Oh Say Can You See? Posted May 11, 2001 Blindness is a devastating affliction, and I have a hunch it doesn't afflict many blind people quite as much as it does the rest of us. I don't know why I think that about blind people, except I imagine them reaching out with other senses in a way that makes them...well...less blind. The thing about true sightedness is that it's overwhelming, because when you really look around and see, most of what your gaze falls upon is stuff you can't control in the slightest. The images presented to us by the black box over the past few days were astounding. We saw a fourteen-year-old boy on trial for shooting his teacher, looking at life without parole in an adult prison. We saw the horrors of Canada's residence school program, wherein Indians were leached of their culture and "sent out the other end as little Canadians," routinely subjected to sexual and other abuses along the way. The pending suits are clearly in the right, but if they go forward, they will bankrupt many of the churches that ran those schools, leaving our northern neighbor neigh churchless. We saw a contracting company that ripped off little old ladies, and we saw a forest fire that was deliberately set. There isn't enough power, and we saw that we're off to do some major screwing around with the environment. President Bush says he's not about to propose anything that would mess with anyone's lifestyle. We saw that one of the contestants in the Miss Universe contest might have been born a male and another, at age 21, has had 19 cosmetic surgeries. One piece was on how many more drugs we are taking, thanks to the aggressive marketing of the pharmaceutical industry, and how much that marketing raises the price of all medications. Patients are now going to the doctor with a specific drug in mind just as they might go to the mall with a certain shirt in mind. Yet at the same time, we are fighting a vicious war on drugs -- a war in which even a minor drug offence can disqualify a young person from obtaining federal grants or loans to pay for college tuition. A war that accounts for two thirds of the two million Americans (1,333,333 fellow citizens) behind bars in a prison system that costs $40 billion a year, the single largest item in many state's budgets, according to the Human Rights Watch. The fact is both junkies and old people spend money on drugs that should be going for food. More of us are in prison for drug offences than for any other reason; and every other commercial you see on TV is for drugs. But such contradictions don't bother us anymore. We saw purveyors of poison like Phillip Morris portrayed as "good neighbors," the friendly folks who help fix other people's roofs on the weekend. After a week of seeing a raft of shows on exactly what happens when someone is executed, we saw that Tim McVeigh's execution was postponed, causing untold troubles for innkeepers whose reservations were cancelled and for those who had snaked telephone and power lines around the city to provide coverage of the media event. It seems the FBI withheld evidence. The thing is, of course, we don't really see this stuff. We perceive it, maybe, but we don't "grok" it. Because if we did, we'd see we are in a loony bin. There is a reason that The Emperor's New Clothes is considered an archetypal myth. We live in a world where insurance and security systems are major industries because we steal from one another with such regularity. Countless thousands of us, including many women and children, sleep on grates and in shelters, and we need metal detectors in our middle schools. All of our presidents lie. Everyone is trying to sell us something, and most of them lie, too, for why else would tens of thousands of dollars be spent to portray results not typical. There is a D.O.T. sign near my house that says "Beware of Aggressive Drivers." Our most popular TV shows carry the message that cunning and betrayal is the way to come out a winner. I always used to wonder how it was that in Nazi Germany nobody knew what was happening. I wondered the same thing about the USSR when Stalin was dragging people off to the labor camps. And yet I, too, acknowledge myself seeing without really seeing. It's there, but it doesn't quite register. It's locked away in a compartment called That's just how it is bricked in with a wall of Mustn't be negative. Yet, the only way to stop the lunacy is to start seeing that it is, in fact, lunacy. Seeing that doesn't negate that there is goodness and beauty in the world; but I think seeing it does bring us to a place where it becomes unacceptable, does force us to find a way to step free of the either/or, right/wrong, victim/perpetrator consciousness and seek a new platform from which to conduct our lives. And therein, of course, is the problem. It's interesting that on a personal level, the trend is increasingly toward taking responsibility, while on a cultural level, we're into blame big time. In the wake of the tremendous upsurge of both traditional and non-traditional religious identification, we are blind to the fact that we are dancing around the golden calf. We allow a little black box to dictate our beauty standards and to seduce us into spending more than we make. Our children record songs about rape and mayhem, and we argue about the issue of censorship vs. free speech, but we don't address the fact that that our kids respond to such imagery. We have taken sexuality, the most profoundly intimate way we have of touching one another, and made of it a commodity, a self-serving thrill. And it all seems perfectly normal. We are like an old man sitting in his rocker on a porch watching it all come apart at the seams and saying, "Ain't it awful, Mildred!" We're getting to the point where outrage strikes us as naïve. Because of all the frightening things in this world, there is nothing quite so terrifying as a bare-assed naked emperor. Feel like ranting? Here's a guest book to do it in. |
