pebblerocker

Election news: the special votes have all been counted at last and the Green party went up to over 11% of party votes, meaning they now get a fourteenth MP in parliament. I've been hoping for this, both generally because the more Greens we have, the better they can try to curb the worst excesses of the National party, and in particular because the fourteenth on the Green list is Mojo Mathers, who becomes the world's fifth deaf member of parliament. She'll be a good advocate for the rights of people with disabilities, discrimination and accessibility issues as well as hearing impairment issues. So exciting!

Before the election I was reading news stories about the possibility that Ms Mathers could get in based on poll results, and of course one shouldn't read the comments on the Herald website but I did and there was the inevitable moaning about the horror of someone getting special treatment and having transcripts made available and a sign language interpreter at taxpayers' expense -- and the next comment pointed out that hey, deaf people pay taxes too, which I found most heartening.

Today I passed a woman going down the road using crutches, and she was wearing a badge saying "I have low vision". Interesting -- not something I've seen before -- is it useful to her to carry a label telling people something about her they might not notice? -- what sort of changes does the badge make to the way she gets around in the world? I wonder.

I was also sent off along a different thought train because of the irony that it was my partner who saw the badge and told me what it said; my vision isn't good enough to have read it myself, without my glasses on. Boyfriend's vision is similarly poor (we can borrow each other's glasses for brief sign-reading etc) but he wears his glasses most of the time and thinks I should do the same. I find my glasses uncomfortable and fatiguing and they make it hard for me to see things close up (arm too short to read my watch with them on!) so I put them on when they're useful to me (when I'll be looking at exclusively far-off things which I need to see in detail) and the rest of the time I have strategies for working with the eyes I've got. To me boyfriend's attitude to glasses tastes of doctor-knows-best medical compliancism, but he says wearing glasses doesn't hurt his eyes like it does mine.