Color Blind

With staying indoors and going out less, I've been using electronics a lot more with my daughter. Part of it is she's a picky eater and I have no patience to try and cajole her into eating without the assistance of something she actually enjoys. The other option is reading a book to her over and over and over again, which normally I wouldn't mind. But, if I'm in a hurry or I want to eat too, or I'm managing the baby at the same time, it doesn't quite work.

I tell myself what I show her is educational: library story-time, cooking shows, songs from Veggie Tales, or video clips of our friends and their children.

We watched a Reading Rainbow episode a few weeks ago. I grew up watching the show many afternoons at 1 pm or 1:30 pm, whatever the original air time was. She's really into Arthur right now so I picked the episode where they read Arthur's Eyes. It's the one where Arthur couldn't see and got glasses, was embarrassed about needing glasses, and eventually, embraced them in the end.

After reading the book, the show incorporated a series of different worldly applications of some ideas taken from the book. In that episode, one idea he mentioned was being color blind. Levar explained what it means to be color blind and the test for color blindness. He showed a few pictures of the colored circles with numbers inside them. He also mentioned another kind of color blindness.

"There's another kind of color blindness the kind that has nothing to do with your eyes. Has to do with your mind. Not with what you see but how you see it. Has to do with your heart. Not with who you see. But how you see them. People come in all kinds of sizes shapes and colors, and when you see through the skin on someone's face to the person underneath, then you're colorblind in the best possible way."

That episode originally aired on July 27, 1983. It is very unfortunate that in the last 37 years, we have cumulatively moved forward very little in this regard.

Let's be color blind.