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Monday, October 1, 2007

When should we be deliberately colorblind?



When the world lives in abstracts of black and white, I have always claimed to see shades of gray.
I am not a man of absolutes. That is not to say that I don’t have preconceived notions or that I don’t believe in absolutes, but I question the status quo constantly.

I cannot help myself. Someone once said, “The more you know the more you know you don’t know.” And I have had a jump on wisdom since I was a child. I have always been acutely aware of what I do not know and frustrated my tutors to no end with endless questions and suppositions.

“The sky is blue.” It would seem a simple enough lesson to learn. But for me it was just the beginning of unanswered questions like “why blue?” “What makes it blue?” “Who decided to name it blue?” “Where does blue come from?” “If it is blue, why does it look gray sometimes?” No one ever wanted to see my hand go up in class.

Eventually I gained a reputation as the classroom smart ass and that has followed me in life. I am comfortable with that now and admit to using it to my advantage numerous times throughout my many years. It can be an effective shield as well as a double-edged sword.

But ultimately I am still that classroom ass questioning everyone and everything and it is a legitimate condition. My mind really works that way. It is like a peripheral condition that will not allow me to look at an object straight on, I see hints of protruding sides and shadows from unknown angles and my minds eye want to absorb all the information to analyze and catalogue.

Nothing is just black and white anymore, it never was for me. Now I see in Technicolor. The broad spectrum of black and white and all its shades of gray have expanded into an entire rainbow of coloring.

Good is white, evil is black symbolically speaking. Black absorbs all color and white reflects all color so then shouldn’t shades of gray include all shades of color as well? My new wisdom now envisions the world through tetrachromatic filters and once again I realize how little I actually know about what I thought I knew.

So is good still good if it has tinctures of green or pink or blue? Or how evil is evil if it shows hints of gray around the edges? How do people walk around seeing only black and white?


2 comments:

sue said...

When you put it that way, I would have to say I'm pretty colorblind too. I would question things, but wasn't brave enough to vocalize it in class. I would, however, start most of my school papers with a question.

Jan said...

Maybe that's why I analyze everything to death, and still am not sure about everything.