Category: Disability Perspectives

Lately I have been endeavoring to send letters of recommendation to colleges and universities across the U.S. on behalf of students who are applying to graduate schools.

I only write letters for those students whose work and preparation will make them successful graduate students and accordingly the process of writing these letters is fairly pleasant. (It feels good to say that Casper Hauser will be a credit to the profession, whatever that profession might be. He has, after all, come a long way from the feral state that characterized his former days.)

The "thing" that does not feel good is the relative inaccessibility of the various online recommendation websites that some of these colleges and universities are now using.

If you use screenreading software for the blind you will be able to access some of these sites, but others are largely inaccessible.

Well that’s no big deal. After all, stores like Target have resisted making their websites accessible for years. Even when there isn’t some kind of organized hostility to electronic or digital accessibility, there’s a cluelessness and systemic inattention to accessibility in all kinds of areas that intersect with higher education. I could go on and on about this topic but I need to maintain my equilibrium today.

Two of these online recommendation sites have form fields that screenreading software can’t engage and when you write the "help" line you actually get an e-mail that asks you to enter your problem in another inaccessible place.

I hold my head. I spit gently into my hanky and proceed.

S.K.

There’s a poem I particularly like by Robert Bly entitled “Eleven O’clock at Night” in which the poet lies down in his bed and wonders about the usefulness of his day. Bly asks the all important question: “What did I accomplish today?”

Some years ago I found a sermon, written by my paternal grandfather—it was in Finnish but the title in translation was: “What Does God Ask of You Now?”

I was only 19 or so when I found that sermon and after translating the title I scoffed. “What a silly, old fashioned and entirely dark sensibility,” I thought. I was “hip” after all, and accordingly I was filled with adolescent despair and a lot of bad ideas from the sixties including “don’t trust anyone over thirty.”

My Finnish grandfather was an immigrant to the United States. He was a Lutheran minister and he offered church services in rural Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, and in his later years to the Finns who worked in the leather tanning factories and quarries in Massachusetts.

I have recently heard civic officials in more than one American city say in public that providing basic services to people who have disabilities is too difficult. I won’t name the towns and I won’t disclose the identities of the Babbit-like city council types—at least not for now. There are plenty of blockheads on the planet’s surface and I’ll risk carpal tunnel if I start typing their names.

My point in this instance is that providing special education to kids in our public schools, or putting in accessible curb cuts are no longer “choices” in the old-fashioned sense—at least the Americans with Disabilities Act says so.

Yet all over America (and even in relatively prosperous towns) one sees and hears a kind of adopted scarcity rhetoric when it comes to the provision of basic civil rights.

Here’s how the thinking that I’m alluding to actually works:

Continue reading “The Easy Things”

Nowadays its customary to hear people talking all the
time about “transitioning” much in the way they used to talk about “flossing” or
“dating”—you can hear people say, “I’m transitioning right now,” as if they’re
actually undergoing a metamorphosis. The reformation of transition into a verb
carries with it the implicit assumption that transitioning is a good thing. One
doesn’t say, “I’m transitioning from the Titanic to a lifeboat,” or, “I’m
transitioning from heroin to methadone.” Transitioning implies
forethoughtfulness and purpose.

I think that people with disabilities are so busy making
a “go” of their situation that they seldom have time to say they’re
transitioning. As a blind person I don’t say that I’m transitioning down the
street, though I probably could. The trouble is, I’m too busy trying to get
somewhere and get there in one piece and avoid walking into street lamps or
dumpsters to feel that I’m transitioning my way down the sidewalk.

But I want to be one of those transitioning people. So here’s my plan:

I’m transitioning from being a young blind person to being an older blind person. I don’t care so much anymore what other people think about my physical difference. I’m just me.

S.K.