In 1991—yes, I’m showing my age here—one of the major networks produced a show portraying a blind man as a bumbling idiot. Blindness organizations got together, went after the sponsors, and the show was dropped, but not before one of the actors allegedly said, “That’s how blind people are.” Harder to check rumors before things like Snopes.
I only ever saw a few choice clips from this show. They were bad enough. At one point, the blind man is hugging a coat on a coat rack thinking it’s the woman he loves. In another, he’s swinging his cane around, knocking glass objects onto the floor, as he makes his way around his place of employment. That is NOT how you use a cane and a blind person who can’t tell an empty coat from a real person has worse issues than being blind.
The only good thing about this show seems to be that the man is employed. With 75% of blind people unemployed, this is a positive indeed.
Later in the 90s, a friend called me about a movie she saw on TV. She was appalled and wanted to ask my opinion. One thing she mentioned was that the woman was getting assistance through an airport and:
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- Was holding the dog’s harness while holding the person’s arm,
- Was counting steps the whole way.
Two problems here. One is that we are trained to drop the harness the minute we take someone’s arm. Why? Because you can’t have two guides. Either the sighted person is guiding, or the dog is. The dog can get confused and start relying on a sighted person to guide rather than doing the work him/herself.
And the counting steps! That sound you just heard is my primal scream. This is nearly as bad as feeling faces and takes me back to another portrayal of a blind person in an art form.
“Butterflies are Free” was first a play and then a movie. I was far too young to go to the movie when it came out, but I later in life received a recording of the play from the National Library Service for the Blind, a division of the Library of Congress.
The play shows a blind guy living on his own, against mommy’s advice, and spending his days playing his guitar from his loft bed. When asked how he gets what he needs, he explains that he knows how many steps to go from his apartment to the deli, to this establishment, to another establishment. Basically, this guy is living in New York City and going nowhere outside his block.
Until this movie came out, people thinking blind people counted steps was unheard of. I’d never been asked. My older sister, who is also blind, had never been asked.
Think about this when thinking a blind person counts steps: One’s stride is not consistently the same length. External factors like cracks in the sidewalk, ice, numerous moving obstacles like human beings, change one’s trajectory. You can think it’s fifteen steps from the corner, to the drugstore, and end up in an adult bookstore because you had to go around a bike chained to a parking meter, three tween girls trying out their new lip gloss, and a cup of ice someone spilled on the pavement.
The next day, you try again, and you are wearing spike heels instead of sneakers. You don’t have any obstacles to circumvent; however, you have a different stride because your feet hurt. This time, you end up in the liquor store right in front of your teetotaling great-aunt you hope will leave her fortune to you.
The next day, you are very tired from lying awake wondering why your carefully counted steps while on the arm of your mother aren’t taking you to the pharmacy, where all you want is a cherry Coke from their soda fountain, which is still in existence. You can hardly put one foot in front of the other. So, you turn after 15 steps and end up in a parking lot, where your confused ass is almost grateful to be run over by a delivery truck.
In short, counting steps just isn’t practical. And don’t you think we have better things to do with our brains than keeping track of how many steps from here to there?
Next post will be about how we actually do find the drugstore or movie theater… It’s not how the media or arts portray us.