Well, I’m supposed to be cleaning house and getting ready for my trip, but I’ve been running some errands and I’m tired and just need to sit for a minute – so I thought I’d blog a bit.
If you’ve ever been involved in the world of blind politics, you know there are several different philosophies about how blindness affects daily life, who is really considered “blind” and how we should cope with this disability.
I’ve always fallen into the camp that one should always be extremely careful about asking for society to make adaptations for us. Nothing is free in life. Everything comes with a price. Society, in general, thinks that blind people are helpless and unable to adapt to the sighted world. They say things like, “I just don’t know how you do it. If I closed my eyes I could never do xyz….” What they fail to appreciate is that learning to adapt to low vision or blindness requires learning a set of skills, just like everything else in life. Once those skills are learned not seeing well can be reduced to essentially an inconvenience. Okay, sometimes it seems like a big inconvenience here in suburbia, the big green jail, as I call it. But, we must operate in a world with a bunch of people walking around with their eyes closed, and thinking that this is what it's like to be blind. They're the ones, for example, who sit on the other side of the table in a job interview. They can't imagine how we'd function without a zillion adaptations to our basic living environment.
The problem is programs that adequately teach these skills are few and far between and many blind/low vision people don’t have adequate access to these programs. In my opinion, this ought to be the top legislative issue of the organized blind movement. But, that’s another blog entry.
So, with this background in mind, and keeping in mind that I’d rather eat my shoe than ask for any sort of concession from city hall – I e-mailed the city engineer’s department (the folks in charge of building codes and approving construction projects) about my little problem with the construction projects underway on Metcalf.
Friday I got a response. Two very nice city engineers had a conference call with me to discuss the problem. They were extremely nice, very accommodating, and probably would have been all for beeping streetlights and whatever else if I’d asked for it. But, I don’t want those things. I just want to be able to safely walk down the street without having to take a ¾ of a mile detour to access a grocery store, drug store etc.
They’re going to work on the problem while I’m out of town, talk to the construction projects involved, and see what the time table is and whether they could at least keep a path clear of dangerous debris along the street.
I’m thrilled. I’ve thought a lot about whether my request was reasonable and what sort of a message it sent about the abilities of blind people. I decided that because the inconvenience to me, a tax paying citizen, is so great, and the solution is so small, that it was justified.
And, I must say, I was impressed with the civil servants at Overland Park City Hall. Kudos guys!
If you’ve ever been involved in the world of blind politics, you know there are several different philosophies about how blindness affects daily life, who is really considered “blind” and how we should cope with this disability.
I’ve always fallen into the camp that one should always be extremely careful about asking for society to make adaptations for us. Nothing is free in life. Everything comes with a price. Society, in general, thinks that blind people are helpless and unable to adapt to the sighted world. They say things like, “I just don’t know how you do it. If I closed my eyes I could never do xyz….” What they fail to appreciate is that learning to adapt to low vision or blindness requires learning a set of skills, just like everything else in life. Once those skills are learned not seeing well can be reduced to essentially an inconvenience. Okay, sometimes it seems like a big inconvenience here in suburbia, the big green jail, as I call it. But, we must operate in a world with a bunch of people walking around with their eyes closed, and thinking that this is what it's like to be blind. They're the ones, for example, who sit on the other side of the table in a job interview. They can't imagine how we'd function without a zillion adaptations to our basic living environment.
The problem is programs that adequately teach these skills are few and far between and many blind/low vision people don’t have adequate access to these programs. In my opinion, this ought to be the top legislative issue of the organized blind movement. But, that’s another blog entry.
So, with this background in mind, and keeping in mind that I’d rather eat my shoe than ask for any sort of concession from city hall – I e-mailed the city engineer’s department (the folks in charge of building codes and approving construction projects) about my little problem with the construction projects underway on Metcalf.
Friday I got a response. Two very nice city engineers had a conference call with me to discuss the problem. They were extremely nice, very accommodating, and probably would have been all for beeping streetlights and whatever else if I’d asked for it. But, I don’t want those things. I just want to be able to safely walk down the street without having to take a ¾ of a mile detour to access a grocery store, drug store etc.
They’re going to work on the problem while I’m out of town, talk to the construction projects involved, and see what the time table is and whether they could at least keep a path clear of dangerous debris along the street.
I’m thrilled. I’ve thought a lot about whether my request was reasonable and what sort of a message it sent about the abilities of blind people. I decided that because the inconvenience to me, a tax paying citizen, is so great, and the solution is so small, that it was justified.
And, I must say, I was impressed with the civil servants at Overland Park City Hall. Kudos guys!
Comments