Color Blind
I am color-blind
Coffee black and egg white
Pull me out from inside
I am ready, I am ready, I am ready
I am…
Taffy-stuck and tongue-tied
Studder-shook and uptight
Pull me out from inside
I am ready I am ready I am ready
I am. … fine
I am covered in skin
No one gets to come in
Pull me out from inside
I am folded, and unfolded
And unfolding
I am…
Color Blind
Coffee black and egg white
Pull me out from inside
I am ready, I am ready, I am ready
I am …. Fine
I am fine
I am fine
Adam Duritz, Counting Crows — Color Blind
I don’t know what someone else goes through. I only know what they report about their experience. If I assume I know — I am delusional.
No one knows what I go through. They only know what I report about my experience.
What they know is only as good as my ability to report what I go through. But, hard as I try, what I report is limited to what I can consciously convey, filtered through my desire to show you what I want you to see and know about my experience, and who I am. You don’t get to see, or feel, what I don’t want you to see and feel. It is my prerogative to show as much, or as little, as I want you to see.
If I showed it all to you, you might not like me. You might not love me. You might hate me. I don’t understand that unconditional love means, no matter what or who I am, you will love me. You might not like me — but, you will love me.
But, I want it all. I want you to like me and to love me. So, I hide what I think you will not like. In doing so, I deny you the ability to love me as I am. I put up a wall. No matter what you do, it seems that you cannot penetrate that wall. I built it. But if it is to fall, love must knock it down. I can’t. It feels safer behind it, so I prop it up with everything I have, because if I knock it down, I become naked before you. What then?
What then, indeed. Love, then. Truth, then. Reality, then. Knock the damn wall down. Please. Love me. Love me more than the walls I’ve built.
Just like, no matter what or who I am, the haters will hate me. Not for who I am — but for who they see. What do they see? They see the color of my skin. They see my job. They see the role I am assigned to play in this game of life. They see my walls.
They see my privilege, or my lack, thereof, depending on which side of the coin I am lucky or unlucky enough to have landed on. Flip it, and it might be different, but it’s all essentially the same. We live with whatever side of the coin we’ve landed on. We opine from that side. We might think we see the other side, but we can’t. We assume we know, but we don’t. We can’t, really.
All we can do is love. That bridges the gap. Hate doesn’t. It can’t. The haters make a whole shitload of assumptions about who I am, based on these surface things, and they hurl insults and rocks and venom at me for these things. These things that have nothing to do with who I am. These things that are myths in their own hate-filled minds.
These things that are capitalized on and leveraged by the men who would be king to build their own warped image up behind their Mexican walls of greed. They don’t see what pathetic pawns they truly have allowed themselves to be, these haters, pawns of the biggest, most pathetic hater of them all.
I can’t participate in the fight. I was infected with this fucking non-violence germ when I was young, and, save for one or two unguarded, unhinged moments in my life since then, I have been constitutionally incapable of fighting back. I can only take the punches, and continue to be willing to stand up to be knocked back down again. I do know how to take a punch.
I will take each punch you throw. I won’t shy away from it. I’ll take the blows. I will continue to stand in love — I will stand on the side of love. I will meet your hatred with love. I will die from what I believe, if I must. While I might die, love will live on. Love is worth dieing for.
Hatred is worth — shit. That’s all it’s good for. Haters are full of it. Their walls have grown so impenetrable, so sturdy, that they cower and hide behind them, hurling grenades of hatred from behind them, while they stew in their own hatred juice behind their walls. Hatred only makes their walls stronger. Hating them feeds them. Fear pumps them up. Behind those walls of hate, they are the most pathetic creatures you could ever imagine.
Love kills them. Hatred and love cannot exist together. One is stronger than the other. Only one. Fear and hate makes them stronger. Love prevails.
Which one do you choose?
