I’ve used the story of Helen Keller to teach the lesson that God’s people should never be content with scraps fed to us from the table of humanists. The first time Anne Sullivan sits down to eat with the Keller family, Helen is seen moving around the table taking food from each of the plates. When she gets to Sullivan’s plate, Helen meets an obstacle in the person of her new “Teacher,” as Sullivan will also be called by Helen. Sullivan will not allow Helen to feed on scraps. She will sit at the table with everyone else and learn to eat as they do. A battle of wills ensue as a one-on-one food fight clears the dining room. The Animal House food fight is amatuer stuff compared to the Keller-Sullivan fisticuffs. You can see all of this in the 1962 film The Miracle Worker based on Keller’s autobiography The Story of My Life. The Miracle Worker is an inspiring story of a remarkable woman.
What many people do not realize about Keller, is that when she grew up, she adopted some rather radical political views. The following are taken from Claude Cartaginese article “The Forgotten Side of Helen Keller”:
• She was a founder of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).
• She was a pacifist and a proponent of universal disarmament.
• She was the author of the essay “Why I am a Socialist.”
• She was a member of the Socialist Party and a communist sympathizer, who actively campaigned for Socialist Party presidential candidate Eugene V. Debbs.
• She was an admirer of Vladimir Lenin.
• She was a personal friend and strong admirer of Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood, the largest provider of abortions in the country.
• She was a strong advocate of birth control and sterilization.
• She was a member of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), a group founded in Chicago (where else?) by socialists, anarchists and radical trade unionists whose goal was “to promote worker solidarity in the revolutionary struggle to overthrow the employing class.”
• She was a supporter of the eugenics movement, once declaring, in an ironic twist, that: “Our puny sentimentalism has caused us to forget that a human life is sacred only when it may be of some use to itself and to the world.”