Assalamu alaikum, and greetings, all, I started thinking about this a few days ago when I was explaining to a coworker why I feel uncomfortable in groups of people where I’m the only blind or disabled person, and I have in the past also attempted to explain my, how do I call it? Feelings of bitterness and mistrust toward “sighted” or non-disabled people. I have to say, though, that the “bitterness” comes in short spurts and as soon as I feel it, I do my bes tto get rid of it.

I think most of my feelings stem from having to fight the stereotypes and misconceptions that most people, I’d venture to say, have about people who are blind/visually impaired and/or disabled.

I’ve often said that dealing with blindness, in and of itself, isn’t hard, in fact, when I’m in my own home, I normally don’t even think of it. It’s so much a part of who I am, and I’ve been this way practically my whole life, that I just don’t give it much thought, unless something comes up where I really need sighted assistance, but even then it’s not a big deal, I just have my husband help me, or get some help from friends, when I was single.

The problem for me is and has always been dealing with “the outside world”, their expectations of me, what they think I can and can’t do, what they think I should or shouldn’t be doing, what my position in society should or should not be.

I’ll give a few examples. I was at a meeting a few weeks ago, and I was in a room full of people, as meetings go, and while there were people in chairs immediately adjacent to me, most of the time, people talked *around* me. The thing is, I knew pretty quickly as soon as I came in the room, that I probably should not have come. I didn’t know anyone there, I really felt like I stood out like a sore thumb, and even if I only came with my cane and not Chloe, I still would have stood out. I’ve been in situations like this from Eid gatherings to neighborhood meetings to conventions, etc. And unless it’s a convention for an organization for/of the blind, it’s pretty much the same thing. I’m sitting there, and hardly anyone says hi to me, except the occasional salam, or the hi how are you, or the “you have a wonderful dog” comments. I’ve literally been in situations where two people have been sitting on either side of me, and they’d be talking to each other, both of them leaning right in front of me, and it was like I was not even there.

And as I have said, this has happened across the board, so it’s not just Muslims, non-Muslims, me, women, whoever. I’ve been in a myriad of situations where I’ve been in a roomful of people, everyone talking, and me just sitting there, and people walking and talking around me like I wasn’t there. It’s made me feel like I could have just stayed at home, which is one reason I don’tggo to many Eid “gatherings” anymore.

Another issue I’ve found is that there is this “invisible circle” that most sighted people won’t cross with you, as a blind person. I’ve found this from college to work to organizations that you may be involved in. And it goes something like this. People may talk to you, at work, in class, at lunch, etc., on a superficial, “hi, how are you”, kind of thing. But you, as a blind person, will never be invited out for tea, for drinks, if you do that sort of thing, for shopping, or anything like that. And it’s not because I’m Muslim either, because I’ve noticed this before I became Muslim. The “invisible circle” I’m talking about is that in my experience, most sighted people will only get to know you so much, will only go “so far” in their friendships with you.

And I’ve asked other blind people about this and they report the same phenomenon. I’m not saying that all sighted people are like this, obviously, because my husband is sighted. And I’m not saying that it’s malicious, perhaps people are doing this and they’re intimidated or don’t know how to act around blind people. I’m saying that it’s enough of a phenomenon thta I believe there’s something to it.

The only sighted people who seem comfortable with us “blind folks” are usually sighted people who have had contact with other blind people, i.e., they’re married to blind people, have blind people in their family, or are the parents of blind children. Although this doesn’t mean they won’t have stereotypes of thier own, I know of parents of blind children/people who shelter their kids, won’t let them grow up, won’t let them move out and have lives of their own, etc., because they don’t think that their children are capable of this.

And just because someone may work in the “blindness field” such as a rehab counsellor or independent living instructor, doesn’t make them immune from viewing blind people in stereotypical ways, which is really sad because you’d think that they of all people would know better. However, people who have worked with blind people or know blind people on an intimate level seem to be less susceptible to the still-pervasive stereotypes of the blind that we still have in our society.

When I’ve tried to explain this to some of my sighted coworkers, I’ve gotten the same sort of defensiveness that you’d get if you’re discussing race to white people. The same sorta “oh but I’m not like that” or the “oh but you gotta understand, we just don’t know” kind of comments. And to me, if you have a blind coworker, or a blind friend, or a blind family member, there’s just no excuse for you *not* to know. But I think the problem is as someone told me once, people are afraid, “blindness” as I was told once, is one of the most feared things, and for people who are sighted, they think that if they were blind, they couldn’t possibly function, I once had a college roommate actually tell me that if she ever lost her sight, she’d just curl up in a corner, and wish that she’d die, that there would be no way she could ever learn to function, and that she’d probably just curl herself anyway.

I was shocked, and I was even more shocked to hear from some blind people that they didn’t want to be blind, that if they could see, they would, that blindness was a curse, an evil, and I was just shocked! I’ve heard partially sighted people tell me that they do everything they can to “not look blind” even if it means they don’t carry a cane, and they end up running into something. They’d rather look stupid, look like a bumbling idiot, than like *shudder* blind! This was why someone once told me they wanted to get a dog, because having a dog would make them lookless *you guessed it* “blind”. I was angry!

Those of us who are totally blind don’t have the luxury of choosing to “pass” for sighted or not! And it’s always made me angry, that when I was growing up, and going to school, that the “partials” seemed to get treated better by the staff, seemed to be the ones who got the off-campus jobs, for example, seemed to be the ones who got to go to public school for half days (something I was always promised but never got myself). The “totals” always were at the bottom of the barrel, and it took my mother pointing this out for me to realize this. The “totals” were always a burden, always shoved to the side, always “less than”. I have memories of traveling for track meets and other athletic events where we’d stop at the school we were going to to compete, or a restaurant to eat, and all of a sudden, the kids who had more sight, who were supposed to make sure those of us who couldn’t see at all were guided to the building, all of a sudden were nowhere to be found. This happened more times than I can count, and either the adults had to help us, or other kids, who barely had any sight themselves, stepped up and helped.

It’s not that I don’t want to see, it’s just that if seeing is going to make me act like this, make me treat others in some of the ways that I’ve been treated, then I’ll just stay blind, sorry.

And I don’t think blindness is a curse, an evil, or anything to “change”. It’s not like if I woke up and Allah gave me sight tomorrow, that all of my problems would disappear, that everything would be great and wonderful. In fact, I’d probably have to re-learn everything all over again. Most people don’t think about that. I’d have to learn to do things by sight and not by touch, I’d have to learn to read, perhaps to drive, etc. And I wonder if it’d be just as traumatic as going blind would be to someone who’s had sight their whole lives?

I’m not saying that I’d not want to see, I’m saying that I like how I am now, I like how things are now, frustrating as they may be sometimes.

Assalamu alaikum, first of all, the Dell technician came on Tuesday and replaced the motherboard in my computer, and now it’s working, Alhamdulillah for that. (And apparently, it was a woman technician as my husband informed me during my lunch break at work that *she’d* called him to inform him that the part had been replaced and that the computer was working so Mashallah for that, always good to see women in what seem to be male-dominated professions like, well, “cable guys” etc. I actually did have a woman come out to install my cable once, but I digress).

So anyway… I was reading the Blind Confidential blog, which had an article about WebVisum, a Firefox plug-in which adds many accessibility features to the Firefox browser, the most breath-taking and exciting for me being the fact that WebVisum uses OCR to solve the always-frustrating and highly dreaded “captcha” problem faced by blind and visually impaired computer users.

So this morning, I installed the WebVisum plug-in, and this afternoon, when I got home from work, I put it to the test, by going to Imam Zaid’s New Islamic Directions site and commenting on an article, the one I selected was called “Disabled Society”, and whadaya know? It worked! There is a shortcut key that you hit, and WebVisum gives you a message that the captcha has been submitted and the result will appear momentarily. Which it does in a few seconds, at which point you get a message saying “the captcha code is ready for pasting”, at which point, you paste it into the field that asks you to enter the image. And it worked! It actually worked! At which point, I ran out and told my husband about it!

This is just all kinds of great and wonderful and exciting and any other words of joy and excitement at having been provided with the means to do something I heretofore could not do.

Alhamdulillah and Allahu Akbar! This wasn’t the “big access technologoy” companies that did this, it was, well, just some average everyday guys who knew something about computers and made something happen that all the “big guys” seemed to think could not be done, i.e., solving the captcha problem!

Alhamdulillah!

Assalamu alaikum, well, I’m not quite sure what I did or how I did it (I think changing the display from 1024 by 768 to 600 by 800 helped), but Jaws seems to be working fine now Alhamdulillah on my on-loan-from-work laptop!

Inshallah, it will continue to work smoothly, and my telecommutting process will go smoothly from here on out.

Anyway, I’m tired. Trying to solve computer problems wears me out!

Assalamu alaikum, my computer is still dead, or as I’ve been saying, it’s taking a long nap! And no offense to people from India, or wherever the tech support calls are outsourced, but, whoever thought of this idea was, well, let’s just say I don’t think it’s a good idea! It seems you spend the majority of the itme just trying to understand the person you’re talking to, and they trying to understand you! It’s quite tiring, and for some reason, they got the idea that my husband (who was assisting them with doing some things within the gutts of the computer) is not named Glenn. And now I’ve got that song “My Name is Not Susan” stuck in my head.

So anyway, we spent probably 2 or 3 hours on the phone with tech support which, if we were techies or a techie had come to our house, probably could have figured out in a few minutes, which was, that perhaps, or maybe not, it’s the motherboard that has gone out. Or who knows,it could be something else when the technician gets here on Tuesday (and no we don’t know the time they’re coming, they’re supposed to call us back for that!) *sigh*

The thing is, maybe my husband’s laid back nature and patience is wearing off on me, but when this happened to me last year (yes I had to have my Dell machine replaced last year at about the same time), I was so upset and frustrated about the whole thing. And now I’m just like “well we’ll get it fixed eventually).

Anyway, I’m watching old hip hop videos on VH1 Soul right now (they’re playing Roxanne Roxanne by is it UTFO?) So I’ll probably just vege out in front of the TV for the rest of the day, because I won’t obviously be on the computer.

Inshallah, my computer gets fixed soon.

Assalamu alaikum, and so it goes withthe plethera of computer issues I’ve had to deal with since yesterday. The first of which is the fact that Jaws is being quirky with my laptop, choosing not to read some edit boxes, address windows in browsers, and the Jaws cursor won’t read the desktop, just gives me a “blank, blank, blank” when I know there is stuff there.

Some applications that aren’t necessarily Jaws-friendly require the effective use of the Jaws cursor, as the PC cursor won’t always read things in these applications to you. And there is one application, in particular, that I use in performing my daily job functions, that I absolutely have tohave the use of the Jaws cursor.

So in essence, no telecommuting until I can get this fixed, as this is ostensibily why I’m being issued the laptop in the first place.

Now, just when I’ve seeming got this figured out, something on my home desktop computer (we think it’s the power supply), has died, as the computer will come on, but it just sits there and the fan blows at full speed, and nothing, and I mean nothing, comes up on the screen. This happened after I heard a strange, incessant, beeping noise coming from the CPU of the computer. At thiat point, I tried shutting it down, but the computer had lociked up, and when I tried to turn it back on, it turned on, and just sat there, the fan going and nothing else. So anyway, once my husband gets home, we’re going to call tech support back as they needed me to look at some things, watch for what color the on/off button was flashing, etc., which I obviously can’t do.

So there you go… You know what is interesting, though, I’m not mad/upset/frustrated… I’m just kinda like, “we’ll get this worked out eventually”.

And Inshallah, everything I need for work will work with Jaws, which I think it will.

Make dua for me please.

Assalamu alaikum, today I switched my cable service from Bright House to Verizon FiOS, and so far I really like it. The coolest thing for me is the fact that I get Bridges TV, and I don’t have to pay extra for it. Bridges TV isn’t perfect, and I’m sure that we could have a lot to complain about it, but it’s a form of Muslim media, and they do have some shows/documentaries that I find myself watching (and cricket isn’t one of them). But my feeling is that we’re not going to have the quality Muslim media that we want out there if we don’t support the upstarts that come on the scene.

There is also a BBC World News channel, Boomerang (which is a classic cartoon network), and some other channels that I was not getting with Bright House, that I’m now getting. And I might actually save a bit of money (which is another reason why I changed services).

Having said that, though, Bright House has very good customer service, which it seems that Verizon might have issues with if you read some online sources, and I’ve had nothing but positive experiences regarding them.

The guy who came out to install the service was professional, pleasant, answered any questions that I and my husband had, and he even helped change the contrast on my computer room TV for me (I guess there was hardly any color and I didn’t know that and my husband never mentioned it to me). My Spanish-language skills came in handy, though, as somehow the menus were switched to Spanish, though with the guy and my husband spelling out/trying to read the Spanish words to me, we figured out how to switch the menus back and get the contrast changed to a more pleasing level for the sightlings. Add to that, the Verizon guy also helped my husband hook up his DVD player to the TV in the living room and he even showed him how to switch back between the TV and DVD. The guy was on time, he arrived just after 8 or so, I didn’t even hear him knock at the door, all I remember was my mother-in-law coming to the bedroom door and telling me the “tv Internet guy” was here. Anyway, the installation went smoothly, took about 3 or so hours, and no setting of fires or other installation calamities occurred. So there you go. As if I need any more “bread and circuses”.

WASHINGTON | The Justice Department is considering letting the FBI investigate Americans without any evidence of wrongdoing, relying instead on a terrorist profile that could single out Muslims, Arabs or other racial and ethnic groups.

Racial Profiling Studied for Terror Inquiries | theledger.com | The Ledger | Lakeland, FL

West Central Florida ‘Gets More Lightning Than Anywhere Else’

Bertha Forms Off Africa

Assalamu alaikum, Tariq Nelson and Kalimaat both have interesting posts regarding cross-cultural marriages. I commented on Tariq Nelson’s blog about it, and I’m sure my thoughts weren’t hashed out properly so I’m posting something on my own blog, which might not make any more sense than the comments I left did, but I’ll try, Inshallah, anyway.

While I think that it’s naive for people to go running off to a foreign country to get married, for any reason, ya know, it’s kinda their own life, and their own business. It might be stupid, naive, ill-advised, etc., etc., etc., and I’d personally advise against it, and have done so on an individual level, however, I don’t think we should pan all cross-cultural marriages because of the some, or maybe the many, stories we all think we heard about. And for me, this falls into the pervue of “things that don’t concern me”. Yes, I know we can talk about the “good Muslim sisters who’re being passed up”, the kids who are born into this sort of thing that might have problems later, and any myriad of “problems” that can arise from this sort of thing.

However, there’s a fine line between “bringing problems out into the open” and bashing either cross-cultural marriages, or bashing whatever “other” culture we’re talking about in the said cross-cultural marriage, whether it be Arab, African, whatever.

What is it, exactly, that we are against here? Is it cross-cultural marriages, per se, is it the passing up of American Muslim women (most usually converts) by (usually) convert men for “something better”, “something more pious”, etc., because I’m sensing that it’s not just about being against cross-cultural marriages, in and of themselves, it’s something deeper than that. And whatever that “something deeper” is, I’ve really not quite figured it out.

And I don’t think that Arabs have the monopoly on bad treatment of women, racism, prejudice, etc., and it’s just really a fine line between speaking your mind/giving advice/stating your experiences and bashing whatever “other culture” you’re talking about.

I don’t disagree entirely with what Tariq and Kalimaat are saying, I just wonder how many times are we going to continually bring this sort of thing up, without descending into negative caricatures of people and their motives, instead of offering up solutions and trying to address, as in the case of these two articles, why this perceived “problem” of men running off to Morocco is happening in the first place.

And I’m very sensitive to the “we shouldn’t marry interracially”, the “we shouldn’t marry cross-culturally”, etc., etc. kind of comments/opinions because I find them to be for the most part generalistic and close-minded. It’s your choice whether you want to marry within your own cultural or racial group, but don’t pass judgment on cross-cultural marriages and the people in them because of your opinion that those of differing cultural back grounds shouldn’t marry, or your own bad experience in a cross-cultural marriage, or if not your own experience, the often anecdotal experience of “others you’ve heard of”. It’s one thing to go into a situation naively, but if the two people involved in the marriage have an understanding, they’re familiar with each others’ cultural practices, etc., then I don’t think it’s a problem. It’s only when you go into something, looking for some sort of eutopia, some sort of “happily ever after” “perfect pious Muslim”, that you’re going to have problems. And that’s not just limited to the brothers marrying the Moroccan sisters, many people are guilty of that.

I’ve been in two cross-cultural marriages, the first bad, the second going very well, Alhamdulillah. Perhaps I could have taken my bad experience of the first marriage and parlayed it into a diatribe on why we shouldn’t marry cross-culturally, that “all people of culture A have X issues”, for example, “they don’t respect so-and-so people”, “they’re all abusive and only want green cards”, etc., etc. But I chose instead to examine myself, learn why I ended up where I was, and to take responsibility for the mess I’d put myself in. Perhaps there were aspects of my first husband’s culture that led him to be abusive to me and treat me badly, however, I don’t think that American culture is devoid of any negativity, and all cultures that I can say I have any knowledge of seem to have their issues. And before we start talking about “the treatment of women and how they’re devalued” by whatever culture we want to discuss today, it occurs to me that even here in America, we’re still struggling with issues of women’s value, equality of the sexes, etc. and it wasn’t that long ago in this very country that women couldn’t vote, couldn’t own property, couldn’t do anything without their husband’s consent, i.e., purchasing a car, buying property, etc. So when I read things like “oh look at how bad those men treat women”, etc., etc., and it’s written in a condescending “look at me and how much better I am ’cause I’m a … ” It just bothers me because until the day domestic violence isn’t a problem in this country, until women’s bodies are not used to sell cars, until women stop being objectified, etc., looking down my nose at “the other and how they treat women” is just not a high horse I want to get on.

Because while things like women’s treatment by men in some Arab countries might indeed be a problem, and while marriage in the Muslim community might have some problems, and while men might be running off to marry women from wherever, there’s a way to discuss this without bashing a whole group or culture of people. There’s a way to discuss this without the resentment and anger I’m seeing just below the surface that IMHO needs to be explored just as much as the “whys” of men going overseas to get married to what they perceive as a “more pious” Muslim woman.

I just feel like I’m hearing a broken record of “Arabs bad” “cross-cultural marriages bad” “brothers marrying Moroccan sisters bad”. And no solutions, just a rehash of the negativity, the hurt feelings, etc. We all know these problems exist, we’ve been talking about it for at least a year that I can readily remember. So the question I have is, what do we do about it now? What solutions can we come up with in our communities to solve the perceived problems that we say exist?