Predicaments of Blindness in the Bangladeshi Sighted Society

Blindness is like Poetry that says so much in so few words that Prose (Sightedness) will not work as a means of expression. You can walk the earth and map a continent, but you can never see its patterns and perspectives. Aerial photographs are equally subject to misinterpretation. They give us data but not the wisdom to comprehend it. Sight is enjoyable; it is useful; it is convenient. But that is all that it is–enjoyable, useful, and convenient. Except in imagination and mythology it is not more than that. It does not have mysterious psychological implications; and it is not the single key to happiness, the road to knowledge, or the window to the soul. Like the other senses, it is a channel of communication, a source of pleasure, and a tool nothing less, nothing more. It is alternative, not exclusive. It is certainly not the essential component of human freedom.

The urge to liberty and the need to be free are commodities of the spirit, not the senses. They divide civilization from savagery and human beings from animals. Blindness does not mean dehumanization. In our homes and our offices, in factories and laboratories, on farms and in universities, in places of recreation and forums of civic accomplishment we live the refutation of it every day. While it is true that ninety percent of us do not have jobs and that all of us are routinely treated like children and wards, and that all of us are coming to realize that the problem is not blindness but mistaken attitudes. If even one of us can be a scientist (and many of us are), that does not prove that if an individual is blind he or she can be a scientist, but it does prove that blindness will not prevent a person from being a scientist. In short, it proves that blindness is not the barrier. But, of course, an increasing number of us do not believe it.

In fact, it is not a question of belief. As we go about our business from hour to hour and minute to minute, we know from personal experience that it is false. The blind man yearns in a land apart, Slave though richest king. Not for him the full broad sweep of mind and spirit Dark the channel, nerve and tissue; Long eternal through the night. Day comes down to touch the ocean, And I stand up to look and live – therefore completed even an International ELT(CELTA is an initial teacher training qualification for teaching English as a second or foreign language. It is provided by Cambridge Assessment English through authorised Cambridge English Teaching Qualification centres and can be taken either full-time or part-time.) Degree from The University of Cambridge, UK under direct supervision by The British Council Dhaka head office with meager and discriminated facilities for persons with visual impairment.

I also left some proofs to support my horrible experiences there, What we need most is not, as the professionals would have it, medical help or psychological counseling but admission to the main channels of daily life and citizenship, not custody and care but understanding and acceptance.

Above all, what we need is not more government programs or private charitable efforts. Instead, we want jobs, opportunity, and full participation in society. Give us that, and we will do the rest for ourselves. Give us jobs, equal treatment, and a solid economic base; and we will do without the counseling, the sheltered workshops, and the social programs. We will not need them. We have the same medical, vocational, social, and recreational needs as others; but our blindness does not create those needs, and it does not magnify or enlarge them. It does not make them special or different.

We are neither more nor less than normal people who cannot see, and that is how we intend to be treated. We want no strife or confrontation, but we have learned the power of collective action, and we will do what we have to do to achieve first-class status. We are simply no longer willing to be second and third class citizens.

Nationally innumerable organizations and a few Globally were formed for establishing rights of blind people, Today when we have tens of thousands of members and are the strongest presence in the affairs of the blind) the purpose is unchanged. It is exactly what it was in the past. It can be told in a sentence. We want freedom—jobs, homes, the chance to succeed or fail on our own merit, access to places of public accommodation, interdependence with our neighbors, and full participation in society. The words are easy, but the fact has been long delayed. From the dawn of history blind men and women have worked and hoped and waited, but our dream approached reality.  And now the waiting is over.

Yes, we have waited—oh, God, how we have waited!— but never again! No more! In this generation our time has finally come— for we are determined at long last to live the truth of what we are, and not what others think we are or try to make us become or believe. As Cicero said: “Freedom is participation in power.” And as Max Stirner said: “Freedom cannot be granted. It must be taken.”

There are four essential elements in the pattern of our freedom. Each has a different part to play, and each is necessary. They blend to form a tapestry, which can never be finished without the composite. The first and most important of these elements is internal. It is what we believe and become within ourselves. The second is public education. The third is the law. The fourth is confrontation.

Other people tend to treat and value us as we treat and value ourselves. In matters of the spirit, before a thing can become reality, we must believe it; and before we can believe it, we must say we believe it. We say we are as good as the sighted, able to compete with them on terms of equality. We say that we deserve all of the privileges and responsibilities of citizenship and that we are capable of exercising them. We say that it is respectable to be blind.

When the time comes that a majority of us know for a certainty within ourselves that these things are true (know it so surely that we act and live it every day and do not even need to think about it or question it), our battle will largely be won. Humanity comes through the optic nerve, And justice lives in the eye. Not creed or law or politics But curvature and the nature of light to be initiated by the humane Government.