Disabilities

I have a disability. Actually I have a lot of disabilities, more than I can count. I am not able to fly like a bird, nor to run fast like a horse or (what is it? the fastest animal) like a cheetah. I can swim, but not like a fish (without coming up for air every minute or two). Nobody can do any of those kinds of things, so we don't usually think of them as disabilities, something we are not able to do. But they are.

Mostly the word "disability" gets applied to things that a particular person can't do, that most other people can do. I have lots of those, too, especially now that I'm getting old. On his eightieth birthday my father said, "Last year I didn't feel old. Now I feel old." That happened to me too, when I was 78. But this year people seem to mumble a lot, so I cannot understand half or more of the sermon on Sunday morning, some pastors worse than others. My glasses, the same perscription I wore for some 20 years, now seem blurry. Maybe it's because Ore-gone is a fly-over state, you cannot get quality products here, but more likely it's because my vision is failing. It's becoming a disability.

The one disability that seems most prominent in my life is that I think slowly. Thinking slow is usually a euphemism for your elevator doesn't go all the way to the top, one of dozens of ways to say you are stupid. I'm not stupid, I have a PhD in rocket sci-- I mean computer science (which is actually harder to master than rocket science). It just takes me a while to consider all the factors in whatever I'm thinking about, maybe what somebody is telling me, and I tune them out, so they go on to say a dozen more things and I don't hear a word of it. Everybody else has a reading disability, you speak it at them and they understand, but they don't get it if they try to read it. Or at least they assume that's true of me, so if it's important they want to speak it at me, like on the telephone or face to fact. That's the worst possible way to tell me something important -- unless I already thought about it completely so I can keep up with what they are saying. It's still the worst, because I have no record of what they said.

Did I say I have a disability? I also can't remember details. Meyers-Brigs calls that disability "iNtuitive," the opposite of "Sensor." When I was a kid growning up in a missionary family, it was incumbent on me to memorize Bible verses. I did not succeed, but I did learn Elizabethan grammar (the dialect of English used in 1611 when the King James Bible was done), and if I could get the general sense of the verse, I could reconstruct it on the fly, and that was usually good enough. Two days later I couldn't even remember that much. I minored in physics at Berkeley, and they have a zillion facts. I boiled it down to a half-dozen formulas that I wrote down on a piece of paper, which I memorized going into the final exam, then put the paper away, opened the blank "blue book" (final exams were written in 20-page booklets with a blue cover), and wrote the formulas down on the first page from memory, then answered all the questions. I usually got all A's, but two days later I had forgotten all the formulas. Today you can Google everything, no memory needed -- except you need to know what words to search for.

Thinking slowly probably came from spending some critical part of my life in the Amazon jungle with no peers, nobody to throw something at me suddenly yelling "Think fast!" Later in my life, in public high school, people did that, but it was too late, I couldn't catch it. Partly because I'm a reader, and my eyes refocussed to reading distance, so I didn't even see what they were throwing to calculate where I needed to put my hand to catch it. Every year my parents took me to an optometrist who did the WRONG thing and refocussed my eyes out to infinity, so I could see the wires on the top of the telephone poles and read the blackboards for a couple months, and I had headaches for six months while my yeys reshaped themselves to make it comfortable to read again. I stopped going to optometrists when I grew up, and my eyes stopped getting worse. Today there's an epidemic of myopia because kids spend their time stating at their phones, and the stupid optometrists are still doing the WRONG thing, so there's also an epidemic of glaucoma caused by the eyeballs reshaping themselves to make near vision comfortable, and the eye doctors don't have a clue. Twenty years ago I went in for cataract surgery, and the doc was surprised that my eyeball is so long, but he refused to focus the replacement lens at what I look at 15 hours every day. So I got bifocals and didn't bother with the second eye.

Is myopia a disability? It's correctable with glasses -- if you can find glasses that do that: this is a fly-over state, quality products are not available. My 20-year-old frames broke and I ordered replacement glasses from out of state, and the optician bungled the prescription.

My friend is legally blind, macular degeneration or some such. He can read the computer screen by setting the font size very large, but otherwise he listens to audio books. He tells me that his disability makes him angry. I suspect that some of that anger is due to listening to angry (syncopated rock) music all the time, but I didn't say so. Maybe he doesn't but that's all they play in church any more. That's all they use for background music in the American movies and TV. It covers up the words and sound effects, so I always watch with subtitles turned on because I cannot hear the words and the banging and clunking of car doors and distant gunfire are indistinguishable from the "music" -- but the SDH subtitles explain what cannot be heard. I still need to pause or replay it when they speak rapidly.

Anyway my friend sees this anger at disabilities as universal (like rock music is universal, but he didn't say that), and he found that just saying so was encouraging to others suffering from the same anger. Me, I think so slow that by the time I realized that I should be angry, I also have understood why not -- "The wrath of man worketh not the righteousness of God" in the King's English. Once in a while I get really angry, like at ObamaCare, which drove up the cost of medical care, but then I moved to Ore-gone, the only state in the Union where the people voted into law the right and duty of doctors to kill people for no crime worse than being sick -- and the doctors here take that duty very serioiusly (see "Growing Old Gracefully" a couple years ago) -- so now I don't dare go to a medical facility, and the cost is not a problem. I also got angry at the IRS when they tried to cheat me out of more than $10,000, but I put "cc: Congressman Norman Mineta" at the bottom of one of my letters, and the IRS immediately refunded the whole amount plus interest (better than the bank pays). I used to say that the IRS is the world's largest terrorist organization (some people took offense, so I stopped), but even they fear Congress.

Anger at disabilities? Whatever for? God is (mostly) responsible for whatever disabilities I have, and why should I be angry at God? God is Good, and (as He told the great Apostle in that context) His grace is sufficient. My responsibility is to figure out what God wants me to do with my particular collection of abilities and disabilities, and do that. It's a little slower than 20 years ago -- or perhaps I don't remember -- but I can still program a computer, and I'm working on this program, that after it runs to completion, it will make a 170-year-old Biblical Hebrew dictionary (the only one of its kind) available for searching, and that seems like a useful thing to be doing, so I'm doing that. Probably a few years left to finish it, just about when I run out of gas. God only knows. All my successful work came to me from God, what can I say? If and when He gives me something else to do, I'll do that.

Tom Pittman
First draft, 2025 November 26