Unlimited Possibilities

Tom Ley: Husband, Father, Student, Successful Business Man, and Diabetic
(Taken from an address at the 2003 State Convention)

Tom Ley: I’m going to start my talk today with something a little bit unusual for Federation talk. I’m going to start with a reading from scripture. When Jesus was here on earth, He had to give the people cosmic and eternal ideas in a way they could understand. He used the vehicle of a parable. So I’m going to read a parable to you today and although Jesus was intending this for cosmic everlasting ideas to be portrayed - we’re going to use it to talk a little bit about the Federation at the same time.

So, I’m going to be reading here just a few verses from Matthew 25 starting in verse 14. Jesus is talking about the fact that each of us on the earth has been given something. We are supposed to do something with what we have been given, and there will be accounting for it at the end when Jesus returns. And He’s explaining this in a parable.

“Again it will be like a man going on a journey who called his servants and entrusted his property to the servants. To one servant he gave five talents…”

Now let me pause here and ask, how can you give a talent in this day and age? In biblical days, a talent was a measure of money and one talent was a little more than a thousand dollars, so he was giving this one person five talents of money.

“To another servant he gave two talents, and to another he gave one talent. Each according to his abilities. Then the man went away. The man who had received the five talents, he went and at once put the money to work and in turn he gained another five talents. So also the one with the two talents gained two more. But the man who had received just the one talent went off, dug a hole in the ground, and hid his master’s money…”

We’ll stop with the reading there. The talents in this case were tools, if you will. They were tools, and they were given to the servants to be used. The master wanted his servants to do something with what he had given them. And two of the servants took their money and put it to good use. In fact, they gained more money for their master--the pool of money grew. Then there’s the one person who took what he received, dug a hole in the ground, and waited for his master to return. Nothing was done with the money in the meantime.

How does that apply to us in the Federation? One of the greatest tools that all human beings have is what we call a philosophy. We all employ philosophies everyday. And we in the Federation have a philosophy that all of us have been given. It’s the philosophy that was so brilliantly put down in paper by Dr. tenBroek and Dr. Jernigan, and has been continued with Dr. Maurer here. Our philosophy is that great philosophy that the average blind person can do the average job as well as his average sighted counterpart if he’s given the proper training, the proper opportunity, and if he has the right attitude. That’s the philosophy that each of us has been given. The question is, what are you, what am I, what are we doing with it? Are we taking that philosophy and putting it to work so that more people understand it and use it? Or are we taking that philosophy and keeping it to ourselves and not using it in our daily lives as we should? As we go forward here, we’ll talk a little bit about that philosophy and see how I’ve been applying it in my life.

A philosophy is a lot like knowledge, and knowledge, without being used in people’s lives, is useless. Imagine each of you; imagine you discover the cure for cancer in the basement of your home or apartment. You discover the cure for cancer-- you write it down, you explain it, and you keep it to yourself. Is the cure for cancer a powerful idea? Well, it has the potential to be powerful, but if you never share that with anybody--never put it to use--it’s only as good as a rock. It’s no good to anybody unless it’s put into use. And it’s the same thing with our philosophy of blindness. We need to use it. We need to share it, and we need to make it grow.

I’d like to talk at this point about how somebody in the Federation used the philosophy, shared it with me, and gave it to me.

I went blind when I was 17 years old from diabetes, as many of you know. At the time, I was living in Louisiana and there was no Louisiana Center for the Blind. This was pre-Louisiana Center. And I went off to a traditional--very traditional--training center in Little Rock, Arkansas. When I returned from that training center I started college at Louisiana Tech, and a Federationist who knows the philosophy and puts it into action every day, Joanne Wilson, found out about me. She tried to encourage me to join the Federation, but I didn’t really want anything to do with the Federation. I felt like I could do things on my own. I knew I was confident in myself that I could do what I needed to do. But Joanne would not let go. She knew the power of the Federation, she knew the power of the philosophy, and she knew the changes in my life that could occur if she was able to share it with me. She tried to get me to come to chapter meetings; I didn’t want to go. She tried to get me to come to a national convention; I said, “You know, I just don’t want to go.” And she was all stymied by that one because she said most people give excuses like, “Oh, I don’t have enough money”, “I don’t have enough time”, “You know I gotta do this…” She said she didn’t have any answer when I said, “I just don’t want to go.”

But eventually do you know what got me to go? Freebies! I was 18 and I was in college and she said, “You know we’ve got this thing called the March on Washington…” and she started talking about “NAC tracking” and that didn’t sound like anything I would ever have wanted to do. But march on Washington, go to DC, get to go on Capitol Hill, meet people… That sounded like something that was up my alley.

In Louisiana at that time they were paying for people’s ways to go to the March on Washington. A free airplane ride! I had never flown in an airplane before. It got me to the March on Washington. And that event changed my life. I saw people for the first time--large groups of blind people--who had something I didn’t have. And it became clear to me they had a philosophy, an idea, a belief, if you will, that was different from mine. Through that event, and that opening of my eyes, and then subsequently receiving a scholarship from the national organization the following July and coming to the national convention, it cemented in my head this philosophy.

Of course lots of people have talked to me over the years, and the philosophy has become more ingrained over time. I use it now more and more. But those two events were important in me getting the philosophy. Joanne Wilson and her persistence, but also, more than the Joanne Wilson’s of the world, it was you folks selling raffle tickets, selling candy bars, selling krispy kreme donuts. Because you know what got me to the Federation--freebies! Not everybody’s as hard-headed as I am, but it took the freebies to get me. So when you’re selling a raffle ticket you are in no small way living out and sharing the Federation philosophy--not in a direct way, but in a very substantial indirect way.

I eventually did complete college and the Federation helped me to have a successful college life. I went on and had a successful teaching career for four years as a math teacher in Louisiana. I had a successful dating career--met my wife. She brought me up to the great state of Maryland about ten years ago and I had a very successful unemployed part of my life for nine months and went to work for Blazie Engineering. Now I work for UPS, United Parcel Service. But all through those years this tool of our Federation philosophy has been in my life and has allowed me to be successful in so many ways.

Let me talk about my life now. As Sharon said in the introduction it says, “Father, husband, businessman and student,” and there are a few more titles you could put on there. You could put on patient (because I am often in hospitals and health facilities because of the health issues I have), I’m a teacher at times, and sometimes, as most all of us are, I’m a bumbling idiot. But, you know, let’s talk about how I use the philosophy. I’m now pursuing my master’s degree through the University of Maryland, but I’m not going to the campus. As many of you have heard, there are many online Master’s programs, and even Bachelor’s programs now. I want to encourage you all, if you are looking to go back to school, or be in school, to check into online courses. I find online courses, at least in my case, great for blind people to use. I love that for the first time in my life I’m competing with other people in the classroom for grades and nobody knows I’m blind. It’s really neat. The web-based master’s program that I’m in is all done from your home or from your workplace on your PC. And you are completely anonymous. Nobody knows anything about you unless you divulge it.

I was worried when I heard about the program--oh, it probably won’t be accessible; there will be things that will get in the way, and I won’t be able to do this as I had hoped. My Federation philosophy taught me though that the worst thing you can do as a blind person is to stand still, to not move forward, and to not try things. I can’t tell you how pleased I was when I finally put my money up, signed up for the courses, and found that they are completely accessible to me. The University of Maryland University College program, the web-based, is completely accessible and I love it. It takes a lot of time, but I want to encourage those of you, as I did with this master’s degree program-- don’t stand still as a person in life! If you stand still thinking and are hemming and hawing about whether you can do something and it’s your blindness that’s stopping you, go ahead and try it! Will you succeed everytime? No. But neither do sighted people. So that’s one way I have the philosophy living out in my life.

As a husband, one of the things that I have to do is keep my wife entertained. And, we—well she--is a dancer. She’s from Puerto Rico and well, it’s just in her genes. But she’s been for years trying to get me to dance, and I always pretend that I like to dance, but you could really tell I was never really comfortable with it. We decided finally however, to take some dance lessons through the Arthur Murray dance studio, which is near our house. It’s actually within walking distance, which is really very nice. I got to tell you though, I was pretty sure we could do the dancing, but I wasn’t sure how the teachers--their individual dance lessons--would accept us. But once again the philosophy, if you live it, works for you. We’ve taken dance lessons now for about a year. We’re becoming very good. Our teacher is really neat. When she goes to teach us a step or a particular maneuver, she’ll close her eyes and she’ll say, “Okay, let me see how do we have to do this?”

I truly believe that if our teacher went blind she would have no trouble in life because she’s accepted our philosophy. The philosophy is spreading. Every time a sighted person, or one of us, uses the philosophy in our lives, and makes it true in our lives, the philosophy spreads, and our Federation grows. No, she’s not a member of the Federation—yet. We haven’t given her an associate membership form, but I’ve been prompted today to do that. But she is in no small way living out the Federation philosophy in her life. And every time another person joins the Federation in this way, all of us are better.

Sometimes the successes don’t always come easily. I’m thinking primarily now of UPS, where I work. I work in a software development arena for UPS. I’m very pleased with the way I’m accepted within the workplace. I’m respected for my knowledge and my abilities. People don’t give me any more help than I ask for; I truly am competing on terms of equality with everybody else who I work with, and it’s really nice. But it’s interesting how people will compartmentalize our philosophy-- our Federation’s, if you will. Here’s a case in point.

I believe everybody on the floor where I work believes that Tom Ley can do the development work and works very effectively. It doesn’t matter whether he’s sighted or blind; he’s going to do his job. We however, had a fundraising opportunity where we had a dunking booth brought to our facility. Our manager, my boss’, boss’, boss, was going to sit in the dunking booth. We could throw balls and hit the target, and you know, knock him into the dunking booth. We were raising money for the United Way. And I went out there and wanted to do this. I thought it would be fun, and so I paid my money and I had three opportunities to throw the ball—whoops, I think I had six opportunities--anyway, I threw a couple times and missed. Then I threw a third time and lo and behold, he went into the dunking tank! I threw my hands up in the air, “Yes, I did it!” I threw a couple more times and missed. And then the last time I threw the ball it was a wild throw. The ball actually hit the ground, bounced up, and hit the target, (talk about blind luck), and the gentleman fell in again!

Needless to say, I was all happy. I said, “You know, this is really great.” I was hopeful I would hit it once, and I hit it twice. I was about average with everybody else out there. Other people were hitting about one out of three. Everybody was saying, “Hey, you did a great job. That was amazing.”

But as I was leaving, a fellow came over to me and said, “You know, that first time when he went into the dunking booth, you didn’t hit the target. You came about two inches from it, and somebody just hit the target for you.” And then he said, “And that last time, the ball hit the ground and bounced up and hit the target, but it didn’t hit it hard enough to make the dunking booth latch release, so somebody went in and hit the target and dunked him in.”

I felt awful. I felt only the way a blind person can feel in that situation. You know, I didn’t want this. I wanted to just compete on terms of equality. I wanted to get out there and have fun. I wanted to make a donation. My whole team was there as this was done to me, and I just wondered, what are they thinking? We can treat him normally inside the workplace, but when we go out to the dunking booth--no, the blind guy needs special help. We need to make him think he’s succeeded even when he hasn’t. Because, after all, blind people need that kind of emotional help.

I really felt betrayed by this in many ways. I had to talk to some of those people. I talked with the guy in the dunking booth about it and the philosophy is in action. Next year I’ll go out there and if I have to use twenty balls I will, but I’m going to hit that target myself. Next year. Without any special help!

The last area I live the philosophy, I guess, is as a father. We have a son with hemophilia. He’s two and a half years old. Hemophilia is a bleeding disorder. He has to take special medicine so his blood will clot. And the procedure to do this has to be a 100% sterile procedure. Sterile gloves--if you touch anything that isn’t already sterile then you have to in many cases start the whole process over. And we as blind parents, my wife and I, have been challenged to figure out a way to do this. I’ve got to tell you, I’ve hesitated, and I’m still hesitating on this. Right now we have a nurse coming to our house every other day to infuse our son. In the back of my mind I believe there’s a pretty good chance that we can develop non-sighted ways to do this and keep it completely sterile. But I gotta let you know, it’s tough out there to apply the Federation philosophy in every instance of your life. And what I want you all to do is to keep me accountable and next year at this time, I want you to come to me and ask me, “Hey, have you applied the Federation philosophy? Have you tried it yet?” Because we haven’t even tried it yet. It’s something we gotta work on.

I want to encourage you. Is there an area in your life that you believe you are not living out the Federation philosophy? I know there are areas in my life, and I just want to encourage you to continue to live out the philosophy. It will work for you. I don’t know whether we will be able to find a way to give our son his medication or not, but I owe it to myself to try. I owe it to myself as a blind person to go ahead and at least try. And we haven’t tried it yet. The philosophy doesn’t meet the test of really working in the real world when I don’t give things a try. I have dreams and I’ve been able to live my dreams because of the Federation philosophy.

Now, Christ when He was here on earth, gave another parable about people who heard His words and put them into action. He said, “He who hears my words and puts them into actions is like a wise man who built his house upon the rock.”

Think of our house as the dreams we have as blind people. “He built his house upon the rock and when the wind came and the storm blew up, the house was still standing.”

His dreams didn’t fail. “But then there was the foolish man who built his house upon sand.”

And we can think of that as a philosophy unlike the Federation philosophy--not true wisdom.

“And when the winds blew and the storms came in, his house crumbled because it didn’t have the firm foundation.”

Our Federation philosophy is a true, firm foundation. It is a rock. And if you will build your dreams upon it, when the winds and the rains and the storms of life come, (as they do for blind people almost every day), your dreams will not falter. Thank you.