Helen keller #2

Vision is a gift that all of us have been given. Even those who are blind can see. I am not talking about eye sight explicitly, but rather any contact with the world around us. Even Helen Keller, a girl who was both blind and deaf, had contact with the world around her. Sure she could not see the things around her, or hear the people around her, but she could still paint a picture in her mind of her world. She could still make assumptions, true or false. She could still long for something better. All of these things she could do, the same, or even better than you and me.

Helen Keller was born June 27 1880 as a normal child. She could talk, see, hear, and run like anyone else. However when she was one and a half, she contracted a serious case of scarlet feaver. While she recovered from the desease, it left her blind and deaf. However, it wasn’t until quite a while after her desease that Helen realized that she was different than other people. She realized that while she had to make gestures to communicate, other just had to misteriously move their mouthes and they could communicate with each other.

In her essay, In Platos Cave, Susan Sontag tells of how we can become desensitized to the world around us. She tells how just like Helen accepted her blindness as normal at first, it is easy for us to accept the evils in our world as normal. Sontag talks about how people would become desensitized to pictures of the Vietnam War. [read section and expount] Even now, we can look back a the horable things that happen at war and just brush them off as the past. Only once we shake ourselves and realize the tradgedy can we do anything about our perdicament. This is what Helen Keller did, but first she had to change her perspective and see how life works.

Helen Keller was a spoiled kid. From her perspective the world revolved around her. If she wanted bread for supper, her mother gave her bread. She was never punished for being disobedient and even kicking and hittin her nanny. When her teacher, Ann Sulivan came, the first thing she had to teach Keller was that the world didn’t live to serve her. If she wanted to excell, she would have to work towards it herself. Of course there would be people who loved her and would help her, bu it was ultimately up to keller, to make her dreams and visions happen.

Because Helen was not able to communicate in the traditional sense with other people, does that mean that she was a victim to believe anything that anyone told her. I would say she wasn’t. In fact, when Sullivan came to teach her, Helen had to choose that she was going to learn. She had the choice as to whether she was going to learn or not. Because of her disability, no one could force Helen to learn. She had more of a choice than we do what sources she would take in. For us, even when were in line at the grocery store, we might somehow glance at a magazine in the magazine rack and to influenced by the cover on that Magazine. Helen Keller did not have that dilemma. She had almost complete control over the sources presented to her.

Erin McGraw has a similar story that she tells in her essay, Bad Eyes. McGraw had a deteriorating eye-sight problem. Without her glasses she could hardly see a thing. Unlike Keler, however, she started relying on other to be her eyes. [examples]