Heller Keller continues to be an amazing role model for just about everyone. She overcame the odds when no one believed she could. She allowed no one to tell her that she could reach her goals, have dreams, or have a purpose in life. Nothing could hold this amazing woman back.
The article below comes from a 1912 newspaper. It was written while she was still alive.
Helen Keller to Open Blind and Deaf Minds
By Harry Burton
Cresol, PA., Aug. 5. — Most persons think that Helen Keller’s life has BEEN lived — that it is enough that a blind, deaf, and dumb girl should have won her way through school and college, should have written books and should finally have learned to speak with her lips words that she may never hear — but they are all wrong!
“Helen Keller’s life has, as a matter of fact, only just BEGUN!
“All the rest that has gone before has been as nothing. Only the merest preparation — the getting ready to do REALLY great things that shall, perhaps, help all mankind!”
Helen Keller, herself, leaning forward in her chair, spoke the words. Her great blue eyes, though unseeing, blazed with eagerness and her newfound voice thrilled with intensity.
She sat on the broad, cool veranda of the summer home of Harry Thaw’s mother, where she is spending the summer. And as the questions were propounded to Miss Keller regarding the social work she is to take up this fall for the mayor of Schenectady, N.Y., Mrs. John Macy, her lifelong teacher, read them into the palm and instantly, in a clear, ringing voice, she gave forth her answers, brilliant and clear cut.
“I a, blind and deaf in my actual sense, you know,” said Miss Keller, “but there are many who are blind and death in their minds — who have never heard nor seen the light of truth. And it is these whom I am now going to seek out to try to set the eyes and ears of their minds free.
“Rev. Dr. George Lunn, the new mayor of Schenectady, has offered me a fine chance to do this thing. He asked me to serve on the board of public welfare which he proposes to establish next fall.
“The problem which the board will approach is the city’s neglect of its human resources, the problem of enriching and enlarging the lives of ALL people.
“And to enrich and enlarge the lives of ALL the people, as I see it, we must, as I have said, open the shut eyes and ears of the minds of the people themselves. Instead of just going about ameliorating bad social conditions as they do in most cities, we will also be correcting the causes that produce these conditions.
“The fundamental evil that causes all the terrible eruptions upon our life is poverty. Therefore we must get rid of poverty and any REAL social work will teach people HOW to get rid of poverty.
“I am going to begin with the children.
“There is little use in trying to do anything with those of the older generation who do not already see aright. They cannot understand the broad viewpoint which embraces the good of the world rather than the good of just the individual.
“In the schools where I will go I shall tell the children that there are two great principles, the adoption of which will eradicate poverty and hence most of the great ills from which this world suffers. These two principles are the public ownership of all the means of livelihood and the public management of all those things that we shall come to own.
“Through them mankind will be able to have at its disposal all the things needed to insure health — fresh air, good food and comfortable homes and healthful places to work in.
“What is the government anyhow? What is government other than the conducting of the national household for the benefit of every member of that household? When every member, who is capable, has a voice in the management of that household, then the best that is in the people will be brought out and we shall develop under our new found freedom as never before.
“It is this that I shall teach the children. They will respond to it because the time has come in the world’s evolution when the world is ready for such a policy.
“I am glad that I have had to struggle without seeing or hearing for these many years, for it has taught me, as nothing else could, what it means to suffer — what it is to have a spirit in prison. And people who see and hear and talk CAN be held down so that they are just as much in a prison as I am. And I shall help them to get out!”
Source: The Day Book (Chicago, Illinois newspaper). August 05, 1912.
