Note: After I posted my dismay about Lera Auerbach’s operatic revival of Maeterlinck’s 1890 play “The Blind” on Facebook, her publisher Sikorski removed the following description from its website:
via www.planet-of-the-blind.com
I am reposting this. Lear Auerbach and Lincoln Center deserve approbation
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
CONTACT:
Chris Danielsen
Director of Public Relations
National Federation of the Blind
(410) 659-9314, extension 2330
(410) 262-1281 (Cell)
National Federation of the Blind and Two Blind Taxpayers
File Suit Against H&R Block
Boston, Massachusetts (April 8, 2013): The National Federation of the Blind (NFB), the oldest and largest organization of blind people in the United States, and two blind taxpayers residing in Massachusetts—Mika Pyyhkala and Lindsay Yazzolino—filed suit today in the United States District Court for the District of Massachusetts (Case 1:13-cv-10799-GAO) against the digital arm of H&R Block, which prepares approximately one in six tax returns in America and claims to be “the only tax preparation company capable of serving clients anyway, anywhere and anyhow they want to be served.” The complaint alleges violations of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) and Article 114 of the Massachusetts Constitution as enforced through the Massachusetts Equal Rights Act (MERA) because the company’s online tax services and Web sites are not accessible to blind taxpayers.
Blind people access computers and Web sites through screen access software that converts what is on the screen into spoken words or Braille, but improperly coded Web sites and applications can prevent this software from working properly, denying the blind user equal access. Both Mr. Pyyhkala and Ms. Yazzolino unsuccessfully attempted to file their 2012 tax returns using HRBlock.com. The plaintiffs are requesting the court to certify the suit as a class action.
Dr. Marc Maurer, president of the National Federation of the Blind, said: “As millions of Americans rush to prepare and file their taxes online using H&R Block’s popular Web sites, blind people are unable to do so because the company has refused to make its Web site accessible to us. For most blind people, this means that they must obtain assistance filing their tax returns, rather than having the option to do so privately and independently. The laws of the United States and the state of Massachusetts require, and blind Americans demand, that H&R Block make all of its online services accessible to blind taxpayers.”
The National Federation of the Blind and the individual plaintiffs are represented in this matter by Christine M. Netski of the Boston firm Sugarman, Rogers, Barshak & Cohen, P.C., and Daniel F. Goldstein and Gregory P. Care of the Baltimore firm Brown, Goldstein & Levy LLP.
The National Federation of the Blind needs your support to ensure that blind children get an equal education, to connect blind veterans with the training and services they need, and to help seniors who are losing vision continue to live independent and fulfilling lives. To make a donation, please go to www.nfb.org.
Last night I dreamt I owned a talking hat. This hat was different from the talking animals I’ve owned for it was cynical, even angry. “What makes you think you’re fit to talk about physics?” it said. I protested, said something like, “everyone should talk about physics, Einstein would agree.” “Aw, to hell with Einstein,” lthe hat said, adding, “to hell with everybody.” Because there’s logic to dreams, and because sometimes the dreamer knows it, I thought perhaps this was Satan’s hat–some combinative, wearable rohrshach demon-blob. “Are you the devil?” I asked. “Well Sonny I ain’t Madame Blavatsky,” it said.
In general this was a very fine dream. The hat was, of course, my Id, and I noted with satisfaction upon waking it was high up on a shelf.
Call me Celexa. I’m half man, half business. I should sport an advertisement on my back, something like: “Not depressed, and Eat at Joe’s!” for I’m a dancing hot dog, a man in a lobster suit–I’m “depression man” who just happens to live in a nation that doesn’t like depressed people as this is the land of the Big Smile and “I’m Feeling Great!”. (Man, if you look bluesy in in America you’re dangerous. You might own a big gun or be planning something.) But not Celexa Man. He’s blue only on the inside. Outwardly he smiles like a game show host, optimistically deferential. But inside, oh oh. Here’s the problem:
Medical Narrative only reaches some parts of our bodies and the body politic, but other shores it cannot reach. Do you understand? I’m not well. I’m decidedly unwell. I’m hidden. I’m blanketed by commerce and its designs.
Our public lives involve working hard, working very hard, never taking vacations, becoming sweet dinguses, statuettes. If you have some ideas they ought to be cheerful and they shouldn’t travel far. So much for the body politic and being well.
I am well. As for my secret, the interior body, medical narrative says I can be cured, healed, mended, or “made strong at the broken places”. But if you believe this, then you don’t understand the Body Politic which has other plans.
The Body Politic is like that cruel kid who lived next door when you were eleven–who made you play “dress up”. Today you will pretend to be healed.
If you’re insistent you may declare you “own” the “dress up game”–you call it performance theory. You acknowledge who is making you dress up, and pretend to resist stage directions. This is called idealism.
“Every form of addiction is bad, no matter whether the narcotic be alcohol, morphine, or idealism.” (Carl Jung)
I’m Celexa Man. I wear a lobster suit with additional accoutrements–panty hose, tattoos, a meerschaum pipe, many piercings.
I believe, perhaps dimly, in counter statements. This is what I think narrative “is” for they told me so back in English class.
Not only am I performing “being well” or “being alternatively, resistantly happy”–I’m imagining this for you. If you’re in a wheelchair, I want you to dance in your chair. If you’re blind, I want you to go skiing. If you’re a cancer survivor I want you to tell me how you survived on rage and the Tibetan bardo. This is the work of Celexa Man. And Celexa Woman, and Lord help us, nowadays, Celexa House Cat.
The Body Politic is commercial, it accepts everything because it sells happiness above all else. You can be ironic. You can put a safety pin through your cheek. The BP will sell you music to accompany your fetish. You can tell yourself you have a counter statement.
Celexa Man thinks he’s swallowed a chance to overcome his despair. He must of course think this afresh each morning. Crucial moments before a shave.
Celexa Man loves “overcoming narratives” more than medical marijuana and Whitman candies. He needs to believe moral victories and psychological health are co-determinates of imaginative language. Celexa Man loves irony, wears his crustacean suit with a brassiere, but he’s wary of too much ambiguity. He hopes when he puts down his razor he’ll be happy if only for a day.
The Medical Model and the Body Politic sail along and Celexa Man goes to Portugal where alone in his hotel he turns on the TV. He sees commercials in a lingo he doesn’t understand. Men dressed in feathers dance wildly to ersatz acid rock and then an enormous omelette appears. The voiceover sounds like poetry.
The Overcoming Narrative can kill you. But the adhesion of medical narrative and the BP encourage you to adopt overcoming for its easily commodifiable.
At home, when he unclamps the complicated Czarist underwear of his lobster suit, Celexa Man intuits how overcoming is a trap. Lobsters know about traps. Yes, I had to try out that joke. Celexa Man makes jokes. Overcoming is predicated with a syntax of limited psychological possibilities, which is of course the work of the BP.
You see, consciousness is sadness. Back to Jung: “The shoe that fits one person pinches another; there is no recipe for living that suits all cases.”
Jung again: “Nobody, as long as he moves about among the chaotic currents of life, is without trouble.”
Robert Bly now:
Eleven O’Clock at Night
I lie alone in my bed; cooking and stories are over at last, and some peace comes. And what did I do today? I wrote down some thoughts on sacrifice that other people had, but couldn’t relate them to my own life. I brought my daughter to the bus—on the way to Minneapolis for a haircut—and I waited twenty minutes with her in the somnolent hotel lobby. I wanted the mail to bring some praise for my ego to eat, and was disappointed. I added up my bank balance, and found only $65, when I need over a thousand to pay the bills for this month alone. So this is how my life is passing before the grave?
The walnut of my brain glows. I feel it irradiate the skull. I am aware of the consciousness I have, and I mourn the consciousness I do not have.
Stubborn things lie and stand around me—the walls, a bookcase with its few books, the footboard of the bed, my shoes that lay against the blanket tentatively, as if they were animals sitting at table, my stomach with its curved demand. I see the bedside lamp, and the thumb of my right hand, the pen my fingers hold so trustingly. There is no way to escape from these. Many times in poems I have escaped—from myself. I sit for hours and at last see a pinhole in the top of the pumpkin, and I slip out that pinhole, gone! The genie expands and is gone; no one can get him back in the bottle again; he is hovering over a car cemetery somewhere.
Now more and more I long for what I cannot escape from. The sun shines on the side of the house across the street. Eternity is near, but it is not here. My shoes, my thumbs, my stomach, remain inside the room, and for that there is no solution. Consciousness comes so slowly, half our life passes, we eat and talk asleep—and for that there is no solution. Since Pythagoras died the world has gone down a certain path, and I cannot change that. Someone not in my family invented the microscope, and Western eyes grew the intense will to pierce down through its darkening tunnel. air itself is willing without pay to lift the 707’s wing, and for that there is no solution. Pistons and rings have appeared in the world; valves usher gas vapor in and out of the theater box ten times a second; and for that there is no solution. Something besides my will loves the woman I love. I love my children, though I did not know them before they came. I change every day. For the winter dark of late December there is no solution.
Celexa Man, when he’s off his pills, understands there are circumstances for which there will never be a solution. American happiness is a strange addiction, washed with medical narratives and the political and commercial advantages of overcoming what ails you, but you see, the psyche knew all along you can’t live that way.
The teaser for a recent New York Times column by David Brooks argues that universities, faced with alternative (and cheaper) online courses should envision a streamlined future for their educational missions:
“The promise of online education lies in taking care of the technical knowledge so that universities can focus on transmitting practical knowledge.”
Brooks thinks higher education should offer two brands of learning: technical information and practical fine tuning. The technical education is, in Brooks’ scenario, the introductory curriculum, all those courses where students receive the formative knowledge of their chosen disciplines. Since these foundational courses can be offered at cheaper rates on the Internet, saving students substantial sums, Brooks argues the old fashioned four year college should offer classroom learning only for upper division students, who, presumably are ready for what he calls practical knowledge.
There’s nothing wrong with this idea if the goal of society is create young people without dramatic or comic irony. One wonders, since American colleges and universities are already the best in the world, what precisely is Brooks imagining?
First let’s think about comic irony. The term comes from literary criticism and it describes the trick used by Shakespeare when he allows his audience to know more about his characters than the characters know themselves. In “The Tempest” all the players are dazzled by Prospero’s magic and fail to recognize each other. Only the audience knows what’s happening. Comic irony affords a powerful kind of aesthetic pleasure but its also a metaphor for what what we now call “emotional intelligence” or EQ. Removed from the play and practiced in our personal work and days, we learn to ask “what do I know now that I did not know before I began?” I’m leaving out the direct object because it can be so many things: before I began the essay, before I began the journey to the Adirondacks, began the literacy tutoring program, before I read the Grapes of Wrath–you see the antecedent of emotional intelligence can be almost anything.
In the workplace EQ means you possess the capacity to listen, evaluate, pause a bit, often liberating yourself from the fight or flee emotions of customary professional discord. Emotional intelligence is a product of literacy because it requires the same cautionary discernment as reading–to ask in effect, “What’s wrong with this argument?” Or: “What’s wrong with my emotional response to this situation?”
It may be David Brooks thinks critical thinking comes later in an education, that it happens in a student’s junior or senior year. In that version of epistemology a student absorbs facts as tonnage, then later he or she learns what to do with variorum chemistry or architecture or philosophy.
I should say I love digital gizmos. Indeed, as a blind person (for whom the talking computer was a godsend) I’m a huge believer in technology in the classroom. When I came to Syracuse University to direct their renowned undergraduate honors program I promptly purchased iPads for all the staff. We are working assiduously to bring technology into many areas of the honors program.
No matter what Brooks thinks, college is about learning how to think, not about utility. Critical thinking isn’t a rococo picture frame made of facts. Most students, especially those from historically marginalized backgrounds find their interaction with students and faculty is transformational–in a hallway outside the classroom a professor asks you to lunch, a student group invites you to join, you volunteer with your classmates at a local inner city school. These all teach the inestimable qualities of emotional intelligence, qualities that can’t be learned from online courses because acquiring them requires conversation, questions, and being tricked out of your small comfort zone. Learning how to learn is often about spontaneous talk.
It may surprise David Brooks to know that learning academic EQ happens in the first two years of college for most students and it involves living with and talking to people.
Waking up crazy happy in Morgantown, West Virginia. People love books in this little town. There are poets and fiction writers and non-fictionists all about And by god, they buy books and turn out for readings!
It did this old writer a lot of good to come here.
Now I’m off to another day of airport garnishing –as in garnishing your wages, except at the airport they garnish your psyche.
But I’ll always have Morgantown.
– Posted using BlogPress from my iPad
When a guide dog enters your life you become aware of things you’d forgotten. Memory rushes in when terror lifts. On a crowded street in White Plains, New York my impressive Corky, my first guide, known by her puppy raising family as “Miss Thing” as in “Ain’t I the thing?” once took evasive action, pulled me back from a Jeep cutting the curb–its teen driver was doing some urban offroading, probably changing the radio and he looked down, lost control of the wheel for only a few seconds, but really, death loves the second hand the most, and Miss Thing was totally hip to the Rorschach of death and jeep and 16 year old and then I was alive again. Corky had saved me but she’d also returned me, as having your life preserved isn’t a simple thing, and while you’re swallowing the flavor of your fear and breathing anew, memory floods in, all topsy turvey, or as my Finnish grandmother would say, “all nurin kurin” and you can hardly go forward because of the visions.
On Mamaroneck Avenue I saw a man in a black rubber suit, a German tourist who once upon a time some twenty years earlier I’d seen in Lapland as winter was coming and the Nordic world was turning dark. When I saw him in Finland he was searching for psychedelic mushrooms in the boggy twilight. He sat beside me in a little hut and shared the news–for that’s what it was–that ancient shamans of the Iron Age used to drink the urine of reindeer that grazed on mushrooms, and he offered me some but I didn’t accept them as I was fighting what would later prove to be walking pneumonia and the prospect of Lappish hallucinations wasn’t attractive just then. But there he was outside Macy’s in White Plains and he was still smiling his impish German hippie’s smile, still sporting his diver’s suit, waving as Corky and I resumed our walk.
I like to call such visioned figures “tutelary angels” but I have no doubt they’re the spun phantasmagoria of the carbon in my brain. No matter. You’re back in the world because your guide did her or his job and memory, sensing the hole in the dike of daily consciousness pours in its strangenesses–as the Swedish poet Tomas Transtromer would say: “Friends, you drank some darkness.”
The ticket agent at the United Airlines desk in Syracuse wants to know if my guide dog has a license. Before I can say something snappy, like, “yes, she’s Guiding Eyes 007, licensed to thrill,” the agent next to him, a woman, says, “of course he has a license” which puts an end to the matter for the conversation shifts to the apparent fact I’m booked for a nonexistent flight. The agents argue, push buttons, conclude my flight does exist–the destination was changed–I’m in the right. For once in my life I haven’t said a thing. I was a perfect statue, clutching bag and leash. I want to tell agent one that he isn’t supposed to ask for a license for a guide dog, but decide to keep my powder dry. “Know when to hold ’em, and know when to fold ’em” etc. etc.
I joked with my friend Lance Mannion (who drove me to the airport) that I hate all the airlines, that they’re equal opportunity emotional vandals. Then I walked through the pneumatic doors. But today the TSA folks were friendly and helpful.
It’s the conditional nature of disability travel that’s so hard. While everyone talks about the indignities of air travel, in truth the experience is much worse for people with disabilities. Sometimes the sight of an airport is a limbic experience for me–I just know something horrific is about to happen, like the time I was supposed to fly to Chicago to appear on the Oprah Winfrey Show. The flight was canceled and the airline hired a bus to take passengers from White Plains to LaGuardia for a substitute flight. But the bus driver wouldn’t let me on the bus with my guide dog. He became belligerent. When I called the cops, Lo and Behold, they scratched their meager scalps, unsure if not letting me on the bus was a crime. Eventually I just got on the bus while the driver and the cops argued like bald men fighting over a comb.
Disability travel is often demeaning. Whenever I see a well dressed business man fuming because his flight is delayed I think “you don’t know the half of it pal.” My very presence is often treated as merely conditional, a matter of sufferance, and is suffused with a de facto permission to behave unprofessionally. There are exceptions. Most travelers with disabilities can report random acts of kindness. But they often seem infrequent.
My problems pale when compared to the horrors wheel chair users face. Ruined chairs, third rate assistance boarding and deplaning aircraft–their narratives are horrific.
We dust ourselves off, keep going. Traveling when you have a disability is a right. It’s also a political act.
I urge you to read Scott Rains’ amazing blog The Rolling Rains Report to see the best in disability travel writing. For all the difficulties disability travel has hundreds of glories.
New York State has made the decision to move the P&A from the Commission on Quality of Care and Advocacy for Persons with Disabilities, a state agency, to a not-for-profit corporation. Advocates in New York State and elsewhere understood that regardless of which organization was selected to serve as the New York State’s P&A, non-legal advocacy would continue to play an important role in the State’s P&A system. Since the early 1970s, there have been few organizations that have been more influential in promoting progressive policies and practices for people with disabilities and their families than the Center on Human Policy. The Center has an unrivaled track record in producing research and resources that have provided the foundation for disability rights and progressive pro-community, values-based supports nationally.
New York State has announced their intention to designate Disability Advocates, Inc. as the new P&A. Clearly, a P&A must have a strong legal component, and Disability Advocates, Inc., a legal advocacy group, offers this ability. Their work has focused on housing and on issues affecting people with psychiatric disabilities. Their record of advocating for the full inclusion and community participation of people with all disabilities, and especially those with intellectual and developmental disabilities, is less clear.
Further, as advocates know, not all change is accomplished through legal action. Legal strategies alone have not been and will not be effective in ensuring the rights of people with disabilities in society. In case after case, state after state, P&As have accomplished broad, critical change through non-legal strategies including investigative reports of abusive settings, self-advocacy by people with disabilities and family members, regulatory and other public policy efforts, and the development of policy statements supporting the rights of people with disabilities to full inclusion, self-direction and control, and life-sustaining treatment.
All states need a strong Protection and Advocacy system that offers a balance between legal action and broader advocacy approaches. The best P&As nationally offer both of these critical elements – a strong legal service balanced with a directed focus on non-legal advocacy approaches. The Center on Human Policy at Syracuse University is uniquely qualified to provide this balance in New York State. We are asking that whichever organization is selected to be the new P&A in New York State, a prominent role for the Center on Human Policy is assured. The Center has pioneered the support of self-advocacy and family advocacy, conducted and published investigative reports on both abusive and humanizing settings, and issued policy statements that have had national impact toward assuring the full rights of people with disabilities and their families.
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Planet of the Blind 