1. In the book "The Art of Seeing" Aldous Huxley explains that the cause of eyesight problems requiring corrective lenses is Public Education and schooling. In societies without organized schooling, children do not have vision problems requiring corrective lenses.
2. Hellen Keller was deaf and blind. Because of her ability to overcome these difficulties and to learn to communicate through speech and the written word, she earned a scholarship to college. While studying in college she was astonished to learn that: "The cause of blindness is poverty." And it is still true today : The medical cause of blindness is poverty, or lack of monetary resources (i.e. no money). Because of this, she became an ardent social activist and well known public speaker until the advent of her death nearly twenty years later, publicly agitating for the socialist cause and advocating economic equality for everyone. After her death, the play "The Miracle Worker" was written and published in nearly every school textbook in America. School children became so familiar with her childhood that no one seemed curious to know the rest of her life story. Her bravery and courageous political activism for social justice and universal health care has just vanished from public memory. Her historical importance has been reduced to a blind school girl saying, "Wah Wah" and almost nothing more.
3. My great grandfather was a travelling musician that died when my grandfather was five years old (in 1905). When he was eight, his mother went blind and he was put in an orphanage. At age fourteen, he ran away from the orphanage and slept on a milk wagon, where he worked during the day, until he saved money and found better circumstances. He never really learned to read and write. While living on the milk wagon he saw his own brother fall to his death and get run over. He eventually got a job in a Steel Mill where he worked until he retired.
copyright (c) 2018
William Schaeffer
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