Why do we insist on looking at this matter from the blind person's
perspective only?
I am willing to wager that if the format required for the grant application
was complex, the grant applicant would have got it right. He made a stupid
mistake, not an incompetent mistake. If he could see, he would have picked
it up immediately when he signed the application. Now he gets bashed by
his own community for not having checked on probably the one thing he would
have picked up if he had been able to see.
In Africa we are often told by well-meaning Americans that we have much to
learn from the United States. That assertion is by and large correct, but
maybe blind people the world over are socially totally out of step with
their sighted compatriots.
Now a grant application, for all I know a good one, gets turned down by a
bureaucrat because its single spaced? No second chance to append another
template? It could have happened to anybody else who gave his/her
secretary instructions over the telephone while attending a conference.
Then, I would wager, everyone would have insisted that it was the
bureaucrat who had been stupid. I suspect that, in the sighted community,
almost everyone would have accused the bureaucracy of pig-headedness,
irrespective of whether the person in question was sighted or blind.
It is, in my view, unacceptable that blind people should try so hard to
impress their so-called competence on society that they take their
inferiority complexes out on each other. The sighted world is not
impressed by this self-flagelation. The sighted world won't change its
attitudes about blind people because blind people are hard on blind people.
Reading this thread one might be pardoned for thinking that this is some
academic fraud who, despite the fact that the publisher insisted on
footnotes, decided to put his citations in brackets throughout his
dissertation because he did not know how to operate his computer program.
What is more, one gets the impression that he did not even bother to ask
for an accommodation beforehand.
I would imagine that blind phyzicists are quite scarce, even in successful
America. Quite frankly, I admire that level of achievement. I would have
thought that blind people would at least try to consider the matter from
his perspective. If blind people are unable to affirm each other, blind
people, as a class, will never be taken seriously. If we cannot be
compassionate to our own kind, we cannot expect others to have the decency
to stop patronizing us.
And don't tel me how wonderfully you guys formatted your papers at college.
I am not interested. I am much more interested in what you are doing now.
JR
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