Dawn’s Blogs

By Dawn M. Sanders

I’ve always felt like, I don’t care if I can only see a foot in front of me, as long as I can still see colour that’s all that matters…

Yet, what precious little I can see, seems to be slipping away.

It’s almost impossible to make out colours anymore, unless the sunlight is just right on whatever the object is, if it’s bright enough or if something is translucent and I can look through it.

I feel like I’m fucking drowning with no way to be rescued.

Light has become really distorted, contrasts are more blurred all the time and outlines like buildings I could make out okay before, seem to be fading into white/grey.

As my already limited world seems to be disappearing in front of my bad eyes, my confidence in walking around out in the big outside, even in places I know, is getting shaky.

My unempathetic eye doctor jus says it’s the glaucoma taking over and of course: nothing can be done.

So, for someone who is a tetrachromat – seeing the world through a kaleidoscope of colour, just boggles my mind.

A tetrachromat is someone with an extra colour receptor to their vision.

While most people have three colour receptors, 12% of females are born with a fourth.

I read this amazing article – based on an interview with Concetta Antico, a tetrachromat and artist from San Diego.

She described how, she could see other colours within one colour, such as black. As I read I couldn’t help but think: wow! Don’t you feel some times overwhelmed?

Funny thing is, her husband is colour blind and she described how they both looked for a piece of apple core that fell on the floor and how it both appeared completely different to each of their visual perspectives.

I would do anything, just to have three functioning colour receptors.

I’ve never been able to see well enough to look at the colours of autumn, the colour of someone’s hair and eyes, but as a kid I would sit close enough to the TV even though I couldn’t make out the picture, I could see the various colours on the screen. I loved it when the Wizard of Oz went from black and white into colour – all those years ago.

My mum taught me what colours were when she took me for walks and, if I got close enough to a parked car, green grass or someone leading me, I could see the colour of the car or the colour of the top they were wearing.

I vaguely remember looking at the hand of a black man and saying something like: “your hands are dirty” but that’s how I found out people often have different shades of skin.

The corneal transplant I had three years ago, just seems like light years away and I’m worse off than I was before the operation.

I’m glad Concetta can use her extra special colour vision to celebrate the gift through her art and whatta beautiful gift to be blessed with.

In losing my colours, I feel like a part of me is dying. If I look at my son’s beautiful chessnut brown hair in the sunlight, I could probably still see it and, I’ve always dreamed in vivid colours.

http://nymag.com/scienceofus/2015/02/what-like-see-a-hundred-million-colors.html

By Dawn M. Sanders

I ‘see’ from the latest news headlines that: the judge presiding over the man who shot Michael Brown, a Black unarmed teenager in Ferguson, Missouri in the deep South of the US, has decided against all reason, not to indict the police officer who perpetrated the murder.

Michael was just eighteen when he was shot and apparently lay for four and a half hours in the streets – having died from the bullet.
He was just a little older than what my son is now and had his whole life in front of him.

No reason has ever been given as to why the young man was shot so randomly – he hadn’t committed an offense, but… His skin was black within a hotbed of long-standing, deep-rooted racism running through the deep southern United States.

Why am I writing about this and why can I empathise with the plight and struggle for people of colour and open contempt for them?
Because… I’m severely visually impaired and, when I went to school and grew up in Southern California, in what could be dubbed the “post-segregated era” of the ‘70s and ‘80s, parents still didn’t want their white kids hanging out with the black or Mexican-American kids.
Everybody tended to “stick to their own” and if you didn’t, you were seen as rebelling or some kind of deviant.
I remember when my mother freaked out when I was twelve and had a boyfriend who was black – Rodney was sweet and, why shouldn’t I – I just didn’t ‘get the blind prejudice’ especially from a woman who was half Mexican herself.
Yet my mother seemed to subscribe to the whole ‘white is right’ mentality of so-called middle-class America – even though, we were anything but middle-class, as she raised five of us on her own on welfare benefits.

Growing up severely visually impaired, shunned in the playground, at football games or at lunch tables, I always hung just about where I could squeeze in, which was with the kids of colour, be it black or Mexican, or just with the geeks and rejects…
I always secretly felt: I could relate more with the kids of colour, because they had it harder, they were disadvantaged and many of their parents too, were uneducated as my mother had been.

I’m constantly faced with people who are “blind on the inside”. People look at me and see a white stick before a woman; people presume I don’t clean my house – that someone else does it; people assume I need help getting on a bus, even though I bloody walked to the bus stop; people presume, I can’t make a cup of tea in a self-serve café; people avoid speaking to me and stick to people they can make eye contact with; people presume, the only way to communicate with me, is by “helping me”; yes, I only ‘need help’ – not love and friendship like the rest of society. I consider every one of these kinds of people blind on the inside!
Just as Bijan Stephen wrote about: I’ve been refused entry to nightclubs: “because of health and safety” the all-prevailing excuse of the twenty-first century, on the assumption that: if you’re severely visually impaired you “can’t see what’s going on and might get hurt.”
Yet, these people: from nightclub managers, to policemen to judges, use and abuse their power to systematically dis-empower others because they’re blind on the inside, but clever enough on the outside to get to where they are: in high places where they can look down atop the hierarchy of society with a bad sense of vertigo when they spot any form of ‘difference, person of colour or something that doesn’t blend in with the mundane mediocrity that constitutes what is “normal or okay.”

Inspired by
Bijan Stephen:
http://fastcolabs.com/3039094/today-in-tabs/today-in-tabs-i-will-only-bleed-here

I was listening to PM on radio 4 the other day and interestingly, the topic was ‘can newspapers survive in a growing online market’?

I personally think yes and, the opinion of the editor and others working at the Orange County Register (Orange County coincidentally being my former hometown in California) agreed that the newspaper industry would always be relied upon and taken most seriously in the delivery of the news.

While the days of printing presses may be becoming a thing of the past, it was pointed out how: people still rely on the newspaper being delivered to their door.

Something tangible, which can be held in one’s hand – flipping through the pages, can never be forgotten or rendered obsolete and producing hardcopy newspapers would be preserved for as long as possible, was the position of one of the participants of the programme from Orange County.

Globally, I ‘strongly feel’ the hardcopy newspaper will never die. Developing countries do not have the same limitless access to the internet that we take for granted here in the West.

When I visited the Middle East for example, printing presses were still very much in operation – often providing job positions for people who are deaf, as they of decreased job opportunities.

Further to this, as we are all swept by the phenomenon of the internet, all it teaches us and exposes, how do we know we will always have it at our finger tips?