American Center on Blindness and Visual Impairment, Part I

My two-part blog posting today is about the American Center on Blindness and Visual Impairment proposed by the American Council for the Blind at its most recent convention last week. This sounds like an excellent way to remember and honor blind people who have contributed to humanity and is very much-needed.

Perhaps, the Center or its Board of Trustees could award The Crystal Stylus biannually to a blind person making an outstanding contribution that year. The statuette could resemble a silver stylus embedded in a baccarat crystal handle, a sort of 2.5 times larger mock-up of a real stylus. And the silver could be the real thing, too. Aren't we worth it? (Platinum would doubtless be too expensive—but I’m worth it! )

I wish ACB every success with this laudable endeavor.

Note: In the second part of this blog item, I proposed a list of potential blind Hall of Fame members. I neglected to add a major example, Nicolas Saunderson, blind mathematician and occupier of the Lucasian Chair early 18th-century at Cambridge, a position currently held by Stephen Hawking, CH.

Another English person comes to mind, Blind Jack of Narlingham, but I know nothing about him save that he lived during the early 19th-century and may have been a surveyor. The Irish had an entire class of bards, often blind who sang the news in 19th-century Dublin.

(I recall something about them on a show called Sound and Spirit, but I’d never be able to figure out anymore about it than that.)