President's Column

President's Column

By Jennifer Dunnam, President

Over the many decades of our existence, this organization, at all levels, has produced a vast quantity of literature: to inform, to inspire, to challenge, to teach.  For starters, we have our flagship publication, the Braille Monitor with 11 issues a year, perhaps 14 articles an issue.  Future Reflections is our quarterly magazine for parents and teachers (but for us all, really).  One doesn’t have to be a math whiz to deduce that over the decades long histories of these magazines alone, literally thousands of excellent articles about blindness have been generated—about personal experience, about questions of philosophy, reportage of issues from a more global perspective. 

And then, of course, there are the nearly 45 important speeches delivered at banquets of our national conventions, the articles in the Minnesota Bulletin and other state newsletters around the country, the kernel books, and the national presidential reports.  Many thoughtful people have set pen or stylus to paper or fingertips to keyboard to understand and build upon our individual and collective experience. 

Obviously, the Federation has much to offer that cannot be gained simply through reading, but the reading can sometimes help us get to a mindset where we can better understand and learn from the rest.  I can remember, in my late teens, when I first discovered our literature.  For most of my growing-up years, I did not have access to many positive blind role models—being usually the only blind student in my schools, and not knowing many blind adults.  Our literature was one of the primary ways that brought me into the Federation.  It spoke to my everyday experiences and me.  As an example, for the first time I found out that there were others in the world who got just as frustrated as I did when my peers who had some sight seemed to be viewed (and to view themselves) as superior to me and more able to be responsible, regardless of what their other skills and characteristics may have been.  Beyond expressing frustration though, these writings helped me see that there was a cogent, sensible philosophy of blindness that could guide a person in how to do something about things that did not seem right.  They also taught me how very much that I, as a person who had been blind my entire life, had yet to learn about the capabilities of blind people.  Reading a description of how a blind person navigated independently through an airport helped me be better prepared for my own first experience with flying and showed me that it might be possible to do much more than I thought I could.  Best of all, the writings connected me with a movement larger than my own life, a movement that truly was changing what it meant to be blind.  Upon discovering that the banquet speeches were available all the way back to the 60s and earlier, I read them all in chronological order over a day or two; they made so much sense to me and were so compelling that I just couldn't stop.

We keep writing more as our world changes, as we work to make sense of it all, and to use our philosophy as our guiding light.  Our means of communication have changed and continue to do so.  Information flows more freely and rapidly than ever through our evolving communication tools.  Yet our vast body of literature, spanning many decades, remains, and though some of it is specific to the period in which it was written, much of it is simply timeless.  Because of the sheer quantity of our writing, it is possible that we can overlook many important gems.

Many of us find our state and national conventions a great opportunity to “recharge our batteries”—to get encouragement and new enthusiasm for our collective work and for the work we do every day around blindness in our individual lives.  But conventions don’t happen all that often in the scheme of things, and sometimes we need more.  Now that our literature is so easily accessible in electronic text (and therefore, audio and braille formats), it seems worthwhile to draw attention to some of the articles that have been important to people over the years.

So I’m asking you now—are there particularly outstanding NFB writings that have inspired you?  Challenged you?  Enlightened you?  Had an impact on your everyday, real-world life?  Please send me the article title and when and where it was published, if you know that information.  If you are not sure but can send other identifying information, please do so.  I would like to gather these important pieces as identified by our members, and perhaps we could have an “article of the month” that could sometimes be discussed in our chapter meetings, via our e-mail listserves and social media, and on our conference calls. 

To get us started, here is a list of five pieces that had an impact on me—some of them still widely read today, some of them a bit more obscured by time.  These are not all of the articles that have been important to me, but they are ones that stand out. 

Our philosophy of blindness is what sets us apart and makes our efforts effective in improving opportunities for blind people in a real way.  Let us keep working together to support one another and to see that our message stays strong into the future.