New point of view

You may have heard that New York State has a new governor - I guess he'll be sworn in Monday. Actually, you probably haven't heard about him, but about his predecessor, who fell from the heights of moral crusade to opprobrium with stunning speed this past week. How and why a crusader against things like prostitution rings should himself have been a client, and thought he could get away with it, is one of the questions of the day.

His successor, the Lieutenant Governor and a veteran legislator, is newsworthy, too. David A. Paterson will be the first visually impaired governor in US history. This picture from today's page 1 alludes to it somewhat tactlessly. Happily, there's also a wonderful Op-Ed piece by a Steven Kuusisto, which suggests a different interpretation: Paterson doesn't need to see things to understand them, doesn't understand only what an unimpaired person would see from where he stands:

Blind people are invariably creative and resourceful. Obviously we’re good listeners. But what people may not know is that learning to have a keen sense for what others are talking about requires developing an equally sharp curiosity about human beings. When people talk to me, I can’t just listen; I am also compelled to take stock of the person behind the words. This means asking questions that might not occur to people who can see. One of my students recently observed that I ask people in my classes to explain the things that they customarily overlook. “You ask things like ‘What was the first thing you said to yourself this morning?’” she pointed out. “You challenge us to recall the forgotten things.”

I can’t afford forgotten things. Blind folks must constantly keep track of what we learn and memorize our surroundings. For us, an unfamiliar setting that a sighted person could map out in a glance is a puzzle that requires agile problem-solving. On occasion we even need to ask strangers for advice.

New Yorkers will no doubt discover that Mr. Paterson will take great interest in the details of governance and that this will require him to take sincere interest in people. He’ll ask more questions than your average politician. And those who work in his administration will find that they are important not simply for knowing things but because they can describe how they learned those things in the first place. That’s perhaps the most important thing for the public to understand about professionals who are blind — we are by nature tireless in acquiring information, and we remember virtually every detail of what we read or hear.