A girl needs a stick

[kestrell]

and it should be whichever fucking stick she wants. More comments after the link.
https://nfb.org/sites/default/files/publications/bm/bm19/bm1902/bm190207.htm
This story reminds me of when I was doing time at the Carroll Center, and I was walking along, bouncing my cane off objects to identify them --bang! trash can tang! newspaper dispensor thwong! bike rack-- and the mobility instructor told me I was doing it all wrong, that the point of a white cane was for the blind person to gently sweep it back and forth in order to alert sighted people that she was blind.

Seriously, how is a person supposed to respond to that?? I'm a goddamn blind Jedi and she thinks I should be selling pencils.
*"A girl needs a stick" is my riff on a song by the Flash Girls titled "A Girl Needs a Knife." I added some of my own lyrics including, A girl needs an accessible flamethrower, A girl needs a Death Star, and, thank you John Varley, A girl needs a sentient talking black hole.

Comments

[kestrell]

The most disturbing thing to me is, IAP didn't exist when I was i high school. I wanted to learn braille when I was in school, and my request was denied because the head of the Commission for the Blind said I would "use it as a crutch." This is why I am only semi-literate in braille. The IAP was supposed to fix these issues, but it's just become the same bureacratic machine s before. The travesty is, this isn't even what like outside of the institution is like: for the most part, total strangers treat PWD with more dignity than the "gatekeepers."

[conuly]

...no, you'd use it to read. JFC. Would they deny you an actual crutch if you needed one of those? (Don't answer that, I think we all know the answer.)