Category: Let's talk
Do any of you share my observation that most visually impaired people and people who have other disabilities have middle-class parents? There are several things that lead me to this conclusion.
Many blind people have several gadgets that cost thousands of pounds. Grants and welfare payments may account for some of the gadgets, but they don’t account for all of them. Also, there are plenty of blind people who own expensive musical instruments.
I know of disabled people (not usually visually impaired) who regularly go to concerts which aren’t cheap, regularly go out to watch movies or to eat, and travel long distances. They usually do all of these things with a family member. I know of visually impaired people who regularly travel or have regularly travelled long distances using public transport.
If you look at some profiles on the Zone, focusing on the activities and interests people enjoy, they give the impression that many users come from middle-class backgrounds.
ps: If you're wondering what prompted me to post this shortly after midnight (Western European time) on Christmas eve, this thread was inspired by a thread about private schools I saw on the boards.
Looks like you've done some checking on this.
The middle class in Western society used to make up a majority of the population. It is also quite broad in income scope, so that would account for things.
Many young people might otherwise save up for a car (or <gasp) be given one by a relative). That plus gas plus (expensive) insurance = a lot of money. If same money went to a blind person's general pursuits, you have quite an opportunity of expenditure.
Not one I had growing up, but then again, my friends who happened to be sighted didn't either. We were all on the lower end of middle class, pulling to make it. I'm certainly there now.
It's tough because you always see examples of people who look like they're getting more than the rest of us, and often they fall into one so-called elite category or another. And some are getting a bit more than the rest of us, sometimes by manipulation or double dipping. But in reality, there's usually more to the situation than one can see on the surface. But there is a lot of marketing money being made now in news corporations, based on our tendency to see just the surface, and want to vent very real frustrations at what we see as injustices.
My daughter, for instance, is an only child. So there are times we can say yes to things that a family of four or six or eight might not. But there are other things she'd had to learn to do as an only child that the rest of us growing up in larger families didn't have to. More often than not, life is a series of trade-offs.
I must say that plenty of research went into this topic. Most of my blind friends have middle class parents; interesting.
But we don't hear from those who are disabled and so poor that they can't afford a computer or the internet bill, taking them pretty much right out of the equasion.
Absolutely right, Anthony. Something I had forgotten. While some people had Apple computers and were on bulletin board systems in the 1980s when I was a teenager, I was one of the masses who never had a computer. If someone is out there now and working 6 days a week in a vneding program someplace, they're not on here because their work requires them to be on the move. This is one of those demographics problems polling always runs into: how do you actually get a broad segment of society?
After all, Internet access is limited to lower-middle income and up. We live in a older cul-de-sac neighborhood of duplexes, mostly bluecollar people here, and they all do have Internet. But in the projects? Probably not.
I would seriously doubt that the projects have internet. Though do to the missapropriation of just about everything today, you never know.
My only question about this is, what's the point? Of course most blind people have middle class parents, the middle class is huge. Most... um... everybody, has middle class parents, most people are middle class. So, what were we meant to gleen here?