Going Beyond Perfect Vision
Today is the first day of 2021 (or it will be when this publishes). I have rarely felt so much angst and anticipation for a new year as I feel this year. I suspect I am not alone in this feeling, but perhaps I am more inclined to elaborate on that feeling than others. To begin with and to get this out of the way, going beyond 2020 with one’s vision is just so overplayed metaphorically that I do not want to dwell on the ophthalmological implications brought on by reference to the now ubiquitous Snellen eye chart. Dr. Herman Snellen gave us that …
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chart in 1862 and not until 1976 did the LogMAR chart to replace it …
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Even now Snellen is more commonly used than LogMAR. 114 years is a pretty good run for any invention or idea and 158 years is even better.
My personal history with my vision is pretty erratic. For my first eight years I made do and never spent any time feeling one way or the other about my vision. Then in fourth grade for some reason I got tested and was told that I had very bad far-sighted vision. I was taken for glasses one day and remember the ride home and all its surprises with my new glasses. I went from needing to sit in the first row to see anything on the board to sitting in the back row and reveling in my newfound capacity. My glasses were the first thing I touched in the morning and the last thing I touched at night. My dependence on them became extreme and my self image growing up was of a big guy with thick glasses. During college I tried contact lenses (the hard type were the only option at the time) and after the pain of adjustment, found them modestly acceptable from the standpoint of visual acuity, but terribly bothersome to put in and take out every day. All through the advances in lenses from soft to disposable to whatever, I stayed with glasses as my only truly viable option. Then at age forty I got enticed into radial keratotomy (RK) with the promise of 20/20 vision. It took a short eight weeks of visual discomfort to cave in and get glasses again (admittedly much thinner lenses). The early adopter price for RK was that when LASIK came to America my scarred corneas were not eligible for LASIK surgery. So, I toddled on with my glasses, finding myself regularly removing them to read and work more clearly, to the point where I also started removing them at home and only used them to drive. Then at age 62 my Ophthalmologist told me my vision had self-corrected to perfect 20/20 and that I no longer needed glasses. I treated this like the RK prognosis and didn’t take it as gospel until the State of California gave me a drivers license this year (that would be in 2020, of course) without the need for corrective lenses.
Five years of not wearing any lenses has been a wonderful treat for me. I suspect this good fortune has a finite life to it and that some day I will return to needing glasses, but in the meantime I am enjoying the freedom immensely. Having adopted a senior dog that was blind (good Ole Betty) and watching how much her life has changed for the better with vision (admittedly less than perfect, but partial at least), has changed my perspective on sight. Some vision is so very much better than none that I feel foolish for always insisting on crisp and perfect acuity. I have learned that sight is the most important sense of all and that without it life is immeasurably more challenging.
So, now that I have gone off on the exact tangent I said I planned to avoid, I feel the need to address the unusual position we find ourselves in at the start of 2021. I find myself reading every article I chance upon dealing with the prognostications for the future, even the near future. Here we are eight weeks from the election and a mere three weeks from Inauguration Day, and we still don’t know what will happen a week from now when the Vice President is supposed to ratify and declare the results of the Electoral College victory of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. With only 2.1 million vaccinations so far versus the touted 20 million that were supposed to happen, I hear that herd immunity will not occur for ten years if that pacing doesn’t improve. And perhaps the most meaningful uncertainty of all, the control of the United States Senate, which has suffered the indignity of being under the thumb of the Grim Reaper himself, Moscow Mitch, for six long and disastrous years, rests on the head of a pin awaiting the results of the run-off elections in Georgia in five short days. The swing between a revival of social justice and a continuation of the era of inhumanity is a stark contrast, but is not overstated. If there is a devil incarnate he looks a lot like the senior Senator from Kentucky.
I find that everything I know and understand from global energy policy to the oligarchy of big technology, not to mention the valuation of markets and investments for the future are entirely unreliable in the extreme. There have been times when uncertainty and volatility have run rampant for a short period, but at no time in a very long while have we truly been unable to see the future in any meaningful way. There are people who have become famous for their wisdom and insight. Joe Kennedy saw the stock market collapse in 1929. FDR saw the need for societal change and a new deal in 1932. Winston Churchill saw the evil in men’s souls in 1939. Jack Kennedy saw the value and future of space exploration as well as the perversion of Soviet Communism. There have been other sporadic visionaries including Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos and now Elon Musk. But today, everyone’s vision has massive flat sides brought on my some combination of the global pandemic and what that tells us about life going forward with medical vulnerability (a stark and likely unending uncertainty) and the global divide that exists between the proponents of social justice and the forces of libertarianism (or whatever they choose to call themselves at any time) that believe in the natural selection of dominance.
Regardless of how you feel about any of that, medically, politically, economically or socially, these factors make predicting the path of the world in the near term harder than ever before. It surprises me how blind the world seems to be right now. I know I am modestly above average in intelligence and have far greater and more worldly experience than most, but even if that puts me in the top 0.1% of people who can see this situation for what it is, that means there should be millions of astute people who we know control the vast majority of the world’s resources. And yet, where are they? Why are markets continuing to soar? It is a mystery that confounds me and makes me wonder how I could have it so wrong. I am simply not a person who feels I can possibly be right with everyone else being wrong. That just doesn’t happen. So, I will continue to go beyond the perfect vision of 2020 and wander into 2021 with a quizzical look on my face. But then again, my vision is 2020 all of a sudden now…