Due to an erroneous misrepresentation of language, we usually call disability, – which in itself implies discrimination – people who suffer from some physical, congenital or acquired ailment.
We can mention among them, dwarfism, obesity, deafness, having a hunchback, or stuttering.
Of course there are other forms of discrimination against others. Because of their race, their religion, their color or their nationality.
But I want to refer especially to blindness, to loss of vision. Not to mental blindness, of those who mistake the path, blame the path, but to the blind, who were born without vision or who lost it prematurely.
And I will mention a kind of list, undoubtedly incomplete, of blind writers, who were a true pride of the countries in which they developed their work.
Three directors of our National Library were blind.
José Mármol, Argentine novelist, who for several years directed the National Library, wrote the first Argentine novel, “Amalia”, an allegation against the Rosas government, a fact that forced him into exile in Montevideo.
Another blind director of the National Library was Paúl Groussac. Born in France, he was also Argentine, by choice, and out of love for our country.
He wrote a beautiful book, “La Divisa Punzó”.
And the third director, practically blind, of the aforementioned Library, was our Jorge Luis Borges, who gave his country and the world works of enormous
literary value and was for much of its existence, non-seer.
Also, in the last stage of his life, another Argentine writer, Francisco Luis Bermúdez, wrote this beautiful sonnet, which ends:
– “Because after all I have verified
That one does not enjoy what is enjoyed well
But after having suffered it.
Because after all, I have understood
That what the tree has of flowery
He lives, from what he has buried”.
And a book of cute children’s stories and not only children’s, “Gulliver’s Travels”, was created by an Irish priest in the 18th century.
He was also blind and his name was Jonathan Swift.
As was the Italian Giovanni Papini from the age of 54, when he dictated the book “El Diablo” to his granddaughter.
And he lacked vision, in the last decades of his life, the Spaniard Benito Pérez Galdós, from whose books two famous Spanish films were made, “Nazarín”, directed by Luis Buñuel, and also “Marianela”.
I wouldn’t want to go on too long. But wouldn’t it be unfair to call Frenchman Louis Braille disabled, who lost his sight at the age of 3?
He was a blind man who pointed out paths, by giving blind men the possibility of reading, through an ingenious system that today bears his name.
And for those within them who possessed some musical aptitude, Braille created a pentagram. That pentagram made it possible for an enormously talented blind man, Joaquín Rodrigo, who was his own teacher, to create a melody that he called “Concierto de Aranjuez”, with which he enriched the musical heritage of Humanity, confirming that although there are no immortal men , there are immortal works.
Another blind person was the Swedish physicist Nils Dalen, who at only 42 years old won the Nobel Prize in Physics.
Dalen invented, in 1942, a method of intermittent lighting for headlights.
The rocky Swedish coasts produced frequent accidents.
His method helped save numerous lives.
It is true that the blind man’s evening has no dawn, and for him each new day is a
new night.
But it is also true that many men with perfect vision were able to walk normally. But they advanced without seeing.
Those mentioned today and many more could see, without looking.
They managed to surpass their own shadows. They were true enlightened ones, who managed to combat -and defeat- the darkness.
These examples of talented blind beings, who “saw” much more clearly than others with normal sight, are the most complete demonstration that many disabled or “different”, in any sense, can teach us something and even surpass us.
Therefore, any impairment, due to any physical circumstance, is simply aberrational.
Of those who devalue them due to insensitivity, coldness or stupidity, I would say that these are the truly disabled, who are always unaware that they are disabled.
Because only the mentally blind discriminate against men, because of their shortcomings…
Source: Ambito
