Either useless or magicians

I’ve discussed here before about some of the ways that disabled people are kept on the edges, either talked down to and ignored, or gushingly over-affirmed, super-heroes, or tragic victims, . My friend Ian Stanton wrote a song ‘Tragic but brave’ in the mid 1990s about this - the polarised positioning that disabled people are forced into as it is far easier to keep us on the under or over-stated margins than to be in the middle ground that most other people inhabit.

 

An encounter the other day drew me back to think about all this and about the particular slant that describes blind people’s ‘specialness’. There is apparently an inability to cope with (or talk about) what blindness  represents in terms of the reality of living, working, or dealing with the world without sight. they simply can’t fit it into any of their standard ways of understanding.  So they think that we are either far cleverer than we are, or completely useless.

 

I’ve  talked a lot about all those diminishing things that go on in encounters with blind people, but while disgraceful, I find the idea fairly amusing that plenty of people, including apparently intelligent well-paid professionals , find it easier to believe that blind people practice a form of magic than the reality.

 

A few examples:

Computers:

I use a screen reader programme that converts the text on my laptop, iPhone and iPad into synthetic speech, and use an earphone in order to hear the electronic voice. I touch type but many people don’t seem to notice that as they’d rather think either that my computer is telling me what to do and say, or they don’t notice the earphone and think that somehow, I only need to get near the device to have a connection with it – a new type of psychic Bluetooth perhaps.

 

Meetings:

At the start of a meeting, people often seem to behave as if I either use strong intuition or some kind of psychic ability to simply know who is in the room, or, although I’ve worked with them all for some years, I need them to tell me their name, job title, the organisation that they (and I) work for, even a bit about themselves. It took a colleague to laugh at them and say ‘Come on guys, first names is enough!’.

 

In shops:

…and I’ve discussed this in more serious ways before… some think that I either have a form of second sight which enables me to perceive what they are pointing to, or that I need every aspect of the (for example toaster) describing to me very slowly and in simplified English, often even what a toaster is for.

 

Driving:

Some think that I either can’t get about at all, or that I must be able to drive a car (with my psychic Bluetooth I guess).

 

Childcare:

People used to think that either my young children looked after me, or that I could somehow psychically intuit exactly what they were doing at any time.

 

TV:

It isn’t uncommon to believe that I can either watch TV normally with the Bluetooth again), or that it must be upsetting to me to even mention the subject.