Re: Your choice? Would you restore your vision?
@kjsisco
No one is picking apart the ways the sighted have advantages over the blind. There's no picking apart to be done. It's blatantly obvious once you're living independently and holding down a job and doing all those things you're supposed to do as an adult.
being able to sweep the advantages of the sighted under the rug isn't about identity. If you can do that you're either young, living in proximity to sighted people who help you out, or somehow you have more privilege than me and my 6 figure programmer salary.
I've had multiple job-related blindness stories, I've had multiple airport-related blindness stories, I've had multiple home-related blindness stories, I've had multiple college-related blindness stories. I could probably think up a few more categories. All of them caused problems, all of those problems wouldn't have been problems if I were sighted. If you haven't yet built up a list of stories like this, if you haven't yet come to understand your limitations, then you should think long and hard why so many of us do have stories like this and what it might mean. I promise that those of us who are talking about the advantages of the sighted, we're not being hypothetical. I used to think like you do. Then I was fortunate enough to have the opportunity to actually go out into the world, to live alone without a support network, and push myself far enough to find the limitations. That sucks in a way, though I actually prefer living alone without a support network over going back to Florida where I have one, but I also feel kind of sorry for you if you're an adult and have had a boring enough life that you haven't found the edge of what blind people can reasonably do. I will warn you now: if this is the case, you're not prepared for the day that that happens to you.
You keep trying to turn this into some sort of blindness philosophy in order to ignore the purely practical points we're making. Obviously we're not going to force you to take a cure if it existed. But you're arguing against purely practical things with fortune cookie-style philosophy. Your "blindness is identity" arguments don't help me or anyone else get to the grocery store. They don't help us reroute around construction. If you're living alone, they don't let you magically know just how bad that burn is. They don't teleport us to work, or find the pill you just dropped before the dog eats it, or make employers consider us equal. It doesn't turn getting stuck in some airport somewhere into anything less than a nightmare, or let you find your new doctor's office without Aira or somehow getting another human being involved. It doesn't let you sense the electromagnetic emissions of your appliances to read their touchscreens, tel if there's mold on the ceiling, notice that the couch is stained and everyone has just been too polite to mention it. It doesn't make the clouds move out of the way of the GPS signal, or the uber driver notice that maybe that blind guy is waiting on him. I could go on.
All it does is provides you some justification to put your head in the sand, because obviously monstrously long and impactful lists of just what we can't do and what's harder that aren't things like fighter pilot that we nonetheless have to deal with every day is just picking apart the advantages of the sighted. I've got news. It's not picking apart anything, and it's not about the advantages of the sighted. It's about the disadvantages of the blind. You will have these disadvantages until there's a cure and you choose to take it. The only control you have over that is whether you face them or avoid acknowledging that they exist, you're avoiding, and ironically avoiding actually just makes it worse because only when you face them can you find ways around or through them.
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