Blind Boy Boot Camp For All

 

Please allow me to get a little personal and then make a point about the current state of affairs in the United States.

Last October our son Brian, a professional photographer and teacher of photography, lost most of his eyesight in an accident. He’s fully blind in one eye and has only 20% vision in the other eye. That makes him legally blind. As you might think this was a terribly upsetting event not only for him but for Betsey and myself as his parents. Since he’s not married, it fell to us to be his caregivers.

Fortunately, Betsey never lost her Tiger Mom tenacity from our boys’ formative years. The same determination that got Brian speech therapy and Dan back at the correct school after being hoodwinked into transferring to another elementary school now was summoned up to deal with an even greater threat to Brian’s future.

While nursing him through two eye surgeries in a span of a few weeks she went to work preparing for what a visually impaired future would look like for him. Through California’s Department of Rehabilitation (yes, we have one of those here in the Golden State) she was able to locate a program called Orientation Center for the Blind (OCB), a three-month intensive course in living life without sight. Everything from how to ambulate using a white cane to how to cook, clean, do your laundry, all the basic household tasks we in the sighted community take for granted. As well it looks to the future; teaching Braille, computer skills, and how to use the newer assistive technology coming on the market now.

Betsey was gung-ho on the program. I was worried it was a modern version of a Dickensian workhouse. Brian, as was certainly his right, was worried about the amount of time he had to devote to this and, to be quite frank, whether it would make any difference. The OCB facility is located in Albany California, just across the Bay from Brian’s home in San Francisco and about a 45-minute drive from our home in Sonoma. While it is a live in program it does follow a five day a week schedule, but students are more than welcome to live on campus or go home on the weekend.

Betsey and Brian arranged to visit the facility and get a look at what all the program would entail. In short, it was a full immersion into the world of sightless life, preparing people just like Brian for what lay ahead. Their basic working principle is to turn blind people into contributing members of society. Very much a “teach them to fish” philosophy. And the people who worked there, from the teachers and administrators to the janitors and service employees all seemed to have bought in fully to the idea of the OCB as a warm, inclusive, and most importantly respectful facility. By the way, a large percentage of the staff there are visually impaired to one degree or another. There is a definite sense of "if I can do it, you can do it". 

In short, much to my relief, it was not a Dickensian workhouse. In my perverse way I dubbed it Blind Boy Boot Camp.

Amazingly, a space was available for their next three-month session, and it was all Brian’s if he wanted it.

He wanted it.

That was three months ago. At the end of June, he graduated from the program with not only reimagined skills to navigate the world, but new skills such as reading and writing Braille. He also came away with a desire to teach other blind people, especially to teach the new adaptive technologies being developed for the visually impaired.

But most importantly he came away from the program more confident in his ability to move forward in his life. He went from being worried about the future to being confident he could tackle anything that came his way. He also came away with a new set of friends, people who were in the same situation, a band of brothers and sisters if you will who all had the same fears and hopes.

As lovely parting gifts each student received a pair of Meta Glasses, an up-to-date iPhone (filled with apps useful to the blind community), a microwave with Braille buttons and a camera built in to assist with cooking instructions, a Keurig coffee maker and a toaster oven both also with Braille, and several other assistive products.

The cost for this three-month live in, all meals included, room and board program and all the goodies mentioned above?

Nothing.

The State of California looks at this as an investment in one segment of the people who live in California. To be crass, Sacramento would rather you be a working, tax paying citizen than someone merely taking money out of the system while sitting in a room not contributing anything to society. It makes no distinction between those who lost their sight through an accident or disease or even violence (all three categories were represented in Brian’s class). The state says “ok, this shitty thing happened to you, let’s work together to get you back on your feet”.

I don’t know if anyone has run numbers on it, but it doesn’t take a world class economist to figure out that it’s better for the state to have a 37-year-old man putting money into the system than taking money out. Better for both the state and the man.

But the state has got to be willing to spend the money on such a program. More to the point, it’s the state’s, aka ourselves as members of the state, responsibility. As citizens we pay into a system that provides a fallback position, an insurance policy for when the worst occurs. Whether it’s an accident that blinds us or a fire that blazes through our city.

In case you haven’t figured it out those payments are called taxes.

And yes, it is your responsibility to pay more into the system if you have earned more. Because the more you earn, the more you take advantage of the things that were built by the state, I guarantee you. You didn’t build the roads the trucks used that brought your goods to market, you didn’t even pay to use them. You didn’t build the internet that allowed you to communicate with your customers. You didn’t put together the police force that protects you or the fire department that comes running in the middle of the night to save your property or your life. The collective “we” pays for those things.

That’s a good thing. Those public services benefit everyone and thus we should all pay into the system that creates and upkeeps them. When it comes to supplying them or manning them there should be only one rule: how many and how much do you need?

But the inflammatory rhetoric emanating from Washington DC is that the problem is a government “out of control” that needs to be downsized and DOGEd into the most minimal of minimals. That is flat out a lie. It’s a lie told by billionaires who want to pay less and take more. They want to take over the jobs currently in the control of the people. They want private roads you pay them to drive on. They want private police forces you pay them to keep you safe. They want to privatize every function of government for their own selfish, greedy profit.

If it were up to them a program like the OCB would be shut down and replaced with a for profit business that would have told Brian (and us) “oh sure, we’ll help you, but first here’s our bill for $100,000. Can’t afford that? Go find a tin cup, some pencils and a street corner to hang out on”.

Is that really the kind of world you want to live in? Because it sure as shit is the world Trump and his followers want to live in.

I don’t say this as a member of the underclass. I’m not in the 1%, but I think it’s safe to say I’m in the 10%. I’m retired, living on investments and the occasional bit of tour guide work. I don’t worry about where my next meal is coming from or if I’ll have a roof to sleep under. And I don’t mind paying taxes if the money is going to programs that genuinely help the rest of my fellow human beings. As far as I’m concerned, tax money should be spent firstly on education, public infrastructure, and basic human needs like food, health care, and shelter. Then everyone else can get in line and make their case.

Because I don’t want to live in a world where compassion is spit on and human decency is viewed as somehow weak, I’ll be out there in the streets protesting those who champion that somber view. I will be fighting for those who can’t afford to fight, who can’t show their face for fear of a masked badgeless stormtrooper, who haven’t the ability to stand or the capacity to understand.

And I’ll be fighting for those who can no longer see the world. I’ll be their eyes, his eyes, shining a light into the darkness, seeking a better world for all of us.

Shapiro Out.