Helen Keller – the deaf and blind miracle worker.

I have always known of the name Helen Keller, you probably do as well. That she was blind and deaf (can you just imagine that?) and that she was an inspiration to this planet in her century.

Helen Keller (1880-1968) was quite possibly the most remarkable person ever to grace our planet. Left deaf and blind as a result of a childhood illness at the age of 19 months, Helen Keller nevertheless became an articulate spokesperson for the dignity of all individuals. I believe that 41 years after her death, the story of her life is still relevant to this generation.

Courtesy of Time Magazine.com, this is the story of one of the icons of modern history.

Bear in mind that if Helen Keller had not had the misfortune of losing her sight, the world may probably never have been inspired by a story bearing her name. So what story are you the bearer of?

Get ready to be inspired.

Helen Keller

 

 

Helen Keller
She altered our perception of the disabled and remapped the boundaries of sight and sense
By DIANE SCHUUR WITH DAVID JACKSON

I can understand her rage. I was born two months prematurely and was placed in an incubator. The practice at the time was to pump a large amount of oxygen into the incubator, something doctors have since learned to be extremely cautious about. But as a result, I lost my sight. I was sent to a state school for the blind, but I flunked first grade because Braille just didn’t make any sense to me. Words were a weird concept. I remember being hit and slapped. And you act all that in. All rage is anger that is acted in, bottled in for so long that it just pops out. Helen had it harder. She was both blind and deaf. But, oh, the transformation that came over her when she discovered that words were related to things! It’s like the lyrics of that song: “On a clear day, rise and look around you, and you’ll see who you are.”

I can say the word see. I can speak the language of the sighted. That’s part of the first great achievement of Helen Keller. She proved how language could liberate the blind and the deaf. She wrote, “Literature is my utopia. Here I am not disenfranchised.” But how she struggled to master language. In her book “Midstream,” she wrote about how she was frustrated by the alphabet, by the language of the deaf, even with the speed with which her teacher spelled things out for her on her palm. She was impatient and hungry for words, and her teacher’s scribbling on her hand would never be as fast, she thought, as the people who could read the words with their eyes. I remember how books got me going after I finally grasped Braille. Being in that school was like being in an orphanage. But words — and in my case, music — changed that isolation. With language, Keller, who could not hear and could not see, proved she could communicate in the world of sight and sound — and was able to speak to it and live in it. I am a beneficiary of her work. Because of her example, the world has given way a little. In my case, I was able to go from the state school for the blind to regular public school from the age of 11 until my senior year in high school. And then I decided on my own to go back into the school for the blind. Now I sing jazz.

Helen Keller was less than two years old when she came down with a fever. It struck dramatically and left her unconscious. The fever went just as suddenly. But she was blinded and, very soon after, deaf. As she grew up, she managed to learn to do tiny errands, but she also realized that she was missing something. “Sometimes,” she later wrote, “I stood between two persons who were conversing and touched their lips. I could not understand, and was vexed. I moved my lips and gesticulated frantically without result. This made me so angry at times that I kicked and screamed until I was exhausted.” She was a wild child.

As miraculous as learning language may seem, that achievement of Keller’s belongs to the 19th century. It was also a co-production with her patient and persevering teacher, Anne Sullivan. Helen Keller’s greater achievement came after Sullivan, her companion and protector, died in 1936. Keller would live 32 more years and in that time would prove that the disabled can be independent. I hate the word handicapped. Keller would too. We are people with inconveniences. We’re not charity cases. She was once asked how disabled veterans of World War II should be treated and said that they do “not want to be treated as heroes. They want to be able to live naturally and to be treated as human beings.”

Those people whose only experience of her is “The Miracle Worker” will be surprised to discover her many dimensions. “My work for the blind,” she wrote, “has never occupied a center in my personality. My sympathies are with all who struggle for justice.” She was a tireless activist for racial and sexual equality. She once said, “I think God made woman foolish so that she might be a suitable companion to man.” She had such left-leaning opinions that the FBI under J. Edgar Hoover kept a file on her. And who were her choices for the most important people of the century? Thomas Edison, Charlie Chaplin and Lenin. Furthermore, she did not think appearing on the vaudeville circuit, showing off her skills, was beneath her, even as her friends were shocked that she would venture onto the vulgar stage. She was complex. Her main message was and is, “We’re like everybody else. We’re here to be able to live a life as full as any sighted person’s. And it’s O.K. to be ourselves.”

That means we have the freedom to be as extraordinary as the sighted. Keller loved an audience and wrote that she adored “the warm tide of human life pulsing round and round me.” That’s why the stage appealed to her, why she learned to speak and to deliver speeches. And to feel the vibrations of music, of the radio, of the movement of lips. You must understand that even more than sighted people, we need to be touched. When you look at a person, eye to eye, I imagine it’s like touching them. We don’t have that convenience. But when I perform, I get that experience from a crowd. Helen Keller must have as well. She was our first star. And I am very grateful to her.

Enjoy 18 Quotes attributed to this great Woman.

1. Everything has its wonders, even darkness and silence, and I learn, whatever state I may be in, therein to be content.
   
2. I am only one, but still I am one. I cannot do everything, but still I can do something; and because I cannot do everything, I will not refuse to do something that I can do.
   
3. I can see, and that is why I can be happy, in what you call the dark, but which to me is golden. I can see a God-made world, not a manmade world.
   
4. I do not want the peace which passeth understanding, I want the understanding which bringeth peace.
   
5. I long to accomplish a great and noble task, but it is my chief duty to accomplish small tasks as if they were great and noble.
   
6. It is for us to pray not for tasks equal to our powers, but for powers equal to our tasks, to go forward with a great desire forever beating at the door of our hearts as we travel toward our distant goal.
   
7. It is hard to interest those who have everything in those who have nothing.
   
8. Life is an exciting business, and most exciting when it is lived for others.
   
9. Life is a succession of lessons which must be lived to be understood.
   
10. Many persons have a wrong idea of what constitutes true happiness. It is not attained through self-gratification but through fidelity to a worthy purpose.
    
11. No one has a right to consume happiness without producing it.
    
12. No pessimist ever discovered the secret of the stars, or sailed to an uncharted land, or opened a new doorway for the human spirit.
    
13. People do not like to think. If one thinks, one must reach conclusions. Conclusions are not always pleasant.
    
14. The most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or even touched; they must be felt with the heart.
    
15. The most pathetic person in the world is someone who has sight, but has no vision.
    
16. The only thing worse than being blind is having sight but no vision.
    
17. There is no king who has not had a slave among his ancestors, and no slave who has not had a king among his.
    
18. Toleration is the greatest gift of the mind; it requires the same effort of the brain that it takes to balance oneself on a bicycle.

Hope you have been inspired. Have a restful day and God bless.

Remember, if Helen could, you can.