Jim Heartfield writes Tuesday Nov 17/98: I never said that disabled people were not people. I said that sightedness is preferable to blindness. Tell me otherwise. How many blind people confronted with the choice would reject the chance to restore their sight? How many sighted people willingly give up their sight? You make an entirely false logical step from my rational proposition that blindness is worse than sightedness, to the false conclusion that the blind are morally inferior to the sighted. That's the step that you choose to make. I don't. I take no responsibility the conclusion you draw. It is a discriminatory value judgement you make when you say that preference for sight over blindness implies a preference for the sighted over the blind. When you make that value judgement what you are doing is reducing the disabled to their disability. But people who have lost limbs, mobility or senses are not reducible to their disability. They are persons in spite of those losses. By contrast you seem to want to derive their status from those disabilities. That seems wrong to me.
Doyle No you didn't say disabled people are not people. What you did is looked for a metaphor to marginalize POMOs, and you used various forms of disability as the very definition of the margin. In other times you could have used Jews, or Indians (Native Americans). I realize you don't feel disabled people are not human. I am trying to get you to examine why you unconsciously need to use this sort of thinking to talk about marginalization of someone. POMO's may be marginalized for errors of course, but the margin is not defined by disabled people.
Doyle Blind people will have a range of opinions about whether or not to give up blindness. Some will and some won't give it up. There is a famous example in Oliver Sacks book, the title of which escapes me, about blind sight. The person was blind since childhood, and regains sight in adult hood. It was a singular nightmarish hell. We think some things in the ideal are the answer, but they aren't. In a sighted world with everything biased against a person who is blind, then a blind person will feel they could use some eyeballs. Nor can these things be solved by simple attitudinal changes, blindness still presents problems whether or not people admit that blindness seems a "dreadful" scourge in a world where norms define blindness as the margin.
Doyle A disabled person must acknowledge their disability to get by in the world. But in any case, there isn't a reason to prefer sightedness over blindness. I mean literally there is not a social reason to do that. That is the very definition of to discrimnate if one instills a preference. I do not want to derive the status of someone because of skin color, or sex, I want equality and an end to discriminization. I want people to think twice when they call someone a marginal, and naturally look for the best possible definition of marginal and find the disabled fit the bill. Such thinking keeps stereotypes alive amongst people who ought to examine their values and just think for a moment. regards, Doyle Saylor