Turning a blind eye

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That saying, "When it rains, it pours," I think it's starting to come true these past few days. Not to shed any personal baggage from the past week, but it all ties into together with the idea for this post.

So, last week, after a wonderful wedding shower for LK and I, (only two months to the big date), my right eye, the blind eye, starting having sharp pains. Now, I don't mean sharp like needles or anything like that. I mean sharp, like not sleeping for three days, moaning and driving LK crazy, kind of pains. Fortunately, it was in a blind eye, though quite an annoying thing none the less. Once I finally got the eye under control (thanks in part to lots of under-the-counter goodies), I then lost my front tooth, the one that I knocked out five times when I was a kid. Yeah, I had bad eyes then, too. Anyways, all this is going on while I'm trying to take on a new project for a client. So, I'm managing yself well, tyring to play it cool and not look like the front row of a Lynard skynard concert (with one tooth and one eye taken out). And in all this time, all I can think of is my frustration at the Internet.

All I wanted to do was find a little research on the whole painful eye thing. Instead, I had page after page on political books and articles that kept saying, "...turned a blind eye to the bla, bla, bla of the world"

So, what is this all about? Why is it that whenever we want someone to play dumb, or stick their head in the gorund like an ignorant person, we say, "Turned a blind eye?" Maybe it's the pain kilers, but I find offense in this. Over 75% of the legally blind in this country don't work. It's not because they can't work, but I would argue it's because society thinks they can't work. And I can see why when we use expressions like "turned a blind eye" to paint a picture of someone who is not in the real world. Blind people are, almost always, overdone in movies. sure, there are plenty of memoirs (mine included) that tell the tale of how strong persons who are visually impaired have to be to actually make it in a sighted world. But, look in the Bible, and we're still on the side of the road asking for money.

Ok, enough ranting for now. What I hope, though, is that maybe we can start a campaign, as small as it might be, to start saying, "And he turned a sighted eye..."