Part One
When I was in college I witnessed a poignant scene: a line of blind people behind a funeral car, silently walking, holding on to each other’s shoulder like obedient schoolchildren. Most probably inside the coffin was a comrade of theirs.
The blind leading the blind is a common expression. But many times, it is the blind or visually impaired who carry the light for the rest of us who have full use of our eyes.
Homer who composed the Iliad and the Odyssey, two pillars of light of Western literature was said to be a blind poet. Likewise, John Milton was blind when he crafted two blank-verse epic poems Paradise Lost and its sequel Paradise Regained by the light of his mind alone, dictating the lofty lines to several aides.
Jose Feliciano and Stevie Wonder, two blind talented performers, have opened the hearts of millions through their music.
Still more on the subject of sight, there is this basket weaver in a remote mountain village somewhere in Northern Philippines who has captured the admiration of buyers with his fine quality rattan products, his colorful personality and a benevolent heart for sharing his weaving skills.
Though he is blind, he has been able to produce products which are remarkable for their intricate designs and patterns which only people with normal sight are expected to produce. He uses nothing but sheer imagination, his uncanny sense of touch. People are awed and some envy him for his weaving skills.
He works hard, oftentimes, late into the night. From his earnings, he has been able to buy a piece of land and build a concrete house. Out of school youths have learned from him to craft simple rattan items.
Here is someone who lets his hands and imagination do the working while we see idle hands and idle minds around us.
In one of his books, the famous neurologist Oliver Sacks writes about a man whose sight was restored by an operation. For 25 years he had been blind and now that he could see, he couldn’t understand what he was seeing. He is characterized as “mentally blind.” He could only “see” when he was using his sense of touch.
In the end, he preferred not to use his eyes to see, he was more at home with the other senses. His visual processing was impaired. He had grown used to his blindness and the security of life as a partial invalid. He did not want to see and in the end, he again lost his sight, partly by his own choosing. Confronted with the “gift” of sight and with necessity of renouncing one world, he paradoxically chose to be blind again. It allowed him to escape from the glaring confusing world of sight and space and to return to his own true being.
Remember Galileo’s time when the churchmen of the 17th century refused to look through Galileo’s telescope? This is a problem of vision in institutions administered by people not famous for having a vision. In our day, too, many of us refuse to see what is daily becoming all too clear. Comfortable beliefs and systems and routines are a kind of blindness by which we choose to avoid larger and more demanding concerns.
The indelible memory of the funeral march of blind people I mentioned at the beginning now serves as an apt metaphor for what many in this pandemic are going through. Day after day, we see the number of positive infections going up, yet the numbers don’t make us any more enlightened as to where we are in the war against this virus. There is not enough testing and not enough contact tracing. Comparing our numbers with those of other countries serves as cold comfort to those who are leading the so-called war. So here we are, in the dark, as we ease up on restrictions and allow more and more people to go out.
But what makes it even worse is that we seem to have lost sight of our focus. There are so untimely and unnecessary distractions that our leaders choose to inflict on us at a time when we are all supposed to be single minded and united in our effort to contain the relentless onslaught of the infection and provide relief for millions stranded from their sources of livelihood.
Consider the times when we chose to close our eyes or look the other way when our friends and colleagues did deals under the table, or continued to go about their immoral ways. Even in our workplace, think of the time when we choose to “not see” the anomalies and corrupt practices in our own company so as not to rock the boat, so to speak. We conveniently use pakikisama as an excuse and our brotherhood mantra of “protecting each other’s back.”
Many of us prefer to be blind when it comes to electing leaders who are bereft of vision about our nation’s future. We are blinded by the glitter of their golden promises and the appeal of their familiar names. We choose to see only the favors that they can do for us. We elect them time and again and follow them blindly and fanatically.
Blind in small things, blind in big things that matter. We are so used to being blind about small transgressions that it is so easy for us to close our eyes to the injustices and inequalities around us. By the time we realize the destructive effects of our blind connivance and complicity, it would be too late to recover our lost sight as a people, like a line of blind people in a funeral march.