by Paul Edwards
In July I will end my term as president of ACB. I suppose it is natural that, as my time as president draws to an end, I reflect on the last six years. This column will be personal. In my July message I will try to say some more global things about my time in office. For now, though, I am going to exercise presidential prerogative and take you some of the places I have been. I am going to share some of the people I’ve met. Come with me and meet some people who are great and some who are, well, who just are. As president I have gotten to meet both.
Come with me to a pool side and an affiliate hospitality suite where there are lots of blind people enjoying each other’s company. I am there and, as always, I feel a little like a fish out of water. By nature, I am kind of a shy person, believe it or not, and one of the hardest things for me to learn was that people probably wouldn’t talk to me unless I made a point of talking to them. So watch me going from person to person introducing myself and spending a little time getting to know people who I will probably not remember nearly as well as they think I should. And listen to many people telling me what a good job I am doing. Listen to many other people telling me all the things I have failed to do. Listen to most having a deep and abiding respect for the ACB president. You need to know that I never took that respect for granted or thought it much applied to me. I think the president of ACB is a symbol to many people of power and leadership. One has to do a lot of bad things to see that respect eroded. I found myself constantly in awe of the implicit expectation of excellence that being president of ACB provided me. It is very hard not to try to do your best when people expect it of you.
There are so many people, not all of them members of ACB, who wish us well. As president I got a chance to hear how many people truly value what we do. Invariably, one of the people by the pool would tell me a story that illustrated how ACB had helped. On the days when I had hard things to do for ACB or when I became impatient trying to juggle ACB, a full-time job, and having a life, these memories are what gave me the energy to go on.
Many of the people I talked to also had hard lives which they described not as burdens they had to bear but with acceptance and good humor. Around that pool or in that affiliate hospitality room I could always find people to admire. I valued them not because they were accomplishing great things but because they were surviving the ordinary slings and arrows the world sometimes sends us. So, thank you to all of you who shared with me your slivers of self. You made it easier on hard days. I hesitate to mention particular people because I will invariably offend lots of folks by not mentioning them so I will confine myself to talking about situations. I admire the talented musician and teacher who, though blind and a single parent, looked for foster kids to love and spoke matter-of-factly of walking through the snow with a youngster on her back. I admired the many men and women who go to jobs every day they don’t much like because they are proud to work. I admire the several people I met who volunteer every week and who take their time with those they help as seriously as they would a job. I admired the man who had struggled three years to recover from a stroke that left him without speech, paralyzed and blind. He was walking and talking and looking to see how he could help others. All of the people I met who shared their lives with me gave me the strength to carry on.
No, it wasn’t all milk and honey. Come with me to a hotel room where a bunch of us were trying to help a young lady come to terms with her vision loss. Hear her scream and sob and tear the very soul out of us because we could not make her understand that being blind truly is not the end of the world. Another of the hard things I had to learn was that there are times you just can’t fix it. But there were so many times that I wished I could have the right words to say or knew the magic buttons to push that would lift away the hurting just a little from so many for whom life is too hard. So many people are thirsty for love and empty of hope and ACB is the place they come to be healed. Sometimes we can make a difference and sometimes we just have to let people choose to be where they are. That was hard for me to learn, too. I wanted everybody to magically throw off the prejudices and values of a lifetime and arise fully adjusted and ready to rock and roll. It didn’t happen. In fact, it was probably presumptuous of me to expect it. So I gradually demanded less. Let the words I say make people think a little about who they are. Let a few of them get lodged in people’s subconscious so that when the time comes, they will poke their way up to consciousness and do some good.
There are places I have been that are not so nice. Will you come there with me, too? Look at the affiliate where initiative is stifled by people who want to retain power for its own sake. Watch people with power hurt others with their thoughtlessness and self-absorption. Watch people with talent turn and walk away because the hurt just isn’t worth it. Come to places where politics is more important than the work of ACB and watch good people intrigue because they can, not because they must. One of the toughest things for me to get used to is how often, right here in ACB, we allow the end to justify the means and leave wounded and broken people without a second glance. It has been hard sometimes to watch good people defeated by innuendo and cabals. It’s politics as usual, I suppose, but I keep expecting ACB to be different.
Come with me to one more bad place. I get to go there two or three times a month. The president gets calls from all sorts of people. Most of the time they are a pleasure but there is one kind of caller that I dread. The calls always start the same. “I hate to be calling you like this! I know you are very busy and you have a lot to do but I just have to tell you all the bad things that ----- is doing. You need to come and remove him or her from office because he or she is ruining the ----- affiliate.” Yes, there have been times when that advice has been good and appropriate though I don’t know how I or ACB could, in fact, remove any officer from a local affiliate. Most of the time, though, calls that start out that way come from people who have nothing better to do with themselves than complain. Our democracy makes room for those folks too and, as your president, I get to hear from quite a few of these disgruntled, sour souls who thrive on the negative and who wouldn’t know a positive unless it was their blood type. I had to learn that ACB has its share of malcontent naysayers and thus it will ever be.
If you had come with me to all the places I have been over my six years, the good places far outweigh the bad. Come with me to the woman who told me she had been waiting all her life to hear the things I had said in a speech and who, with tears pouring down her cheeks, said, “Thank you so much! You have given me the courage to go on!” Come with me to a hotel room in Virginia where a bunch of ACB students accepted me among them and shared a slice of their lives with me and, by the way, Mike, are you a turtle?
I have met governors, governor generals, senators, congressmen, and prime ministers. I have spent time with President Clinton and Vice President Gore. These are not the most compelling memories I will take with me as I leave the presidency. More important by far, I will take the evenings spent singing old songs. I will take the hugs of friends and the caring of strangers. I will take each of you who have shared yourselves with me because each single person is what it is really all about. Your caring means very much. So, as Bob Hope often said, thanks for the memories. They will sustain me long after the pomp and circumstance have faded.