As far as I know there is no such thing as an email list for sighted
people. Because blindness is a low incidence disability most email lists
will consist of sighted people incidentally, but I have never come
across a list that requires being sighted in order to subscribe. And
here is something characteristic of email that cannot be found in
organizations or other in person communities. Unless you tell them they
will never know you are blind and they probably will not even guess it
unless you give them some big clues.
___
Carl Sagan “Why do we put up with it? Do we like to be criticized? No,
no scientist enjoys it. Every scientist feels a proprietary affection
for his or her ideas and findings. Even so, you don’t reply to critics,
Wait a minute; this is a really good idea; I’m very fond of it; it’s
done you no harm; please leave it alone. Instead, the hard but just rule
is that if the ideas don’t work, you must throw them away.” ― Carl
Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark
On 12/10/2020 4:21 PM, Miriam Vieni wrote:
The first email list of which I was a member, was a list for blind computer
users. I don't remember how I found it. I joined it after I got my first
computer, not a windows computer, but a dos computer, probably in 1993 or
1994. I was a partially blind 53 or 54 year old woman who felt that I was
compelled to buy a computer in order to maintain my social work practice in
adoptions. I had accidentally begun doing that work when we adopted a
Vietnamese orphan in 1974. Back then, social workers were permitted to do
family evaluations (home studies) and post placement reports (follow up
visits after children were placed), in New York State, just as adoption
agencies were. But most agencies wouldn't touch adoptions from Vietnam
because most of those have been non agency adoptions, done by parents
directly from orphanages. I was a member of an organization with chapters
throughout the US of people who had, or were, adopting children from
Vietnam in the midst of the war. The US withdrewe from Vietnam in 1975 and
the adoptions from the country stopped for about a decade and a half. But
there were adoptions from other countries and from within the US and my
practice grew. I was the only blind person doing this work, to my knowledge,
and I was competing with a growing number of fully sighted social workers in
the New York metropolitan area who were also doing this work, as well as
licensed adoption agencies. There are a lot of stories that I could tell
about what it was like to be in that situation, including the one about the
New York City judge who attempted to stop me from doing the work that I was
doing, because of my blindness. Given the fact ath after I received my MSW
degree in 1961, no agency, except for an agency for the blind, was willing
to hire me, and that when I wanted to enroll in a training program for
social workers who wished to do psychotherapy and only one was willing to
even consider me and that one was so far from my home that I finally decided
to opt out, the fact that I accidentally tumbled into the work that I
successfully did for 32 years, is a wonderful miracle. However, it was not
without its difficulties or barriers. So, I was compelled to get that
computer, something that I did not want, and then to learn to use it, at
least minimally. I had a blind friend whom I'd known since I was sixteen
years old and met when I washed dishes at a camp for young adult blind
people. He was about 6 years older than I and had been a ham radio operator
for years. People who were ham radio operators, took naturally to computers.
He and a sighted friend, also a ham radio operator, bought a computer for me
and taught me to use it. Back then I had enough vision to have Zoomtext
enlarged to 16X and the G.W. Micro screen reader, Vocal Eyes. Another
social worker, who did the same kind of work as I did, but in a diferent
geographical area, hired someone to set up a website for us, advertising our
work. And then I joined email lists for adoptive parents and potential
adoptive parents, where I participated, providing information and offering
my services. I got a lot of clients that way. I also found my cat, Lexie,
whom someone needed to give away because she was traveling to another
country to pick up her new baby.
I think that I'm attempting to communicate something specific with this
long, rambling email. I've been visually impaired since birth. I've always
been legally blind. I was profoundly affected as a child, by my disability
and the experiences I had, undergoing repeated surgeries from infancy
through the age of three or four years. Nevertheless, I lived as full and
independent life as was physically and emotionally possible over the years.
I had to learn, over and over again, through bitter experience, that I would
never be seen as a fully sighted person by people who were fully sighted,
that I would never be fully integrated into a sighted world either socially
or economically, even though I might have close and loving relationships
with individual sighted people. When I was sixteen the director of the
recreation program at the Lighthouse told me that I would never be fully
accepted by the sighted world. It was a cruel and tactless thing for him to
say to a naive adolescent, but he was telling the truth. There are blind
people who can never admit that reality to their consciousness, and I
understand why. But on some level, all blind people know the truth. That is
why having the email lists where people can feel a sense of community and
belonging, helps. Yes, many of the list members are also out there on social
media now, or on email lists for sighted people. But it's nice to have a
home.
Miriam
