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I was watching the movie the perfect stranger with Bruce Willis and Halle Barry this past weekend. In the movie someone is killed with a toxin, belladonna. The toxin dialates one’s eyes so that pictures could be taken of them through the pupil. It seems to be a fad from the 1920s. Well in the movie they talk about this and they show several picture of the back of the eye. As I looked I could easily see the optic nerve but I couldn’t find the fovea. I didn’t know if it was the picture, the screen in the movie theatre or maybe it wasn’t actually there. I was looking for something I couldn’t even image. It made me wonder. Was I looking for it because I really wanted to see if it was there or could I not see it because I didn’t know what it looked like.

I couldn’t stop thinking about how we see what we want to see. There are those that believe what they see and those that see what they believe. With all the talk about reality, it makes me wonder who is right? Should I be believing what I am seeing, even though I now know that my mind is making up parts of it or should I see what I am believing. If that is true, shouldn’t I be able to see god or my grandmother who I know is always with me. If we can see what our mind believes why do we believe what we can’t see.

In class I thought that if my mind is interpreting yellow where there is a black dot why should I believe what I am seeing? Through this logic I began to think about what is thinking and reality, two things I’ve been thinking about all semester, and in class we talked about how societies create disabilities but what about disabilities. Don’t they create societies. It seems like most families or comedies have someone who is “not normal” but what if that person didn’t exist? What if there were no people with disability, not specifying whether it is physical, mental or just a little different, but what would our society be without disabilities. Would we all be similar to the book, Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley. In the book everyone had a category and did drugs all the time to be happy. The society existed because there were category’s but what if there weren’t any categories or disabilities. How would our society survive without disability? Wouldn’t we all just be the same? There would be no diversity and yet how can a society exist without diversity? It can’t!

Disability feeds on Society. Society feeds on Disability!

Reality is what you want to see or maybe you just believe what you see. That’s probably how they got the saying, “A picture is worth a thousand words” its what you want it to be that it really is. In your mind at least.