BAM! 2025 - coming to you live on location.
Yep, October is more recognisable for being Breast Cancer Awareness Month, but while Blindness Awareness Month is less familiar to some, it sounds better, more straightforward, rolling off the tongue as acronym than BCAM. This week on Outlook, with the start of a new month…October, we’re highlighting BAM even though, we always say, every month is BAM for us.
On this BAM Mixed Bag episode sister/co-host Kerry is streaming live and on route, but luckily makes it back to “the flat” still within the first half of the show, a major Uk cellphone service is down which made it difficult to get a cab back from the furniture warehouse.
But luckily, freezer deal was found (with help from Barry’s assistant AI as he terms his co-processor) and service from the store’s sales guy was excellent (lovely British chap) who didn’t necessarily know how to assist two blind people, yet was all the things we ask anyone to be when interacting with the public. BAM getting off to a pretty good start after last week’s nightmare (see previous Outlook for more on what not to do. It’s really not that much different from how to assist anyone else, just be willing to listen to our guidance, as we know what we need as blind people).
It’s Thanksgiving for brother/co-host Brian back in Canada, but it’s also Columbus Day in the States (Indigenous Peoples Day in approximately 30 states now) and we’re discussing this update/correction on which one is preferable, along with celebrating our lovely mother’s birth, and thankfully the cab finally arriving to take Kerry and BF Barry home is hardly noticeable in the background.
We’re comparing Canada and The States as baseball rivalries intensify in October. Some things are, as “American as apple pie” while we’re talking thankfulness (which should be as obvious as “Apple cake” with details of what Historian Heather Cox Richardson says about Columbus Day’s origins, years of colonial subjugation, and the difference in definitions that can become glaringly clear in 100 years.
Outlook On Radio Western stands on the foundation of Diversity and we’re talking definitions of all of this, plus on things like BAM or World Sight Day, from orgs like the National Federation of the Blind (NFB) or the Foundation Fighting Blindness (FFB) and using a daytime TV infomercial about “blind children in poorer countries” and how helpless images make it seem. While no country should think itself above another like how even the Canadian National Institute for the Blind (CNIB) tries to raise money by using Canada’s blind people and cute images of guide dogs to elicit pity and donations.
The NFB thinks of BAM more from the standpoint of independence which often, to them means employment, but though we reject another definition that’s all about the patronising angle of everything we do as inspirational, we lay out the harmful impacts of something like the messaging from World Sight Day’s promotional material. While the International Agency for the prevention of blindness (the IAPB) is focusing on eye health around the world, some organisations and charities and nonprofits go about fundraising in reckless ways.
Brian is riding the fader live in the studio while Kerry was out tracking down monkey nuts (but shhh Mom is listening), returning by cab and sharing how drivers often struggle (as sighted as sighted can be) to find the address, Kerry foreshadowing a recent struggle with such things plus one of Marlee Matlin’s similar experiences with those of us who have our sense of hearing which Kerry heard on a recent audio description project. That’s why our mom recently painted Kerry’s garage door bright red and put up a huge house number, Barry in the process of doing something similar for those drivers who might as well be blind behind the wheel, Brian using the example of Uber drivers trying to find the door into the University Community Centre (UCC) where we record our show out of. We use the Pin The Tail On The Donkey example of disorientation to make the point that these are just more additions of those tropes that are harmful to us blind people and those that are simply the truth of our current reality.
Multi sensory, multi media, and interactive - from a recent work experience she had doing cultural consulting and quality control for Toronto’s version of the Nuit Blanche festival, she then tells of another Canadian connection (as we call it) when out during a Saturday pub night for many in neighbouring Belfast. Instead Kerry and Barry chose to attend a local boy’s return performance, Brian Kennedy (Canada has Cory Hart while Northern Ireland has BK), to the classic Black Box Theatre as he played some Joni Mitchell covers including “Woodstock,” (not the same Woodstock but still). So on this one Brian with an “I” and Kerry with a “y” are talking the Dominos that have to fall in our lives with dealing with how sometimes sighted people can and do suck which adds up the blocks of frustration and fatigue as Kerry shares a bit about a recent visitor experience at Belfast’s Titanic Museum and how baseball radio broadcasts put us on an equal playing field (baseball metaphor there for you).
BAM! It gets someone's attention at least and we’re thankful for our mother, apple cake instead of pumpkin pie, and the Toronto Bluejays beating The Yankees and moving on to take the American League championship, from east to west and north to south - BAM begins.
