How Many Ways Can You Go Blind?

Posted on 22/10/2026 by Grumpa Joe

When I asked my friend and fellow Lion that question, Optometrist Dr. Smith replied, “Probably 500, but I’m guessing it’s more like 1000.” That gives us a huge opportunity to serve the blind. As the blind-and-deaf Helen Keller challenged us in 1926 to become Knights of the Blind, she gave us something to work on. Back then, she was so far ahead of us in this topic that it was scary.  Thankfully, the Lions Club International decided to adopt blindness as a pillar of service. We have been striving to help blind people ever since.

Statistically, there are over 12 million people over the age of 40 in America who are classified with visual impairment. Out of that 12 million, over 1 million are legally blind.

Lions have been supportive since Helen Keller presented her challenge to us. For instance, we invented guide dogs and the white cane.

The World Health Organization (WHO) cites five causes of vision impairment and blindness:

1. refractive errors

2. cataract

3. diabetic retinopathy

4. glaucoma

5. age-related macular degeneration

Many more reasons are apparent, like accidents and disease, but there are too many to discuss now.

I am proposing a new way to serve the blind to Lions Clubs. Many newly diagnosed blind people are above the age of sixty. When they are struck with the diagnosis, they are devastated as they would be if they heard they had cancer. Older people have trouble adapting to the condition. The loss of independence is devastating. The loss of mobility combined with losing independence makes living stressful. Yet, people adapt, but often with a significant loss of personal dignity.

About thirty years ago, a young couple from the south suburbs of Chicago, both blind, decided to do something positive with their lives and formed a support group they called OASIS. They worked hard to turn their handicap into something positive. They figured they could help people get back into life even with the lemon they were handed. They met with a handful of vision-impaired individuals and led them in prayer and discussions about handling hard things. Kim and Joe used their personal experiences as positive motivation to encourage others to do the same: lead everyday life as well as possible without sight.

Five years ago, the Frankfort Lions became aware of OASIS through our neighboring Mokena Lions Club. Together, we joined them by sending money to help them with their work. Since then, Kim and Joe Kuster, the originators of OASIS, have retired and moved to Tennessee to be near their grandchildren. This left the two clubs with a more significant opportunity to keep the organization going and self-supportive. It has been a full year since the Kusters left, and we are still in business and are growing in numbers.

We have learned that people with visual impairment, especially older ones, enjoy the company of people with the same affinity. They feel comfortable with each other, knowing they are not standing out as being different.

OASIS brings together a community of people in similar situations. They come with someone who can drive them and sit around a table with people they can talk to and share experiences with. A facilitator leads them in prayer and motivates them with ways to overcome hardships. Often, they lead the group to share how they handle situations.  The leader introduces them to items that make life easier, like large print calendars, talking clocks, and magnifiers. Every meeting is different from the one before. Lions serve a snack and kibitz with the attendees. They clean up and assist with a game if one is played. A favorite is bingo.

I am telling you this because OASIS is an instrumental and helpful organization within this community. I am sure you also have many people within your realm who could benefit from a vision-impaired support group. We would be happy to help you start a chapter within your club. If you wish to help but are not ambitious enough to begin your own OASIS chapter, you may want to assist OASIS in several ways.  Our most urgent need is for volunteer drivers who can adopt a visually impaired person to take them to and from OASIS meetings once each month. Our second largest need is money to run the meetings and expand services.

 You can donate to OASIS (a not-for-profit 501c3 organization) by clicking the OASIS website link below.

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Filed under: Education, family, health care, Lions Club | Tagged: , , | Leave a comment »

Pay Off the Debt

Posted on 21/02/2025 by Grumpa Joe

Have you ever poked a stick into a hornet’s nest? That happened when Trump hired Elon Musk as his advisor to head the Department of Government Efficiency, known as DOGE. Democrats and liberals all have their tails on fire about Musk, an unelected official, looking into the financial goings-on of the government. He may soon be able to answer my question: how do elected officials who earn $175,000 per year leave office as millionaires?

How quickly the public, especially Democrats, has forgotten that President Obama hired as many as thirty-two non-elected Czars to assist him with transforming America. I blogged about it in a post titled “If You Want To Be A Radical, Hang With Radicals.”

Musk’s latest question: Is there any gold in Fort Knox? The place seems so secret that no one can access it to learn about gold. I was surprised to learn that Kentucky Senator Rand Paul has submitted, but denied formal requests to visit Fort Knox, located in his home state. I have also wondered about the state of our gold reserves. It is hard to imagine what tons of gold looks like. A favorite TV program that I watch is Gold Rush. The effort required to remove ounces of gold from the ground is overwhelming. Since a small part of my engineering career was spent designing equipment that was used in the mining process I found it extremely interesting to watch how enterprising men use the machines to extract gold. All I can say is that there must be a huge vein of the shiny metal in the mountains of Alaska that erodes and washes down into the lower plains.

Somewhere in my family, there is a gold coin about the size of a shirt button. It belonged to my parents, who were allowed to hold up to five troy ounces when President Roosevelt declared the hoarding of gold forbidden in 1933. People who turned in their gold were compensated with paper money equal to the value of the gold. To my knowledge, the small coin was the only gold my parents owned. The only gold I own is in the wedding ring I wear.

I approve of the actions being taken by President Trump to “Drain the Swamp” by exposing and eliminating all government waste and fraud. Often, in the past, I have written about my frustration with the Federal Bureaucracy and wondered how we could rid ourselves of this anchor around our necks. The bureaus create too many regulations that cost us a fortune, and there is nothing we can do about it except vote for politicians who promise to cut costs. My experience is that voting on promises is a lost cause. Political promises are like smoke, they are active and visible during the campaign, but then dissipate and disappear.

My support for this new action to finally cut our debt is strong. The only objection I have to date is Trump’s suggestion that the money saved should be returned to the people. No money should be returned until our national debt is paid in full. We will all be prosperous beyond our wildest dreams when that is done.

Filed under: Conservative, Education, Government | Tagged: , , , | 2 Comments »

Poor Planning?

Posted on 03/11/2024 by Grumpa Joe

My logic on this perspective may be perverted, but hear me out. Recently, I have viewed several pictures of airplanes revealing themselves from within deadly glaciers. Many crashed in the nineteen forties, fifties, and sixties. All of them were buried in snow and ice until recent heat waves melted the ice and revealed the carcasses of the wreckages. My logic tells me that since they crashed there has been global cooling because the wreckages were covered in snow and ice, and further the many recent reports of global warming has caused the ice to melt and reveal the wreckages. This is evidence of a cyclic temperature change that has occurred. There is also evidence mastodons, long declared extinct, have been found in ice; also uncovered when the ice melted. This is evidence of another cycle of temperature change. My logical conclusion is that we are currently in another warm period of a cyclical shift in temperature that has absolutely very little to do with carbon dioxide gasses being emitted from man’s use of fossil fuels.

All it would take to shift from global warming to global cooling is for the volcano residing under Yellowstone Lake in Yellowstone National Park to blow up. The resulting volcanic winter would last for years afterward and cool the earth enough to give rise to another ice age. This event would change the process so fast from global warming to global cooling that the liberal geniuses who fear the polar ice caps will melt and flood North America would not have enough time to invent a new narrative.

The current theory is that we, as residents of the planet, should give up our fossil fuel-guzzling cars to prevent greenhouse gasses from heating the planet and melting ice caps, but shouldn’t we also be planning to avoid the ice caps going the opposite way to form another ice age? We should be inventing ways to deal with the mother of all volcanic eruptions from occurring. We have lots of evidence to show us that ice ages have occurred several times, however we have not yet uncovered evidence of ice melts that flooded continents.

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Keep Drinking the Kool-Aid

Posted on 28/10/2024 by Grumpa Joe

Just as I suspected, the dream of Artificial Intelligence (AI) is just that, a dream. The book I am reading, titled “Feeding the Machine,” exposes the millions of workers behind the technology that is supposedly going to change the world. Although AI will help many of us be more productive when we find an APP developed expressly for a specific application we can use it for. My personal experience with AI is limited at best, and I find it annoying. Most times, I use a Chat bot at a website like my bank, or a vendor like the phone or cable service. The first thing I find useless are bots that answer only very specific questions. Most Chat-bots are developed like that. If you are seeking answers to a complicated problem there is a 99.999% chance you will need to connect with a human to get near an answer. Our suppliers, however, make us go through the steps before they give us a number to call for help. Evidently, a large number of callers are happy with the canned answers they receive.

The workers being employed live in East Africa and work nine hours a day in almost slave-like conditions. They watch videos to highlight activities that may escape the sensors used by AI applications. An example cited involved a lady walking a bicycle across a street in the crosswalk and being struck by a self-driving car. The AI used in the car could not determine that a human walking directly in front of the car was a safety issue. The job of the reviewer is to highlight this anomaly on the video to bring it to the attention of the programmer who then modifies the the algorithm to prevent a collision. The work to do this is mindless and boring. Managers require that the worker perform a set number of observations per minute and the worker keystrokes are measured and reported. If the worker does not match the requirements of the job, he is penalized, often by firing.

While all these observations are going on, billions of dollars are spent making artificial intelligence more intelligent and faster. We endure the chatbots just so big companies can use fewer paid employees to do the job. They truly believe we, the consumers, are getting the absolute best service experience that can be provided. It doesn’t matter what we believe we are getting. If they are making more money, we lose, and they keep on convincing themselves that they are making us happy.

Someday, AI may threaten society and cause people to lose their jobs, but I will not be around to witness the debacle. In the meantime, the venture capitalists who continue to pour money into AI companies will keep feeding us the Kool-Aid to convince us of how wonderful life will be when it all begins to happen.

Filed under: economy, Education, Technology | Tagged: , | 2 Comments »

Hooked on YouTube

Posted on 15/10/2024 by Grumpa Joe

What was the world like before YouTube? My addiction to it is causing me to lose interest in doing things for myself. My sports, collections, friends, and social activities are all falling away from me because I watch videos of other people doing those things. My butt is slowly growing into the chair in front of my computer. My brain is creepily changing into mush, and my muscles are shrinking into strings.

How will anthropologists catalog our generation when, in the future, we are being dug out of the earth for study? Will they reconstruct us in the museums of future civilizations? How will people look upon us? As civilized humans or as programmed robots glued to a black box doing nothing? Where will they find all the millions of digital YouTube videos depicting the subject matter that kept our era so mesmerized? If, when they find the videos, will they have a way to know what they are and will they be able to play them or see them as we did? Even we have trouble playing old photos on new equipment. There is a business dedicated to converting old movies, photos, videos etc into the latest format so they can be viewed. I had all of my home movies converted to digital and stored on discs. Now, I find that I need to keep a disc player and a computer screen just for that. Forget about looking at an old vhs tape. My experience is that the few times I wanted to play, a preserved forever copy of my life, the tape was frozen to itself and could not be played. Technology changes quickly and our efforts to make the job of the anthropologist of the next millennia easier are nil. Instead of using brushes and nut-picks to uncover our bones they will be using ultrasound, x-rays, and MRI to interpret the mysteries they have uncovered.

One of the more interesting and educational video channels I am hooked on is “Desert Drifter.” This young man takes videos of himself wandering through the terrain of the southwestern states, looking for evidence of life from another era. He finds many sites on the face of cliffs that are almost impossible to reach. My knees quiver just watching him climb on slippery rack faces to reach a hollow in the rock face too high for anyone to want to live there. Yet humans have walled it off with rocks and mortar made from mud to create shelter. The best estimate he can give the viewer is that the civilization lived there about six hundred years ago. He will pick up chards of pottery and and arrow points chipped from flint stone and discuss them being careful to return the pieces back to the spot where he found it. He shows smooth and steep rock faces with footholds hollowed out of the stone to provide a staircase to a living space. Inside the living spaces he will find evidence like dried corn cobs indicating that people did in fact live there.

What will the Desert Drifter of 2624 find from exploring our habitats?

Filed under: Education, family, Society | Tagged: , , | 2 Comments »

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