins your life many things happen at once. First you’re no longer alone with your vision loss. Most people are at first quite alone with it–owing to the medical model of disability once you’ve lost your sight you’re defective. They take away your driver’s license. Maybe they give you a telephone number for “Talking Books” though probably not. So you go home. You’re the smallest alone person in the world, a final final man, woman, or child of alone. You’re at the center of the earth. You can’t even take a walk because no one has bothered to show you how. Blindness then expands like those early wings Leonardo drew. It becomes a bat-like thing shadowing your relations with the world. If you’re a child the public school doesn’t want you; if you go to university they make it amazingly tough to get what you need. In the classroom the videos and projections are not described. Sullen bus drivers refuse to say which stop you’re at. The days are steep and that’s “once you’re out”. Its no wonder so many stay off the work rolls and give up. Its a frigging unkind world out there.
Maybe the word is rancorous. Its a rancorous world. The means of production doesn’t like vision loss. Its an expenditure. You represent in your sightlessness the neo-Victorian figure of uselessness. Progressives think its a good idea to educate you or give you rehabilitation. But others imagine you should go begging. There are blind people who beg in the shadow of the university where I teach. Ironically they’re just a block away from the disability studies program. You see how easy it is to fall off the wheel of fortune.
And then the dog enters. She’s capable and comes from a team of accomplished people. Her people believe there’s nothing the blind can’t do. Your dog is eager. So the first thing you discover with your dog is capability and zeal and though the two things are not always the same they are with dogs and you’re the grand prize winner because you’re going to go everywhere with c and z and your dog won’t let you forget it. “What’s your dog’s name?” a stranger asks. “Prozac,” I tell her.
Then thing number two occurs: the ten thousand cracks in culture start widening. Because you’re on the street or in a restaurant, suddenly you’re on every street, you enter every cafe. You’re no longer liminal. No threshold stops you. But there’s more to this than entry or access–its the complete engagement of possibility. Don’t kid yourself. Possibility is the stock of the soup.
I know guide dog users who have climbed mountains, walked the Appalachian Trail, run marathons, and in turn, yes, work in the unkind world out there. But dogs are the antidote. Ain’t no unkindness around here. Or as Jerry Lee Lewis might say: “there’s a whole lotta shakin‘ goin‘ on.”
Planet of the Blind 