by Paul Edwards
As another year begins, it is common to see messages such as mine, looking back at what we have accomplished over the past year. I don’t plan to do that here. There is another temptation which is to look at the past century and try to pick out the highlights. That seems to be happening everywhere in the media and there are lists of the century’s top 100 everything floating around. I don’t plan to indulge in that sort of nonsense either. However, you will not escape unscathed from the beginning of the last year of this millennium because I want to spend a little time looking at the year 1900.
In that year, Miami, the city I live in, was not yet three years old, and Cuba was being freed from Spain only to find itself coming increasingly under the influence of the United States. We were three years away from the first-ever airplane flight and electric lighting was in its infancy. For the vast majority of Americans, oil and wax provided light. There were virtually no telephones; there were no cars; there was no radio, no television, no talking books, and virtually no braille. In fact, if you were lucky enough to be attending a school for the blind, you were as likely to have been taught moon type or New York point.
In states like Kansas and Missouri, however, there were already organizations of blind people who were actively working to make things better for people who were blind. I am happy to say that those organizations still exist and are affiliates of the American Council of the Blind. Schools for the blind had already, in some cases, been operating for half a century, and 1900 was the first year that we are aware of special classrooms being set up within a public school system.
In a very real sense, we were living in a world where the town was the center of people’s existence, not the country or the world. In 1900, we were beginning to see the shift in population that would make cities the places where most Americans lived but 1900 was a year when towns were still the norm. Women could not vote. The temperance movement was actively campaigning for the eradication of the demon rum and was on its way to persuading the country that prohibition was a good idea.
The United States was a rarity: a democratic republic. Throughout the world, most people had very little say about how they were governed or about the laws that were made that they had to obey. The whole world was on the gold standard though the U.S. was seriously flirting with free silver. Good incomes were measured in the hundreds of dollars a year, and most trade unions, if they existed at all, had very little power.
There are those both in Europe and in the United States who would look back to 1900 as a year of incredible peacefulness. Many nostalgically perceived the end of the Gilded Age as a time of immense promise and dignity where most people knew their place and most people could look forward to better times. It is ironic to me that we are approaching the 21st century with as much trepidation and hope as operated for our forebears in 1900. I find myself heartened and disheartened by looking backwards. Clearly blind people can compete far more effectively in society because of technology, and it is very likely that we could not have sustained a national organization of blind people such as ACB as things were in 1900. However proud we may be about our accomplishments of the last century, we shouldn’t forget that, for some blind people anyway, a good education was to be had only at schools for the blind in 1900. Many of the approaches to blindness that we take for granted were devised and implemented in schools for the blind. One of the very first national organizations to form in the field of blindness brought teachers together to share techniques.
On the other side of the coin, many blind children of color were not given the opportunity to be educated and, when schools for the blind did begin to serve them, they were often segregated from other students. Wilson’s book on famous men and women who are blind demonstrated an ability we know blind people possess, but, those exceptions aside, most blind people could not expect to work and were not expected to contribute much to society. Services existed to get blind people out of the home and into a segregated workplace where they could do something useful for society with little remuneration and less dignity.
Society knew where we belonged and we, as blind people, for the most part, concurred. There must have actually been something comforting about knowing where we fit in the scheme of things, though. Now, when a proportion of blind people are working and when we have higher expectations of ourselves, it can tear a good person into little pieces when no job is to be found.
No, I’m not suggesting that we all jump on a time machine and travel back to the good old days of 1900. Life expectancy was limited. Most people were lucky to eat meat once every two weeks, and vaccination was a word that was just coming into use, though there were very few vaccines and less public health. As cities were evolving, immigrants were living in cramped, dirty tenement buildings with little sanitation and less privacy. What I do want us to think about a little is just how far our world has traveled in a century.
If there is one thing that has characterized this century it is the escalation of change. The first long-playing records were pioneered by the talking book program in the late 1930s and now records are becoming rare and record players are almost extinct. What is even more unnerving is that the cassette technology that replaced records and that has operated for only 25 years or so is almost certain to have disappeared by the time the new millennium is very old. If television didn’t manage to create a “global village,” the Internet may well manage to do it.
I can safely suggest that no one in 1900 could have imagined the world as it is today. While Mark Twain’s Connecticut Yankee felt like a fish out of water at the court of King Arthur, he survived and recognized much of what he saw. Had he come forward to our time, I suspect he would have been incapable of functioning in a society as dependent on technology as ours is.
We have come a long way in the last hundred years, but we have moved backwards almost as often as we have moved forward. Society is still trying to tell us where we belong, and even other groups of disabled people are trying to tell us who we are. But we know now as we knew, even in 1900, who we are. We are people who are blind who have rights and dignity and who demand that society recognizes both. We are brothers and sisters who are as much in need of each other as we were in 1900. What is sad but true is that there are just as many threats out there to the success of people who are blind as there were in 1900. If disabled people don’t get us, new technology might. Social Security and specialized services for blind people are under attack and, if statistics are to be believed, only 30 percent of us have ever held a job. Most of us had families in 1900. Far too many of us do not have families in 1999.
I suppose that William Shakespeare is right. “Comparison is odious,” but, William, it is interesting. I have no moral to draw in my first message of the last year of the 20th century. I do not claim that we live in kinder or gentler times, though perhaps we do. I suppose that there is one thing I would have you take away from this message. It is embodied in an old adage that I first saw in French which, translated, says: “The more things change, the more they stay the same!” Happy New Year! May the last year of the second millennium treat you well.