We all have blinders. Blinders are what racehorses wear so they can't see the horses next to them, only the horses ahead of them. That way they think they are missing something. A horse that could see next to itself could see that they are firmly in the middle of the pack, comforted, part of community, and they might slow down. Bad idea for a race horse. So they are trained to focus only on what's ahead, on the horses in front of them, on the race, on the finish line.
I walked and walked, pushed past huge crowds of people, buying and selling vegetables and fruits I had never seen, I saw dried squid and octopus for sale. Then I saw a wall. Everything changed. The crowd thinned, the street poles all had a red, white and green stripe, all the shop names had extra vowels. I had wandered into little Italy. I had crossed over two blocks before and hadn't noticed. But everything had changed. What else had I missed?
I crossed the street and headed back into Chinatown. This time I looked in directions I hadn't looked before. I tried very hard to take off my blinders. Mostly this meant I looked up. Above the crowds. To the many windows too close together, to the laundry airing in almost every one. How had I missed that?
A bunkbed was shoved up against one window. Another served as storage of some sort. Many had drawn curtains. It could have been a palatial apartment or a tiny room. My blinders were only partway off.
As I walked back, a woman stopped me.
"Do you speak English?" "Yes." I replied, smiling inwardly, though the thought occurred to me that saying the few words I knew in Korean as an answer and then walking off would be pretty funny. She would have had no idea. She was looking for lunch. A few feet away were her family, picking through trinkets on a table.
Strangely I identified more at that moment with the masses of Chinese crowding the sidewalks than these tourists. And at 6'7" and very white, that's no easy task.
I found a comfortable stoop outside a church and I sat. The Chinese United Methodist Church was my window on the world around me and I eased my blinders off a little more.
- A man stacked and packed cardboard into boxes.
- A stream of older women came into the church where I sat.
- The obvious tourists, mostly white, walk much more slowly than the others.
- The Chinese women almost always walked in pairs. Old women holding hands with and physically supporting older women down the street.
I'd be willing to bet that there are many people who have never or rarely left Chinatown. It is as much a slum, a ghetto, as it was when walls or fences separated this area from the rest of the city. The walls still exist but are now much less obvious.
I met a friend.
We walked together. We tried to take our blinders off as we walked. We weren't very good at it. At one point my friend asked if we wanted to sit on the sidewalk and lean against a building. It was sunny and warm.
We watched people pass by us for a long time. Very few looked at us. Almost none made eye contact. Did they forget to take their blinders off?
I wonder how long it would have been that someone would have noticed me if I were hurt, but not asking for help? Maybe dying but properly staying quiet about it. I wonder if I would have been noticed earlier or later if I was in dirty clothes. Would they have come sooner to clean up the sidewalk I dirtied with my presence or would it have taken even longer because so many would have their blinders on?
Just like my walls I like my blinders. We all do. I don't like looking at the poverty and sadness, the disease and dirt. I don't.
I wish I could say taking off my blinders was easy. But it's not. Because as one hand of mine moves to take them off of my eyes to see the world as it really is, my other hand pushes them right back on.
It's subconscious but it is also conscious.
Does everybody wear blinders, even the most oppressed, most downtrodden, most poor?
I don't know.
All I know for sure is that I do. I am ashamed of it but I have no intention of taking them off fully or permanently.
I'm not that brave.
Dan, speaking from my own experiences it is so often the case that we overlook as much as we are overlooked. Is that part of the human condition or our own insecurities.
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