Myopic Related Quotes

Biological family is too small of a vision. Patriotism is far too myopic. A love for our own relatives and a love for the people of our own country are not bad things, but our love does not stop at the border.

Scholar Marilyn Frye uses the metaphor of a birdcage to describe the interlocking forces of oppression.16 If you stand close to a birdcage and press your face against the wires, your perception of the bars will disappear and you will have an almost unobstructed view of the bird. If you turn your head to examine one wire of the cage closely, you will not be able to see the other wires. If your understanding of the cage is based on this myopic view, you may not understand why the bird doesn’t just go around the single wire and fly away. You might even assume that the bird liked or chose its place in the cage. But if you stepped back and took a wider view, you would begin to see that the wires come together in an interlocking pattern—a pattern that works to hold the bird firmly in place. It now becomes clear that a network of systematically related barriers surrounds the bird. Taken individually, none of these barriers would be that difficult for the bird to get around, but because they interlock with each other, they thoroughly restrict the bird. While some birds may escape from the cage, most will not. And certainly those that do escape will have to navigate many barriers that birds outside the cage do not.

If administration actions are not to mock its own rhetoric, the President must now take the lead in mobilizing public opinion behind a new resolve to meet the crisis in our cities. He should now put before Congress a National Emergency Public Works and Reconstruction bill aimed at building housing for homeless victims of the riot-torn ghettos, repairing damaged public facilities, and in the process generating maximum employment opportunities for unskilled and semiskilled workers. Such a bill should be the first step in the imperative reconstruction of all our decaying center cities. Admittedly, the prospects for passage of such a bill in the present Congress are dismal. Congressmen will cry out that the rioters must not be re-warded, thereby further penalizing the very victims of the riots. This, after all, is a Congress capable of defeating a meager $40 million rat extermination program the same week it votes $10 million for an aquarium in the District of Columbia! But the vindictive racial meanness that has descended upon this Congress, already dominated by the revived coalition of Republicans and Dixiecrats, must be challenged—not accommodated. The President must go directly to the people, as Harry Truman did in 1948. He must go to them, not with slogans, but with a timetable for tearing down every slum in the country. There can be no further delay. The daydreamers and utopians are not those of us who have prepared massive Freedom Budgets and similar programs. They are the smugly "practical" and myopic philistines in the Congress, the state legislatures, and the city halls who thought they could sit it out. The very practical choice now before them and the American people is whether we shall have a conscious and authentic democratic social revolution or more tragic and futile riots that tear our nation to shreds.

The polarities of personality often present as victim and oppressor, the haves and the have nots, rights and wrongs, and other seemingly persistent divisions in our society. These polarities are not the source of this tension, but when we relate with the polarities through a reactionary state of operation, we can easily divide ourselves along those lines. Us and them. The familiar and the other. When we don't own our own wholeness, when we identity too much with something other than our core worth, we collapse into one pole, as in being with or against others. This othering process is myopic, in that it doesn't take into account that our own wholeness is dependent on reclaiming the alternate pole, the person we think we are not, the "other" within us. When we are able to relate with each pole from a place of responsiveness, where we stand in recognition of our own innate wholeness, the experience of polarity can be one of expansion, flow, contrast and generative transformation, rather than division. Once we reckon with the paradox of how the perceived other is both distinct, and a direct reflection of us, then we see ourselves in that mirror. We see everyone and everything as reflecting an aspect of ourself that we get to reclaim. Those we might have judged become guideposts for our own liberation. Our triggers become welcomed signs that we have rejected something inside us. The idea that you are either with us or against us is a limiting lens that perpetuates humanity's suffering. The recognition that you are us, that everyone is us, allows our self-love to humanize others into belonging.

To understand the social meaning of the prison today within the context of a developing prison industrial complex means that punishment has to be conceptually severed from its seemingly indissoluble link with crime. How often do we encounter the phrase "crime and punishment"? To what extent has the perpetual repetition of the phrase "crime and punishment" in literature, as titles of television shows, both fictional and documentary, and in everyday conversation made it extremely difficult to think about punishment beyond this connection? How have these portrayals located the prison in a causal relation to crime as a natural, neces-sary, and permanent effect, thus inhibiting serious debates about the viability of the prison today? The notion of a prison industrial complex insists on understandings of the punishment process that take into account economic and political structures and ideologies, rather than focusing myopically on individual criminal conduct and efforts to "curb crime." The fact, for example, that many corporations with global markets now rely on prisons as an important source of profit helps us to understand the rapidity with which prisons began to proliferate precisely at a time when official studies indicated that the crime rate was falling. The notion of a prison industrial complex also insists that the racialization of prison populations--and this is not only true of the United States, but of Europe, South America, and Australia as well--is not an incidental feature. Thus, critiques of the prison industrial complex undertaken by abolitionist activists and scholars are very much linked to critiques of the global persistence of racism. Antiracist and other social justice movements are incomplete with attention to the politics of imprisonment.

In the beloved community of 'Our Father,' the same desperate love that a mother has for her baby or that a child has for his or her daddy is extended to all our human family. Biological love is too small a vision. Nationalism is far too myopic. A love for our own relatives or the people of our own country is not a bad things. But our love does not stop at the border. We now have a family that includes by transcends biology and geography. We have family in Iraq, Peru, Afghanistan and Sudan. We have family members who are starving and homeless, dying of AIDS and living in the midst of war. This is the new family of our Father.

Liberty as we understand it in the United States has been the exception not the rule — and its survival over the past three centuries the consequence not of happy foreordination but of the good guys in the world having enjoyed unmatched military and financial supremacy. Having known little else, the historically myopic will find it tempting to presume that our present global order represents the immutable state of nature. It does not. Just as the primary reason that the forces of liberty have prevailed since 1815 is that they have acquired and maintained unrivaled power, the relative peace and buzzing international trade that we currently enjoy is the product not of the West’s moral dominance, but of the prepotency first of the British Empire and then — after a seamless and invisible handover — of an ascendant United States.

This othering process is myopic in that it doesn’t take into account that our own wholeness is dependent on reclaiming the alternate pole—the person we think we are not, the other within us. When we are able to relate with each pole from a place of responsiveness, where we stand in recognition of our own innate wholeness, the experience of polarity can be one of expansion, flow, contrast, and generative transformation rather than division. Once we reckon with the paradox of how the perceived other is both distinct and a direct reflection of us, then we see ourselves in that mirror. We see everyone and everything as reflecting an aspect of our self that we get to reclaim. Those we might have judged become guideposts for our own liberation. Our triggers become welcomed signs that we have rejected something inside us.

Scholar Marilyn Frye uses the metaphor of a birdcage to describe the interlocking forces of oppression.16 If you stand close to a birdcage and press your face against the wires, your perception of the bars will disappear and you will have an almost unobstructed view of the bird. If you turn your head to examine one wire of the cage closely, you will not be able to see the other wires. If your understanding of the cage is based on this myopic view, you may not understand why the bird doesn’t just go around the single wire and fly away. You might even assume that the bird liked or chose its place in the cage. But if you stepped back and took a wider view, you would begin to see that the wires come together in an interlocking pattern—a pattern that works to hold the bird firmly in place. It now becomes clear that a network of systematically related barriers surrounds the bird. Taken individually, none of these barriers would be that difficult for the bird to get around, but because they interlock with each other, they thoroughly restrict the bird. While some birds may escape from the cage, most will not. And certainly those that do escape will have to navigate many barriers that birds outside the cage do not. The birdcage metaphor helps us understand why racism can be so hard to see and recognize: we have a limited view. Without recognizing how our position in relation to the bird defines how much of the cage we can see, we rely on single situations, exceptions, and anecdotal evidence for our understanding, rather than on broader, interlocking patterns. Although there are always exceptions, the patterns are consistent and well documented: People of color are confined and shaped by forces and barriers that are not accidental, occasional, or avoidable. These forces are systematically related to each other in ways that restrict their movement. Individual whites may be “against” racism, but they still benefit from a system that privileges whites as a group. David Wellman succinctly summarizes racism as “a system of advantage based on race.”17 These advantages are referred to as white privilege, a sociological concept referring to advantages that are taken for granted by whites and that cannot be similarly enjoyed by people of color in the same context (government, community, workplace, schools, etc.).18 But let me be clear: stating that racism privileges whites does not mean that individual white people do not struggle or face barriers. It does mean that we do not face the particular barriers of racism.

But it is still not enough to allow us to explain ourselves clearly to ourselves. We're not even clear about what it means to understand. We see the world, and we describe it. We give it an order. We know little of the actual relation between what we see of the world and the world itself. We know that we are myopic-we barely see a tiny window of the vast electromagnetic spectrum emitted by things. We do not see the atomic structure of matter nor the curvature of space. We see a coherent world that we extrapolate from our interaction with the universe, organized in simplistic terms that our devastatingly stupid brain is capable of handling. We think of the world in terms of stones, mountains, clouds and people and this is the world for us. About the world independent of us, we know a good deal without knowing how much this good deal is.

I'd thought we were the ones who'd suffered more, torn from everything we'd known, sudden strangers in a new town with no friends or family, having to start everything over - penniless, car-less, petrified, stuck in other people's houses with a strange accent and foreign tongue. I'd flown back to my homeland still feeling rejected and bruised and twelve. I'd expected apologies and atonement to heal my old wounds. I had no idea I'd been insensitive myself. I'd been so myopic, I didn't even know that I'd neglected my closest relatives.

I have been told that to look at history, theology, philosophy from the female perspective is myopic – one-eyed. It is commonly assumed that these disciplines have been regarded from the “human” perspective, that the male has incorporated both female and male perspectives, that he has been fair in all these matters, and indeed, capable. I have been expected to disregard it if the female is rarely mentioned as a factor in the first two million years of human existence, or if she is, that it is in a secondary placement or in a slanderous context. A casual perusal of most history, and “pre-history”, from a “fair” perspective would leave one wondering how the human species reproduced itself, let alone that the female had any further creative input to the human enterprise. As an example, one such weighty tome called The Last Two Million Years, has in all its four hundred and eighty-eight pages of text and plates, remarkably little evidence of female presence to the human enterprise. She rates a mention every now and then in relation to “problems of reproduction”, greater sexual receptivity than female apes, and men insisting that “their sisters married outside the family”. The very occasional Goddess or woman of note is most often, a mistress, consort or wife. Queen Elizabeth I stands alone as a woman of power in the last two million years, and even then the caption under her portrait is couched in a negative, reading “Defeat of the Armada