completeconfusion

(This was a post that followed one writer using the word "blind" metaphorically, next to a couple of other pejorative words, and the next post in the thread wherein another, blind, writer, took very real offense to the word "blind" appearing in such a sentence. Slightly corrected since.) Jessica, as legally designated crip myself, I just have to go with Istvan on this one point re disability, an issue dear to me. I regret to say it, but I believe you do the rest of us with disabilities no service at all by conflating his proper metaphorical use of the word blind with an insult to the visually impaired. I understand that you haven't said he intended that as an insult, but the truth is there was no insult, nor misuse. I don't buy his overarching thesis, but that's another story. By now, I'd say the same about "lame". I confess I rather wish it hadn't become common parlance, recently. That's because I cringe when I hear it used, even though it too is being used entirely metaphorically. But I have come to see that's my problem, nobody else's. I cringe because I am lame, because I hate being lame, and because I am sometimes genuinely embarrassed by *both* of those facts. (Meta-embarrassment!) Even so, despite my not liking this truth; it is a truth that there are obvious and useful parallels between physical disability and... well an immense number of other things. Making this metaphor very useful. I won't make language and thought poorer so that I don't have to be conscious of being different. I'm not going to ask millions of people to drop a very useful, pithy metaphor to save my feelings, when I'm the master of those feelings, and they had not the slightest intention of harming me. I know, as I expect you do, that in general people are far too fearful of putting a foot wrong, in these politically correct days. I really notice this when I'm in my electric wheelchair (which is not all the time). It gets in the way so much, and it just takes one disabled person in a hundred taking offense without a strict need to, to keep that cycle going. That's how severe the embarrassment non-disabled people feel is, when they think they might have embarrassed those less-abled. (Again with the meta-embarassment.) I know it's not your intention to make social intercourse even more artificial than it already is in this day and age, but that's what I think the result of your comment to Istvan is likely to be. You may well differ with me, but I hope you will consider this alternative point of view. I think it makes me happier. Not happier than you are, necessarily - I can't know that. Just happier than I would be otherwise. Ask yourself, should we now withdraw Thomas Hardy's "The Return of The Native" from circulation because he uses physical blindness as a central metaphor for more general spiritual and psychological lack of comprehension - and do this so that no blind person ever flinches when reading this book when they grasp the metaphor? No. Nor consider Hardy to be an insensitive "product of his times", etiher. If the metaphor fits - genuinely fits and isn't a lazy metaphor that betrays an underlying prejudice - let the character wear it.