Category: Disability Perspectives

A friend writes to ask why it remains so difficult for people with disabilities to find jobs and in particular why this is so hard for blind people in an age of technology and the ADA.

My friend is a scientist. He understands how things actually work.

Of course the problem for people with disabilities regarding employment has nothing to do with "how things work"—in reality the problem has to do with symbolism.

Here is what I wrote to my friend early this morning:

Dear (Name Withheld):

The answer to this question is relatively simple though like most easy things it’s also discouraging. Disability functions in general as a series of metaphors or "sign systems" as the French scholar Roland Barthes would put it. The study of signs in culture is known as "semiotics"—and without giving a treatise the crux of the biscuit is that everything we can see is culturally embedded with variegated meanings that are the product of history. This is true of everything from a "stop sign" to your mother’s wedding dress.

Disability has functioned historically in stark metaphorical terms: the blind for instance are identified in Greek mythology as being either monstrous or irrational figures or, prophetic souls who have been given a compensatory gift from the gods. In the ancient world criminals were routinely "blinded" to serve as constant reminders of criminality as they begged in the streets. Accordingly there is a several thousand year period in western cultural history when blindness has been semiotically designated as an exemplary and unhappy figuration. Drama, fairy tales, kid’s books, movies, all reinforce this signifying process. I wrote a little bit about this in my book "Planet of the Blind". The writer Georgina Kleege has addressed this subject in her book "Sight Unseen" and now in her new book of imaginary letters to Helen Keller.

These pejorative ideas about blindness were so pervasive that it was believed impossible to teach the blind to read until the early 19^thcentury.

Again, as I say, these old fashioned notions are not sensible but they exist in what Carl Jung would call the "cultural or universal unconscious" of civilization.

Changing this kind of thing is obviously not so much a matter of technology but really a matter of public education.

I am typing right now without the benefit of sufficient coffee so I hope this makes sense?

Steve K   

As I think about these matters I’m often reminded of the up side of symbolic or figurative dynamism in culture. When human beings understand how symbols can assist their social and political goals then transformation can happen very quickly within society. Rosa Parks comes to mind. James Meredith.

We need more competent disabled people in our nation’s television and movies. We needed this about two decades ago.

I hereby volunteer to be a TV detective. Along with my amazing dog I will have Confucian poetry and logo-rhythmic dancing in my arsenal.

Nira earned her wings today on American Airlines. We flew from LaGuardia to Chicago and then onward to Iowa. She took it all in stride and worked between flights as if she’s been in O’Hare airport a thousand times before.

Now that we’re back in Iowa City we find of course that the temperature (with wind chill) is 20 below zero. Compared to this, Yorktown Heights New York is almost Montego Bay.

Yah Mon! It’s colder than Sibelius’s head back here in the Hawkeye state.

Now that Nira has left the hallowed halls of Guiding Eyes I know that this will be a year of "firsts" for her: first crowded airplane flight; first grumpy ticket agent and cluster of irate passengers; first opportunity to take a whiz in perma frost; first semester watching her immoderately eccentric human partner teach his classes at the university; and then, henceforward, we can scarcely imagine all the firsts. There will be for Nira many new friends and places over the coming years.

I am a better traveler in the company of my guide dog. Guiding Eyes has given me three intrepid guides and together we have visited 43 of the U.S. states and four foreign countries.

But it’s not the travel that’s so uplifting: it’s the expectation and imagination that relates to traveling. Together Nira and I will travel far and safely and with the joy of discovery.

And just think! Guiding Eyes does this for everybody who is legally blind and wants a superb canine traveling companion. And because the average blind person can’t easily afford a forty five thousand dollar guide dog, they do this remarkable work free of charge.

So there are a lot of people to thank.

Thanks.

The Spanish poet Unamuno once wrote that "we die of cold and not of darkness"–which I take to mean that human indifference is much worse than any near gloom.

But metaphorical assertion aside, it’s really cold in Iowa and if you are coming this way I’d suggest you pack your long johns.

S.K.

I have been thinking a good deal lately about the psychological and, for lack of a better term, the spiritual cost of being a person with a disability. NO one needs or wants to hear the tiresome statistics about unemployment among PWDs or the discouraging lack of progress enforcing the Americans with Disabilities Act. These are narratives of abjection (to borrow a term from the French critic Julia Kristeva) and over time the mere act of talking about the conditions of marginalization becomes a secondary form of abjection. To paraphrase the old sixties maxim: "You are what you talk about."

No sensible person would advocate avoiding the use of civil rights language, whether we’re talking about women’s rights or Latina rights or African-American rights, or children’s rights. Yet it seems to me that I am increasingly uncomfortable as a representative of "the disabled community" or "the blind community"—not because I would eschew these political realities, but because the insistence that these are my subjects prevents me from being publicly a more reflective or complex person. I have a sensibility that’s different from what you might suppose.

I’ve been walking down the street during my guide dog training with a baseball cap on my head that says "NAVY" and veterans call out to me as I work with my guide dog. I am not a war veteran. I care however very deeply about the plight of our war veterans. I was never in the NAVY but I recognize that the Navy protects our freedoms. I am opposed to the war in Iraq but I support our troops and our sailors. I am patriotic but I don’t believe in imperialism. I am fiercely loyal to the Democratic Party but I think we need a tough foreign policy candidate in these difficult times which is why I was for Chris Dodd and am now for Hillary Clinton.

I am not a blind person when I listen to the opera or swim in the Baltic. I am not a knee-jerk Democrat. As I said some time ago in these pages, I sided with the GOP in their efforts to defend the life of Terry Schiavo.

My feeling is that we must go beyond identification based on race or disability or ethnic origin or gender or sexual orientation for only in so doing can we rebuild a progressive and thoughtful means of public engagement in our nation.

This is what civics used to teach. I want to live beyond our Balkanized era. The cultural critic Lennard Davis calls this idea "dis-modernism" by which he means that the idea of disability is essentially a cultural or social construction. If you build the right architectures and accommodations no one is disabled. Just so, if you assure genuine equal rights then marginalized identities should conceivably no longer exist.

Imagine the better conversations we all would be having.

This is my morning soapbox. Perhaps I’ve taken too much sinus medication. I’m a utopian Sudafed addict.

People don’t like it when you suggest that their Balkanized political identities are not entirely productive. I know. But if you need to have a social society you can join the Optimists Club. Or a good labor union.

S.K.!

The Iowa folk singer Greg Brown has a line in one of his songs: "The world ain’t what you think it is/It’s just what it is."

How different I am when I remember to let the world open itself to me rather than trying to dominate experience with preconceptions.

There’s something about having a new guide dog that puts me in mind of this quiet lesson.

We walk together and trust that we will mutually take care of each other. We do this in the expectation that what’s ahead will be more interesting and viable than anything we might have supposed.

That’s poetry. If you were to write an equation it would be:

Experience minus expectation equals progress plus bliss

I know. It’s not the sixties anymore. No one is supposed to talk about bliss.

But I’m all for it.

S.K.

Today was a balmy day for New York State with temperatures in the low 60’s and there was even some sunlight. I walked "in harness" this morning for the first time and again in the afternoon with Guiding Eyes "Nira" (whose photo I will soon upload to our blog) and as we strode together down a busy sidewalk in White Plains, a woman who was relishing the sight of this fast yellow Lab and a broadly smiling man said: "That dog sure likes its job!" We were sailing past her at a good clip. And I waved as we were sailing away with the pleasure both of recognition and of being recognized. Nira was expertly slowing, steering, working her way among pedestrians, head held high and wagging her tail. Me? I was wearing a U.S. Navy baseball cap that says: NAVY: Accelerate Your Life". We were surely accelerating today. It was a marvelous time "out on the ocean" and I can’t wait for tomorrow.

S.K.