Lions Club Speech Done
Dear [Mentat],
Good deal. As you’re learning, working with computers involves skill at inventing useful work-arounds until the underlying problem is fixed. Hopefully whomever comes to look at your screen someday will see something obvious.
The speech went  very  well. They want me to give it again before other groups, and put it on DVD to send out to all the lions clubs in the state of PA and beyond.
The key points I discussed were:
- How society, in order to improve its overall health, needs to stop insisting that _the_ way to success must always be through life-long struggle.
- How the camp helps lessen the hardships that the handicapped must face every day.
- Why it is that only once this is done can we realistically hope to achieve 100% integration between the handicapped and the sighted populations.
- I told stories of my own struggles at LexisNexis and
- how and why I came to realize this wisdom there as profoundly as I have.
- The camp resembles and island of relatively unconditional acceptance in the rough and rocky waters of the main stream.
- It’s a place where the challenged can go to escape (albeit temporarily) the psychologically brutalizing prerequisite expectations that the main stream seems to mandate that we meet before they wholly include us.
- And, I thanked the lions for gritting their teeth a little harder, so we handicapped would not have to.
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I got an ovation when I finished and I think people were really moved by my comments. They said things like:
- Wow, that was great! You sound like a philosopher. [This comment particularly thrilled me, since I so much want to think in the well-informed ways of philosophers.]
- Gee, you’re gong to be a tough act to follow. [The next speaker on the seminars list said this to me.]
- One woman, who had been fully sighted until she hit 65 years of age asked if I had ever experienced the frustration of people speaking of me in the third person even though I was standing right there. I told her that I had, many times, and she suggested that I work that idea into the speech and make sure people understand that this is not a good way to treat the challenged.
Hopefully the next time I give this speech, it won’t be so anxiety-laden since I won’t have to start writing it from scratch. However, I am going to do it more off the top of my head next time. That seemed to flow much better than trying to read my notes too often.
I think the dialog we’ve been having really helped me to sharpen and refine my viewpoints on these issues, and so I wanted to thank you for engaging me as you have.
Anyway, now that the speech is done, I’ll get back to our emails and try and turn around some responses this week.
Well, talk to you later,
Tom