Whatever it takes: Lessons from HELEN
by Rick Rader, MD Editor-in-chief
Helen Keller (far right) poses with Henry Ford and Anne Sullivan in 1916.
In a short year HELEN, The Journal of Human Exceptionality has become one of the most respected and recommended magazines in the disability community. We have readers from every segment of the neurodivergent landscape. Our niche is that we are nicheless. We cover the waterfront and have top content from clinicians, parents, teachers, self advocates, therapists, academics, direct support professionals, policy makers, researchers and students.
The name HELEN was proposed by Vanessa Ira, one of the founding editors of HELEN. While we had a shortlist of more sophisticated and academic sounding names, once we whispered HELEN to ourselves there was no turning back. HELEN is named after Helen Keller, who we quickly identified as one of the most iconic heroes in the disability universe. Her disability coupled with her association with her teacher Anne Sullivan and her relentless efforts to rise above her challenges have more than justified her name appearing on our monthly covers.
Keller has once again inspired another editorial.
While the mantra of the disability movement has and will always be, “Nothing about me without me,” I want to propose a second slogan: “Whatever it takes.”
Writing about Helen in Mental Floss, Suzanne Raga shares this little known fact about Keller.
“Keller and Sullivan made a career in writing and lectures, but this still didn’t earn them a viable income. So for four years in the 1920s, they hit the vaudeville circuit. Keller would speak about her life, Sullivan would translate, and audiences could ask questions as part of a Q&A. They traveled from town to town, and Keller was billed as “the brightest star of happiness and optimism” and “the eighth wonder of the world.”
Keller as a traveling vaudevillian is an image that raises eyebrows — both now and then. But Keller did so of her own free will, doing whatever it took to avoid financial precarity. Her appearances also called attention to something that most people don’t associate with people with disabilities: happiness and optimism. Most people in the 1920s had never seen someone who could not see, hear, or express themselves. And like a lot of people now, they thought that the lives of people with disabilities were hum-drum and devoid of pleasure and rewards. But Keller’s ability to excite and inspire changed attitudes and perceptions.
In 1916 Keller delivered her most famous speech, “Strike Against War” at Carnegie Hall. An ardent pacifist, calling for working class people to use the power of the strike to end America’s involvement in World War 1.
A lot of you in our HELEN community have long adopted the tactics of doing whatever it takes. Parents of children with complex disabilities. Dedicated clinicians. Teachers. Self-advocates. Change agents. And one of our most beloved disability rights activists, the late Judy Heumann was the embodiment of doing whatever it takes. Her protests, assaults on the system, sit-ins, and guerilla advocacy showed that when you have to, you have to.
And while Helen Keller may not have been the eighth wonder of the world, she did have something to say about wonders. Something that readers of HELEN can embrace, embody, and share.
“Everything has its wonders, even darkness and silence, and I learn, whatever state I may be in, therein to be content.”
