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What The Blind Can Do

From: Out Of The Dark
Creator: Helen Keller (author)
Date: 1920
Publisher: Doubleday, Page & Company, New York
Source: Available at selected libraries

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* The Youth's Companion, January 4, 1906.

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They meet with darkness in the daytime, and grope at noonday as in the night.-- Job v., 14.

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To present to seeing people the truth about the blind is to describe a state of cruel deprivation, and at the same time tell a story of remarkable achievement. It is difficult for those who have not felt the terrors of blindness or known its triumphs to apprehend the position and requirements of the sightless. A great deal has been said and written about the blind; and yet persons well informed on other matters display a mediaeval ignorance about those who cannot see.

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I have known intelligent people who believed that the sightless can tell colours by touch, and it is generally thought that they have one or more senses given them in place of the one they have lost, and that the senses which of right belong to them are more delicate and acute than the senses of other people. Nature, herself, we are told, seeks to atone to the blind for their misfortune by giving them a singular sensitiveness and a sweet patience of spirit.

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If this were really the case, it would be an advantage rather than an inconvenience to lose one's sight. But it is not the truth; it is a fiction which has its origin in ignorance, and in this ignorance the blind discover the most formidable obstacle in the way to usefulness and independence. Until the public in general better understands the condition of the blind, a condition to which every person is exposed by the vicissitudes of life, it will be impossible to give the blind the special assistance they require. Left without intelligent help, the blind man lives in a night of thwarted instincts and shackled ambitions. . Given the right encouragement and aid, he becomes a brave, efficient being, independent himself and of service to others, triumphant over the bondage of darkness.

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What is blindness? Close your eyes for a moment. The room you are sitting in, the faces of your loved ones, the books that have been your friends, the games that have delighted you disappear -- they all but cease to exist. Go to the window, keeping your eyes shut. God's world -- the splendour of sky and sun and moon, almost the charm of human life -- has vanished.

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Suppose your lids will not open again. What an unspeakable calamity has befallen you! You must begin your life all over in a strange dark world. You must learn to accommodate yourself little by little to the conditions of darkness. You will have to learn the way about your own house. With arms outstretched you must grope from object to object, from room to room. The tools of your work are snatched from your hands. Your school-books, if you are young, are useless. If you venture out-of-doors, your feet are shod with fear. You are menaced on every side by unseen dangers. The firm earth rolls under your uncertain step. The stars that guided your course are blotted out. You are a human derelict adrift on the world, borne as the currents may chance to set "imprisoned in the viewless winds." In the helplessness of your heart you cry out with the blind man on the plains of Syria, "Thou son of David, have mercy upon me!"

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In response to this piteous cry men have stretched forth their hands in sympathy. They could not open the blinded eyes as the Master did on the Syrian plains, but they wrought another miracle -- they taught the blind to see with their hands. They could not stay the eclipse of sight, but they pierced the darkness with the light of knowledge. They raised up institutions -- temples of compassion -- where human skill and science turn affliction and misery to service and happiness.

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Since the year 1784, when the Abbé Valentin Haüy gathered together a few blind children from the streets of Paris and began the work of instructing them, the education of the sightless has been continued and extended, until its ever widening embrace of succour and enlightenment has reached the young blind of many countries. Homes and asylums have been provided for the aged and infirm blind. Governments and private philanthropy have united to provide the blind with libraries of embossed books.

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Indeed, so much has already been done that I am not surprised to hear you ask, "What good thing yet remains to do for the blind?" I answer, "Help the adult blind to derive all the benefit possible from the education that has been so liberally given them. Help them to become efficient, useful citizens."

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When blindness seizes a man in the midst of an active life, he has to face a greater misfortune than the child born blind or deprived of sight in the first years of life. Even if kindness and sympathy surround him, if his family is able to support him and care for him, he nevertheless feels himself a burden. He finds himself in the state of a helpless child, but with the heart and mind, the desires, instincts, and ambitions of a man. Ignorant of what blind men can do and have done, he looks about him for work, but he looks in vain. Blindness bars every common way to usefulness and independence. Almost every industry, the very machinery of society, the school, the workshop, the factory are all constructed and regulated on the supposition that every one can see.

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