Starting in the last few months of high school and for a few years into my undergraduate studies at CSU, Chico I was very active in the National Federation of the Blind and the California Council of the Blind. I went to meetings, conventions, spoke with elected officials and was even an officer for a local NFB chapter for a while. I tell people that I left because of an incident. At the time I was a member and officer elections were being held. I could not attend the election meeting because of a timing issue between my university classes and the bus schedule. However a few weeks after the meeting I was informed that I had been elected treasurer. I accepted the role at first but after a few months, I realized that this situation was not acceptable. Not only was I not there to accept or reject my nomination but I felt that it was too troublesome to be treasurer while living nearly a hundred miles away from the chapter president. The only regular transportation I had between the two towns was Greyhound Bus Lines.
While that part is true, like much of what goes on in my life, it is not all of the story. What I do not tell most people is just as important but harder for me to explain. So, of course, that is exactly what I will attempt to do in this post.
Look at any cause, or call it a special interest if you like, and you will see that the vast majority of people who are advocating for that cause are the same people for which that causes exists. That is, elderly people advocating for elder’s rights, women for women’s rights, or scared white men advocating for no rights for anyone but themselves. Separate from all the other groups were the people with disabilities.
I have always found this separation troublesome. Yes, when you approach someone as a particular group, such as an elder rights or disability rights advocate, it is simple and straightforward. People know who you are representing and probably can predict what you are going to say. My problem with this has always been the “slicing the pie” problem. The more groups that break out into specific special interests, the smaller the group you represent becomes. The smaller the group becomes, the easier the group is to dismiss.
Due to this I left all of my special interest groups and stopped the traditional advocacy role. I never liked self-identifying with a single group, in this case group being an organized special interest, so I always felt that when I was representing one group I was ignoring the myriad complexities represented by the other groups, which may or may not be organized, that I am simultaneously a member of.
So many people want the world to be a simple slice of bread with jelly on one side and nothing on the other. This has never been the case, never will be the case and anyone who says otherwise is lying to themselves and trying to get you to buy into their cult. Even the analogy I used here is a lie because that single slice of bread has more complexity to it than the metaphor implies. No bread is perfectly uniform. There are random pockets in the bread. Every loaf has a unique topography. Even when you carefully slice it and spread jelly on one random side, you haven’t actually spread jelly on a single solid plane but a random conglomeration of interconnected structures that form a roughly consistent surface.
So, what I think I am saying here is that a life is like a loaf of bread. That is not exactly the direction I intended to go but there you have it.
The whole point is that things are not as simple as we want them to be. I am more than a mixed-race American with blotchy white skin. I’m more than a male. I’m more than someone who has a disability. I am all of those things and a million other things that are all interwoven into a loaf of me. I guess I am bread now, as well.
No, honestly, I am not writing this while hungry. Although, I do find bread to be quite fascinating.
So I left being specifically an advocate for the blind. I felt that I spent too much time talking to like-minded people on the one hand or people who could not relate on the other. I focused on some of the other things that I also happen to be and did them as a visually impaired person.
Even though I am working my way back into being an advocate for the disabled, I am doing it differently. I am bringing more of myself to the table because I now understand that we can not comprehend what we have not experienced directly so it is better to find ways to connect to people through what they do know.
Most of us have more similarities with others than we may think. Many of us have had to deal with similar issues in our lives. Finding these similarities brings us closer together and allows us to build from there. It is far more productive than listing our many differences.
Unless you are one of the few people who are visually impaired like me, you may not be able to relate to people in my situation. If you have never had a fully grown stallion standing on your foot, or had your shoe run over by a one-ton truck, you might not be able to relate as well but those at least are more relatable because they are translatable to other situations. For example, with the horse who decided that my foot was a comfortable place to stand there were a few things I could do to move him off my foot, some would be more effective than others. In the second, I had only two options, one choice and there was no guarantee that it would have worked. The two situations are similar because in both I was restricted in movement. In the first situation though I had many choices-some of them bad-and in the other I had only two. Anyone else in similar situations would have had the same choices, no matter if they could see or not.
The first situation is like many situations we run into in life. You find yourself limited in some way but you have many ways to solve the puzzle. Deciding how to solve the puzzle may have many facets. You may spend some time weighing the “best way” to solve the problem more than “how to” solve it. In the end of this problem I decided the best way to deal with the horse standing on my foot was to treat him like a horse who may or may not have intended to stand on my foot. I shifted my own weight to shoulder bump him which caused him to shift his weight just enough for me to move my foot. Once my foot started to move he lifted his foot and we continued walking.
The second case was not quite the same. I had two choices. I could yell at my father to move the truck or wait for him to realize that I was not moving. I decided to yell at him to get his attention. If he had been distracted and had not heard me, I would have had to wait anyway. Have you ever locked yourself out of your house or locked yourself inside of an industrial freezer? This happened to a friend of mine but luckily a co-worker heard him knocking on the door and let him out. Imagine how annoying it would have been for me if my father had been heard of hearing or how dangerous it could have been for my friend if no one wandered by the freezer for an hour or more when he was locked inside?
What I am attempting to relate to you is how important it is to reach out to people in ways that they can understand and not just try to get them to understand things from your perspective. Try and find a way to relate through things they can understand.
This is my new way of advocacy.
There is really nothing new here but we have become so good at creating special interest groups that tackle hyper-specific problems that we lose perspective of the world at large. It is rather ridiculous and sometimes I am waiting for the groups to over specialize even further, such as the Poor White Liberals Who Love Ice Cream and Doughnuts Amateur Radio Club.
We need to zoom out a little and get away from advocating for ever smaller pieces of the population pie. If we must join organizations so that we feel like we are part of something larger than ourselves, I have a few recommendations:
The People Who Live on This Planet Club
The Association of Oxygen Respirators
People Against Garbage Economics
Planetary Environment of Peace, Love and Empathy
I could go on but you get the idea.
Meanwhile, I will keep doing what I do even though I feel like I’m pushing a building uphill.
I still would much rather try and fail than have never tried in the first place.