by Charles Crawford
There can be no question that by the end of these next thousand years and most likely by the end of this century, blindness will have been all but eradicated from the face of the earth. The mere consideration of this probable reality springs forth many questions from both the heart and the mind.
Some might ask if blindness is so bad that it needs to be eradicated, while others will ask why should it take so long. Surely once it happens, all will ask what must it have been like to live a life without sight?
Our old familiar talking books might survive the change as a kind of novelty or even art form. Similarly, our talking clocks and timers will most likely become something cute to give as a Christmas, holiday, or birthday gift. Even the once liberating talking computers will make the journey to new machines with which one will converse. The same fate will not be true for braille, white canes, guide dogs and the like that will slowly disappear into history as little more than academic notations.
What then will future generations think of us? Our alphabet soup of the blindness world will bear no relation to reality. No ACB or NFB. No AFB or BVA. Will the future ever know of us, or even have reason to care? These are the questions that really matter.
It will not be our canes, or dogs, or computers, or detectable warnings or any of these external things that the future will remember. It will be the quality of who we are and why we do what we have done that will serve the deeper human reality and meaning of the new times.
ACB will not be remembered for its material successes. Indeed, what the future will celebrate when it reviews the past and organizations such as the American Council of the Blind will be our spirit, our ideals, our values and what it was that fueled our persistence in the face of a world that many times just did not think we even existed.
The legacy of ACB will not be handed down to the blind of many next generations. It will be given to a human race still plagued with the need to communicate within itself and understand its real potential.
Future generations will know that, because there were organizations such as ACB — that founded themselves on the value of each member, practiced democracy as a real means of governance, held out the promise of a better tomorrow through common endeavor, built partnerships with all of good will and succeeded in changing even the physical world from a collective vision that could not be denied — then there will be great reason to be optimistic about how much more future generations of humanity can do with all that will be available to them. As certainly as these words are written, there will be people in the future who will read of us and find even more meaning in their lives.
We are the present of blindness upon whom the future will rely to record the past. Let us give a legacy of celebration of the human spirit and of a people who helped build a better world from the lives we led today. ACB will not be remembered as an end in itself, but rather a place where hope was more than a word and home was a place for all to share the heralding of a better life for everyone.