Corrected vision

A late blog today.

I was going to blog about another topic today, but I remembered an appointment that I had this afternoon. It was an appointment that I needed. I knew something was wrong and I was compensating to deal with it. I grew tired of doing the compensating and made the appointment.

I needed new glasses. I was wearing my glasses and I had to use a magnifying glass to read some of the comics on the comics page. (Sometimes it's the only part of the paper that makes any logical sense.)

So I went to the eye doctor received a check up on my vision. The eyes are healthy. They just have different focal points now. Astigmatism in both eyes and for the life of me I don't understand the prescription fully, but when the good doctor put a pair of (real funny looking) glasses on me that had the correct prescription lens in them, I could see perfectly.

(Somehow three different focal ranges in the lens makes bifocals. That I will never figure out. New math?  Must be Common Core.....)

In two weeks I will have new glasses and all sorts of problems – eye strain, headaches, squinting – will all go away.

That's what it was like for me back in 2006. The Participation in Government (PIG) class teacher and I came up with a project where the students would take a Political Compass™ quiz and then compare their results to those of political parties and candidates from the 2004 Presidential election. (We repeated a modified version of this project , eventually using the Political Spectrum™ quiz, every year until the teacher retired. I am hoping to continue some form of this project with the new PIG teacher.) Students were surprised at the results. They liked seeing that there were political parties outside the two man capitalist ones. Some were even curious about socialism.

When badgered about my scores, I took it and scored very near the Socialist Party candidate. This surprised me as I was a registered member of the NYS Conservative Party. It surprised my students less.

So I looked into socialism and communism. I read the Communist Manifesto and Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, and other books. I began checking into independent media – Free Speech TV, Link TV, Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, Project Censored, and many other indie news sources, which are now part of my daily diet.

I began seeing things through the lens of class- rich versus poor ; race – white versus anything else ; gender – male versus female and LGBTQ ; among many other ways. I still have to deal with what the (lame) mainstream media was dishing out, but then digging into the independent media to see what they say.

And take a guess who was more accurate…..

A decade later, with much reading, watching, listening, and learning , I see things differently and have a better understanding of what is going on and why. Something I never had when I was younger and in any of the  different political parties that I belonged to.

So, do you need a new pair of glasses to help you see things different?

I know a few good eye doctors.


Update:  Evidently I really needed new glasses as this is at least twice that I have forgotten to fill in the title field.