What Blindness Is, What Blindness Isn’t

by Kevin Burton

   You feel sorry for me?  I feel sorry for you.

   We all see what we want to see, full vision, partial vision or no vision. I can’t take in data with my eyes, not very well anyway. I’m doing OK though. And you?

   You have no concept of what data is worth seeking, with your eyes or otherwise.  You’re turning your head in all the wrong directions. When you do, visually, you get what you wanted. But is it what you needed.

   Seeing is believing you say? So sorry to hear you say that. Seeing is a starting point at best. It’s the beginning of acknowledgement of what appears to be there. 

   You have no ability to discern what it is you are seeing. You can’t see a whole person and what is fundamental to verses what is incidental to that person.

   You begin your portrait by painting yourself.  Then you paint a scene around yourself that is most flattering to you. This is a world of your own construction that you immediately tuck into your belief system.

   And you call me blind?

   There is a house of mirrors where everywhere you turn you have a different highly distorted view of yourself. This amuses you, but you never consider that when you step back into the real world, outside those doors, your vision is as warped, or even moreso. 

   You feel sorry for me or look down on me because I can’t see something. But then you look at something and take it at face value placing no thought into what you are actually seeing. Which is worse?

   You think there is something lesser about me because I can’t see the chalkboard from across the room.  It’s inconvenient to think about or react to me in my otherness. 

   Think about the phrase “love at first sight.”  My question: love what at first sight. You love the first visual stimuli, the surface image?

  You say, “oh I know, I get it, she won’t look the same in 30 years.” True enough brother man, but what I’m saying is she won’t look the same tonight. 

   Have you never heard of Eleanor Rigby keeping her face in a jar by the door? Your eyes are open, but is your mind?

  You know if I were a comic, if I had the stage presence to pull off a comedy act, that might be a pretty good ongoing bit.

   Like you had Rodney Dangerfield talking about I get no respect.  How about some blind guy saying “I don’t want vision, vision makes you stupid,” then riffing on the things people do based on nothing more than what something or somebody looks like, surface stuff.   

   Any blind comics out there, feel free to take the idea and run with it. 

   Say somebody offers me perfect vision tomorrow, no surgery, no risk. Would I take it? Of course I would be a fool not to. But it would also be foolish of me not to stop and consider the false assumptions that can come with visual acuity if you don’t know its limitations. 

   I think back to the times I have taken an eye test. It was like any other test, I wanted to achieve on the highest level possible. So I’ve been known to guess at the letters. 

   My acuity happens to be right on the border for being legally blind, 20 over 200. That means what you can see at 200 feet I can only see when I get within 20 feet.

  But depending on factors such as the lighting in a room the color contrast of the test, maybe even how much sleep I’ve had, I can “see” a little better or a little worse on a given day.

   If I happen to guess a letter or two on the 20/150 line, am I no longer legally blind?

   Up to this point I haven’t said word one about spiritual blindness.  I’ve already posted a long series on Page 7 about the spiritual world and how dangerous it is that you can’t or won’t see it. We had “Imagine Jesus At Your Business Meeting,” Jan. 30, 2022, and many other stories before and after that. 

    Spiritual blindness is the kind of blindness you can’t recover from once you pass from this life to the next.

   Look, you don’t answer to me, forget about me. But my words, deal with them. They either have value or not.

   Slow down, just a little, and think.