Anger or Righteous Indignation

by Maurice Peret

From the Editor: Maurice Peret is an active member of our organization, serving as a staff member of the Blind Initiatives Team and chairing the Committee on Automobile and Pedestrian Safety. What Maurice writes about in this article is timely, and I hope it encourages each of us to express our political opinions while at the same time placing uppermost in our Federation activity the importance of working in harmony to advance the integration of the blind. Here’s what he says:

As a member of the National Federation of the Blind for approaching thirty years now, I came to the organized blind movement already with a developing set of values and beliefs which shaped my character as an activist as well as my intellectual worldview. I have enjoyed a profound sense of freedom of expression through the well-established democratic structure and process of our Federation. I relish the fellowship in common cause with intelligent colleagues with whom, under any other circumstances, I would find little in common due to our divergent views.

I marvel at the example which stands in contrast to the current toxic social atmosphere afoot in our nation. It is by now almost a cliché to the point of being platitudinal to reference the present era of discourse in which we find ourselves. The adjectives that come to mind include coarse, vitriolic, divisive, and partisan, particularly in the realm of government and popular media. One resulting manifestation of this era of rhetoric is punctuated by anger. The online www.dictionary.com defines anger as a noun meaning “a strong feeling of displeasure and belligerence aroused by a wrong; wrath; ire.”

As I recall my childhood, I had a rather allusive relationship with anger, repressed in the form of passive aggressive rebellion. I attribute this, at least in part, to a prevalent misunderstanding about my blindness. My parents were divorced when I was eight years old, and I grew up with many of the challenges that one might expect from being raised in a single parent home. I got into trouble just as much—well, maybe more—than other kids my age. Living in the suburban Washington, DC, Northern Virginia area, I was the only blind student, so far as I was aware, in each of the public schools that I attended. None of the adults around me ever seemed to use the term “blind.” Instead, I was always referred to as “partially sighted.” This impresses upon me now the conviction that this was a psychological trick. I actually thought I was nearer to sighted than blind, and I was not discouraged from reliance upon visual methods to accomplish tasks when perfectly viable nonvisual alternative techniques would have better served me. I had no adult blind role models to look up to or emulate back then. There were plenty of anecdotes about popular blind celebrities, but I found them and their accomplishments far beyond my reach. I wrestled with the inequality of expectations between me and my peers. When I would get into mischief for which there were consequences to face, for example, I was often "let off," or excused out of misplaced sympathy. In my adolescent rebellious mind, I grew outraged and even resentful at not being allowed to fail in the same way that my peers around me were. They were not always so fastidious in reminding me of this fact from time to time.

But for another parallel development in my life to counterbalance the anger was a growing sense of righteous indignation which would eventually save me from a potentially reckless and destructive dead-end path of an angry young man.

Wikipedia defines righteous indignation as “typically a reactive emotion of anger over mistreatment, insult, or malice of another. It is akin to what is called the sense of injustice. In some Christian doctrines, righteous indignation is considered the only form of anger which is not sinful, e.g., when Jesus drove the money lenders out of the temple (Gospel of Matthew 21).” My earliest memory is of a keen interest in biographies. I read a book at the age of eight years old about the life of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. This would have been just five years after his assassination on April 4, 1968, at the age of thirty-nine in Memphis. Until shortly before that time, I had lived with my family on the military base at Ft. Myer, Virginia. It is worth recalling that it was the United States Military, following World War II, in 1948 in an executive order signed by President Harry S. Truman that established the President’s Committee on Equality of Treatment and Opportunity in the Armed Services, becoming the first American institution to integrate men and women of all racial backgrounds. I was therefore shocked to learn that kids like the young MLK were summarily exposed to such terrible treatment simply on the arbitrary basis of their skin color. A few years later I read Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, which was heartbreaking in its depiction of the well-documented genocidal warfare against the indigenous peoples of this land. What I found even more disturbing was the discovery that the struggles of native, African American, and Latin American peoples continued to the present day. When I read the classic The Jungle by Upton Sinclair, published in 1906, I was captivated by the backdrop of rising political movements of the time and the establishment of labor organizations in response to horrific working and living conditions of the early twentieth century Chicago stockyards.

Here's the thing: If we can just get to a place beyond ideology where views can be shared civilly without venom or vitriol, perhaps we might come to some better understanding about where we are as a society, at least for those of us who occupy our mental energy with such things. There are a couple of main factors that lead me to increasingly conclude that capitalism, as a dominant world system, is beginning to show signs of serious decay. To my way of thinking, a historic precedence was established in the aftermath of the great worldwide depression in the 1930s. President Franklin Roosevelt confronted a tremendous dilemma in the land. In the wake of a gilded class of robber barons, there was a strong and growing social and progressive political movement in the country, based on organizations of labor, academic and intellectual communities, a substantial number and powerful portion of whom were avowed socialists and communists. Records of personal correspondence between President Franklin D. Roosevelt and his associates of the time revealed open concerns about a pre-revolutionary environment. Himself a secure member of the gilded elite, Roosevelt opted, against great political opposition, to offer massive concessions to the working poor and comparatively small middle classes. It amounted to a massive political and economic reform of capitalism, assisted in no small portion by the great carnage of World War II. Divisions among progressives lead to capitulation to the New Deal and ultimately a route of the most left elements of these progressives, paving the way for reactionary and destructive McCarthyism, from which we have, in my opinion, never since recovered. These historic concessions taxed the income of the wealthiest in our nation during the Dwight D. Eisenhower administration at a whopping rate of—wait for it—91 percent. It’s true, you can look it up. What was accomplished was the purchase of a nearly half century of social peace that led to growing prosperity and collective bargaining power of a working class made up of women who found themselves working, for the first time in the nation's history, outside the home, as well as combat veterans, among them, newly integrated black soldiers coming home to old Jim Crow; this is where the true civil rights movement began.

In the emergence of a new Gilded Age, not of industrial capitalists but this time of finance speculators (read the great world recession of 2008), wherein many of the regulatory building blocks of the New Deal reforms were systematically dismantled replaced by a new form of social control and revenue generating exploitation through the mass incarceration of overwhelmingly black and brown people, thanks to the war on drugs.

The Trump administration is openly challenging the limits of checks and balances in our democracy and threatening the social peace won by the New Deal. More Americans are aware of problems with our electoral process that many consider voter repression of mostly minority communities. Meanwhile we hear more and more from some among the billionaire one percenters that the way things are going, with out-of-control economic inequality and complete tax exemption providing corporations a virtual free ride, is unsustainable. The point is that the way we are headed is not sustainable, and a possible outcome could again present a historic choice: reform or revolution. Given what we know about the nation’s path, what will it look like for the next generation?

It should come as no surprise, then, that I should have become an activist early on in my life. While attending Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana, in the mid-1980s, I met a group of young socialist organizers, and I quickly got involved. As a union and political activist after leaving college, I fought and campaigned to get jobs in union-organized factories where blind workers were virtually unheard of. Inspired by the chronicled history of the first fifty years of the organized blind movement in the book entitled Walking Alone and Marching Together, I hungrily read about the organizing drives of blind workers in sheltered workshops from Cincinnati, Houston, and Chicago. I learned about Federation leaders like machinists Dick Edlund, Ray McGeorge, and Ted Hart who retired from the John Deere Corporation. My restless sense of adventure led me to many interesting places from the coal mining town of Morgantown, West Virginia, where I worked for an hourly piece rate as a pressor and union member in a shirt factory, to the farming and meat-packing region of Des Moines, Iowa, where I worked as an assembler in a vending machine factory that was organized by a United Automobile Workers union local. I came into contact with so many extremely interesting people. For example, through my work in the US based anti-Apartheid movement in collaboration with exiled members of the African National Congress, I stood just twenty feet from the recently released twenty-seven-year imprisoned Nelson Mandela and his delegation at the Washington, DC, AFL-CIO headquarters. Mandela would become South Africa’s first popularly elected black president.

I fondly recall the only face-to-face meeting I ever had with the late Dr. Kenneth Jernigan in 1993. Living in Des Moines, Iowa, at the time, I was visiting the DC and Baltimore area and decided to drop in, unannounced, to meet Dr. Jernigan with a specific purpose in mind. Astonishingly, Dr. Jernigan agreed to meet with me. I explained that there was a newspaper that I supported and read with the help of a few volunteers who recorded it on cassette tape every week, and I wanted to publicize the availability of this resource in the Braille Monitor. After a lengthy discussion about editorial policies and procedures as they had to do with the NFB, and once I made my pitch, I well remember Dr. Jernigan’s question to me in response. He asked me who I thought made the editorial decisions about the Monitor. I answered that I knew that Barbara Pierce was the editor and that I had been in discussions with her about the matter. Dr. Jernigan said that this was not his question. Catching his drift, I sheepishly answered that I supposed that it was he, Dr. Jernigan, who made those decisions. The conversation went on for an hour and covered many other topics and ended with what I received as a high compliment. Despite openly representing my political views, which it is quite safe to say differed considerably from his own, Dr. Jernigan asked me why I was not more visible at the national convention of the NFB. The fact was that I had not yet attended my first convention, which would not occur sadly until after his untimely passing in 1998. I subsequently attended the 1999 annual convention in Atlanta, deeply and sadly conscious of his absence. I will always cherish my one and only memory of the charismatic Dr. Jernigan and have strived to affirmatively answer his question put to me ever since.

Before leaving Dr. Jernigan’s office that fateful day back in 1993 and making sure he did not forget my request to have the announcement of the weekly volunteer recording of the newspaper I supported, I asked one final time whether he would allow it. In yet another test of my capacity to communicate as a blind person, Dr. Jernigan answered that I should leave the text at the front desk in Braille and he would see. I took out my seldom used slate and stylus and scribed the text of what I wanted the announcement to read. You might be as curious as I was for weeks thereafter. In a subsequent issue of the Braille Monitor, there was my announcement just as I had left it for him, errors and all. In 2020 I will attend my twenty-second consecutive convention.

Through my well-cultivated job search experiences, I derived a great deal of skill and confidence in pursuing jobs and adapting to varied work environments. During one period of unemployment while living in West Virginia, I learned firsthand what it was like to work for subminimum wages in a sheltered workshop. There was an outfit nestled in the coal mining mountains. Unemployment was quite high there, even compared to the above national average rate of joblessness across the state. There were several menial tasks that were set up for the two dozen or so workers employed there. One of the main jobs included making roof bolts that were used to secure the ceiling in underground mines. This involved using a mallet to hammer in dowels into steel bolts which sat in a vat of oily soup. The hourly piece rate was calculated supposedly according to what an “able bodied” individual was capable of producing in an hour. It is important to bear in mind that I had accumulated several years of experience working in private competitive industrial settings by then, so when I was timed at $1.53, I was quietly outraged. I held my tongue about it, though, because after all, a job was a job, and this was certainly not a union outfit. Some of those who were employed there had intellectual or developmental disabilities. Others, I discovered, including a worker with no apparent disability, had been employed in a foundry for nearly twenty years. The company had since been shuttered and had numerous cases of asbestos poisoning lawsuits pending against them, this gentleman among the plaintiffs. To add insult to injury, after a few weeks working there, I was laid off.

I also experienced employment discrimination when I applied to work as a packager at a local pharmaceutical plant well-known for its production of generic drugs. After going through two consecutive interviews, widely considered a virtual shoe-in around the area, I was explicitly denied employment in writing solely on the basis of being blind. In retrospect, I sometimes wish I had pursued the offer of legal assistance from the National Federation of the Blind. My primary focus at the time was to get a job, however, and I was not prepared to commit the time it would surely require to bring such an action, even if successful, to fruition.  

As a student of history and an observer of social and political movements, I am extremely proud of the National Federation of the Blind’s place in the history of the civil rights movement in our nation. This includes the many contributions of our founding President, Dr. Jacobus tenBroek, forever changing equal protection of citizens under the Fourteenth Amendment to the US Constitution as interpreted by the Supreme Court. I am proud of our determinant fight against the mistreatment and injustice of all people with disabilities by the exploitive and immoral practice of payment of subminimum wages and subhuman treatment. I am proud of our continuity of powerful leadership through Dr. Kenneth Jernigan, Dr. Marc Maurer, and our current talented President, Mark Riccobono.

Woven into the rich history of our yet young nation is a legacy of resistance to injustices of all kinds. Despite derailing philosophies that erupted from McCarthyism, which all but erased the public knowledge of popular resistance movements to present-day conspiracy theories designed to detract from the real issues that face us all, I am proud to stand strong with tens of thousands of my brothers and sisters in the Federation who are willing and able to make the necessary changes to empower us to live the lives we want.

I recognize and appreciate that my views on such matters are not widely shared by everyone in our movement nor in our society. I acknowledge that there are many traditions in our society which reflect different experiences and perspectives than my own. All the same, I am proud to be guided by a strong code of conduct that embraces diversity with respect for divergent differences of opinion, beliefs, identities, and other characteristics. What we stand for demonstrates that we who are blind are a diverse cross section of society. I am excited by the prospect of establishing new methods of membership and leadership development, reflecting the diversity of our entire blind community. In promoting a diverse and growing organization, we have come to expect integrity and honesty in our relationships with each other and openness to learning about and experiencing social, cultural, faith, and political diversity. I share in the belief that these qualities are crucial to fostering social and intellectual maturity. Intellectual maturity also requires individual struggle with unfamiliar or unpopular ideas. I not only recognize but embrace that our diverse views and convictions will and should be challenged and expect this challenge to take place in a climate of tolerance and mutual respect in order to maintain a united organization.

I believe that this is what makes the National Federation of the Blind powerfully and uniquely effective and exists as a model to be emulated throughout our society. What other entity can claim credit for passage of monumental legislation such as the Pedestrian Enhancement Safety Act or navigating the elaborately complex labyrinth of legal acrobatics to see through to ratification of the Marrakesh Treaty that will allow access to Braille materials across borders? These are just a couple of examples of what is possible through the power of collective action.