Wales

I was leaving three days of beautiful celebration in this tiny, remote Eskimo village (even by Alaskan standards tiny and very remote) when one of the two Eskimo women who had somewhat sponsored and advised me, told me the other liked me and “was completely color blind.”  I countered stoically, the revulsion from the epiphany brought on by those words required my patience, “shame not to be able to appreciate the rainbow.”

And so, it dawned on me that there is a greater evil than racism and an even more ethnocentric, “color-blindness”.  It is truly more demeaning than hatred, more difficult to fight than violence, and is ultimately joyless.  I am glad I’m not color blind.

I would presume it is some marketing ploy or political experiment in control these past several thousand years.  After all, if we are all the same, and believe this, then we will buy the same products and enjoy the same controls imposed by our government and presume too that ideals, values, or convictions we hold that differ us from our brothers and sisters, must be by their very nature of difference be wrong.  Of course, this is at the very basis of christianity, islam, judaism, and communism, for that matter, and why I despise all four of those religions with passion, though less the Jews I will admit.  Not for the curious tenets within their superstitions which are beautiful stories and poems and expressions of humanness and culture, and not even for the “us and them” divisiveness, but for the evangelical notion of conversion and sameness or death, apparently more physical than metaphysical.

It is also a question of who and what.  We are led to believe that we are “whats”.  I am a white-catholic-lutheran-german-italian-american-socialist-computer person product of the sixties (with a touch of french-canandian-anti-federalist-jeffersonian-democrat tossed in).  That would answer the politically correct, and only asked question, “What are you?” though usually incorrectly phrased as “Who are you?”.  If one answered, “Who are you?” in truth, assuming someone had broken the rules and looked to see who one was to begin with, the initial inquiry would probably be followed with the rhetorical question, “What does that have to do with anything?”.

I am certainly proud of who I am, that is my own creation, and I see the beauty in what I am though it is amalgam of things of which I had little to do with and may be repulsive to others.  Some parts are to me too.  Just like a work of art, it maybe repulsive and beautiful as well.  And like art, understanding reveals the depths of our person.  To be color blind in this colorful world would be just horrible to me.