A Person Who Cannot See

Today was Sunday. People who have a neocortex live by dividing up the 'day,' the 'week,' the 'month,' and on a Sunday like today they often think 'a week has ended.' But recently, having started working on weekends, the sense of 'the weekend' hasn't been particularly alive in me. Ordinary people can maintain the sense of the weekend because they rest on weekends, but in my case, working without resting on weekends, the rest period called 'the weekend' no longer exists as a period of rest. So this morning, partly to do a little class preparation, I walked over to the Starbucks in front of my house. On the sidewalks of an ordinary, sparsely populated, quiet neighborhood like this, nothing ever happens. Nothing special is going to happen, and nothing dangerous is going to happen either. Unless a car on the road suddenly jumps onto the sidewalk, I live a very safe life on this street. But today there was something special, not a 'dangerous' thing like that. It might not be special to other people, but ever since I came back from England, there was something that looks special to me.

Two women were walking. One of them was walking while wearing black sunglasses. But as I passed by their side, I saw that the person wearing the sunglasses was walking while holding onto the clothes of the person walking right in front of her. Ah, this is a person who cannot see, I thought. Many people would only get as far as this thought, but I always go one step further from here. Why on earth did she need a person? Did she need that person walking in front because she had to walk somewhere? Wasn't there a guide dog for the visually impaired or anything like that? Or was it that this kind of person couldn't be cared for as part of the state's welfare services? Is there an institutional inadequacy? I felt sad. I felt sad for reality. Thoughts crossed my mind, like whether the 'guide dog for the visually impaired' that I'd seen in movies existed only in movies. On the streets of this neighborhood there are no roads marked with guidance for the visually impaired. I mean there is no walkway with those 'special yellow dedicated tiles.' I wondered whether such guidance couldn't be provided, and on the other hand I realized that it's because someone else can't always be stuck to you like that that there was such a thing as a guide dog for the visually impaired.

For a moment I made a supposition. What if there were a job dedicated to accompanying visually impaired people? Of course, since it's welfare policy, the state would lead it, with private companies also able to participate. But since one person can't work all day every day, if it were operated, I had thoughts about whether there could be a kind of 'service' where many people take turns being responsible for one person. But Korea is still a country where most of welfare is not at the level of 'blind spots' but rather 'gaps.' It's not a useless thought, but I can't shake the thought that too much time remains for it to be realized.

Come to think of it, among the things I want to do later was also learning sign language. I should learn about guidance services for people with disabilities, and in the long term, take an interest in various welfare services for people with disabilities and make an effort to be able to draft policy in that area.