Blind Lives Matter

The disproportionate discrimination heaped onto the Afro-American community has inspired the Black Lives Matter movement, campaigning against violence toward black people, and to the broader issues of racial discrimination. Certainly the color of skin prompting bias before you have even said “hello” or exchanged a minute of conversation is absurd, disturbing and diminishes who we are as a species. Yet there it is: if you’re a person of color in a white society, the judging kicks in with amazing speed.

Whether discrimination is learned or baked into our DNA, it seems clear that religious, ethnic, age and gender prejudice is thriving around the planet with no signs of easing up anytime soon. Discrimination, and the fear, rage and violence that broils up from it, continues to be a pox on all our houses.

Prejudgment also applies to the largest minority in our country. Over 64 million, or 1 out of every 5 Americans, live with a disability. However, the prejudice against disabled folks generally takes the form of assumption, dismissal and pity rather than rage.

The most mysterious thing about prejudice is that when it kicks in, it seems to assign a complete set of negative traits to the targeted person. Knee-jerk reactions take hold, and individual personality doesn’t stand a chance. Unless a brief conversation with the prejudger and the prejudged occurs, the whole prejudged person is marginalized and dismissed as unproductive or nefarious.

I felt it myself when I met Danny, a fellow, who at the age of 19, severed his spinal cord when he dove off the mast of a sailing ship into a coral reef. When we first met, I stuck out my hand to shake his. It was limp and without any strength. He was quadriplegic and I immediately figured he was pooched with no ability. Then he invited me out on his sailboat which was rigged so that he could manage the boat himself. Good thing – I’m useless when it comes to trimming sails. He moved to L.A. to pursue a career in acting, appeared in several films, and started up an enterprise helping businesses to become ADA compliant. Danny and I would sometimes step out together – I’d grab the handles of his wheelchair and he would tell me “left and right and stop.” We were a motley crew and remained lifelong friends.

People who casually meet me for the first time generally resort to some blind man stereotype or worse, pity. They will quickly grab my bag of groceries as if my hands are broken or tell me how sorry they are for me. People who do get to know me are at first surprised that I’m a professional actor, president of my local actor’s union, have been a VP of Sales and Human Resources, a playwright, a poet, a songwriter, have two kids and do my own grocery shopping. To them it’s “amazing.” To me, it’s just what I do.

It’s important to make a distinction between having a disability and being disabled. Having a disability means having only one broken something; being disabled suggests you are entirely broken. As I often say, “I’m not disabled, I’m just blind.” I get stuff done by other means.

Like most of the disabled folks I know, their particular disability tends to “disappear” to people who spend time with them, and their abilities emerge, dominate and defy the preconceptions.

Disability isn’t a tragedy. It’s just another way of living. And it matters.

Certainly a world without prejudgment is desired by most people, but people who experience discrimination of any kind don’t live in that sort of kumbaya bubble. I figure it will take several more turns of evolution before our species enlightens to a more inclusive mentality, where tendencies toward stereotype and bias are eliminated from the gene pool.

Until then, we must strive mightily to embrace the notion that there are better ways to deal with the ire that boils up from dated assumptions that marginalize the groups of people who breathe and dream outside our tribes.

For now, we might just try saying “hello” when we first meet someone who appears ‘different.’ And we may find out just how similarly we all dream.

Steve Gladstone

The Blind Dude

Gettin’ it done by other means.

Learning New Stuff

I’ve never been a ‘read the owner’s manual’ kinda guy. I’ve always found them confusing, tedious and lengthy.

I used to have a pal who would read every owner’s manual from cover to cover. But I had, as my mother used to say, more of a “creative” mind.

Even when I could see, I didn’t read manuals. I was always a “visual learner” when trying to figure out how to operate stuff. So when I went totally blind, I was pooched.

As a blind guy, I still avoided screen reading online manuals. I preferred to have somebody ‘talk me through’ each button and crank. Sure, it was a struggle, but I was determined to master every bell and whistle on the device.

The struggle got worse as I grew older. Even my $10 toaster, between the frozen, regular and bagel settings and the light, medium and dark knob, became a chore. I figured that being blind exacerbated the learning process.

Then I started noticing my sighted friends calling out to their teenage children: “Hey Sam, show me how to use this remote,” or “Yo Jennie, help me figure out my new electric toothbrush.” It was an Aha moment! The problem wasn’t being blind, it was being over 40.

Not that I ever needed a reason why I didn’t read manuals, but now I finally had a good one.

Besides, why was I trying to learn all 128 buttons on the gismo when I only ever use 5 of them in the first place?

I was suddenly at the gateway to the next level: tranquility, self-actualization and spiritual enlightenment…with a little more time on my hands.

The desire to learn new things dramatically decreases for most people after they turn 40. Many folks believe this is due to the natural diminishing capacity of the human brain, but I’d like to think it may actually be the result of enlightenment. In other words, once you reach that age when you realize that you’re no longer receiving blue ribbons for effort, you trade in your sense of accomplishment for a little efficiency. You suddenly grasp the notion that all the time you spent agonizing over how to work the damn thing might have been better spent dreaming about the little vegetable garden you’ve been meaning to plant in your backyard.

Now I have a go-to-under-40 person to set up my new appliance and show me how to use the latest whizzbang technology with the fewest steps possible.

Keeping it simple is king. I no longer type my destination into my GPS. Instead, with my guide dog in tow, I just mash a button and speak into my phone where I want to go and voila!, the nice droid-lady answers me with step by step directions on how to get from point A to point B. (I can also assist some of my drivers who have difficulty using GPS. Yup, most of them are over 40.)

You may find it more satisfying to ask a stranger under 40 for help with a new gadget, rather than your go-to-under-40 family member. Strangers tend to be nicer and more patient. Family members are prone to be a little quippie during the education process, sometimes rolling their eyes or tossing you zingers like, “You don’t know how to do that?” or “I’ve shown you this a million times!” Of course, if you are a secure person with few self-esteem issues, quippie’s wisecracks don’t bother you. You just say, “Yeh, I’m a blockhead. Fix it.” That’s about all you need to do to get the quipster focused on the task.

If you have the impulse to explain to quippie why you aren’t ‘getting it,’ save your breath. They don’t care if you get it or not. And at your advanced age, you need to lower your stress level. Plus, by not explaining yourself, you have extra time to do something useful, like top-up your soft soap kitchen dispenser which has been empty since last month.

So, with your Millennial or Gen Z of choice and your own good self-image, you’ll have that new “Power-Your-Spaceship-To-Mars-With-Solar” app downloaded and up and running in just a few short minutes.

But before you blast off to worlds unknown, you might consider tending your garden first.

Steve Gladstone

The Blind Dude

Blind Is the New Sight

When you were a child, did you ever close your eyes and imagine flying like a bird, or picture what was at the end of a rainbow, or shut your eyes to make a wish while you were blowing out your birthday candles?

As adults, we take a workshop with Tony the empowerment guru who has us close our eyes and visualize where-we-want-to-be-in-five-years, or we complete our yoga class with our eyes closed as the yogi leads us on a guided meditation.

Why with our eyes closed? Can’t we get there with them open? Does sight somehow prevent us from fulfilling our wishes or reaching the higher plane of our inner-universe?

While we’re asleep our eyes are closed and those vivid dreams appear, sending meaningful messages to ourselves. Sight is turned off even with our eyes wide open via a daydream, where we are transported to the outback thousands of miles away from the boardroom.

When we listen to a book on tape or read a novel, sight isn’t a factor. Instead, the spoken and written words spark our imagination, our mind’s eye surveying the colorful images and landscapes in our head. Our imaginings can sometimes be so potent that they leave us disappointed in the movie made from the book. Perhaps what we see is trumped by what we think.

You also get more out of your other senses when you’re sightless. We may hear more of what someone says because we don’t get distracted by something we see going on around them; you tune into the tone, tempo and rhythm of what they’re saying and pick up the meaning between their words. Touch becomes more satisfying as you check out the shape, weight and texture of items (and people too if you get lucky!). Your sense of smell is heightened into a fragrant blossom when you’re not distracted by the beauty of the flower.

Certainly we all want to see, but sight does come with its limitations. It shapes our immediate thinking and can create a barrier to our deeper self. If we don’t see the fancy car they drive, or the short skirt, or the missing teeth, we may indeed become a little less timid or shy or snobbish and a little more relaxed and real with the people we meet.

If pictures were eliminated from online dating websites, what would be the outcome? Pandemonium that leads to better results?

Going on a ‘blind date’ implies risky business. Sight unseen may lead to disappointment. However, let’s face it, when you’re on that first date, you’re looking your best and on your best behavior; sight may actually be misleading if we don’t begin to get beyond that scrubbed and shining first impression. Half of all marriages wind up in divorce, usually for reasons that don’t meet the eye. When you’re blind, you focus on the voice which can be a better lens to the soul. For the record, all my dates are blind ones.

Sight can certainly promote discrimination, triggering those biases we carry in our heads when the people around us look and move differently than we do. When you’re blind, you don’t prejudge the abilities of the guy you just met in the wheelchair.

If most of the world was blind, things might be more peaceful. There’d be less discrimination since color of skin wouldn’t trigger aggressive actions. War would be reduced and possibly eliminated since we wouldn’t be able to see the enemy, or at least take accurate aim.

Perhaps the world would be a little less hostile if we all were a little more blind.

When you do without sight, there are plenty of advantages. Everybody speaking on the phone is virtually blind: how convenient it is for those who have home-based businesses to strike deals while sitting in their Jockey shorts.

You save a lot of money when you’re blind. You tend to buy only what you need. You’re not tempted to grab the stuff around the checkout counter of the grocery store, or the items down the aisles of the drugstore as you head back to the pharmacy, or the attractive sweater you don’t need but have to pass by in order to get the pants which you do need.

So we dutifully and happily shut our eyes and let out a long sigh as we hunker down into our yoga mats, improving our mood, muscles and digestive systems.

Sight Becomes Imagination

Sighted people who read a novel are essentially blind. They don’t see the actual characters they’re reading about. They are also blind when they listen to the radio. However, the words they read or hear may trigger vivid pictures in their head.

As they read, sighted folks will unconsciously cast the good guy, the bad guy and the girl with specific features and expressions (especially from those sexy passages) based on previous images stored in their memory banks.

People, color, places and things come alive in our minds; we mentally assemble a person or animal or bus or autumn tree or white picket fence as our unconscious pulls from our stockpiled memories.

Of course, the imagined characters in your head don’t match the real ones. You go to see the movie adapted from the novel and say, “Yikes! I didn’t picture Portnoy looking like that!” Or you hear the jazz musician’s deep raspy voice on the radio and conjure up a large, big-cheeked bald headed dude and then see him on some late night talk show a month later and he’s a little man with brown curly hair and narrow eyes.

At times, imagination can be more satisfying than the real thing.

Perhaps you’ve been speaking to a business associate for months on the phone and when you finally meet for the first time, the nice smile you imagined is loaded with bad teeth or the long skinny fingers you pictured suddenly become fat clammy hands.

Having now lived the first half of my life sighted and the second half as a blind man, I often reflect on the transition from being sighted to being blind – what I saw and didn’t see during those transition years. When you gradually go blind, there is that grey period when you wonder if you saw things or if it was, as the song says, “just my imagination running away with me.”

Since imagination and the real world are two different places, in which world was I living? And which had the better view?

That five year period of time when I was losing the remainder of my sight started around the release of the first Star Wars movie. I still wonder if it was in my eyes or my imagination where I first saw C-3PO and R2-D2. In my recollection is a tall metallic guy next to an industrial looking vacuum cleaner, the sci-fi equivalent of Laurel and Hardy.

So now my day-to-day world is pretty much like a big radio that’s always on – disembodied people becoming three-dimensional in my head. I speak with somebody and their voice takes physical shape – my imagined image often quite a bit more colorful than the actuality. I recall working with Donna many years ago. She had a rough voice and smelled of cigarettes and drove our service truck. Yep, now you’ve got the picture. So when she gave me her smooth and petite hand to shake one day, I was flummoxed – she instantly transformed from someone with half a Y chromosome into a princess in distress.

Even though the reality doesn’t match the imagination, I often find people expecting me to be spot on when describing some person I just met, as if they are in the presence of a sorcerer. I must admit, I have resorted to artifice at times, asking a friend to secretly describe the new person to me first so when I’m later asked to give their description, I nail it and amaze the chumps gathered around to hear me wax on like some wizard.

Heck, even in college when I couldn’t see so well, I’d ask a pal for the specifications of the coed I was chatting up so that at the opportune time, I could tell her what she looked like, Impress her with my paranormal powers, and maybe get lucky.

So while you sighted folks read your novels, we blind guys listen to our talking books and converge on our imaginations, where sight has no advantage for either of us.