The World Through Blue-Colored Glasses
“What every man needs, regardless of his job or the kind of work he is doing, is a vision of what his place is and may be. He needs an objective and a purpose. He needs a feeling and a belief that he has something worthwhile to do. What this is no one can tell him. It must be his own creation.”
~ Joseph Morrell Dodge (1890-1964)
A while back, I saw on CBS Sunday Morning that blue-eyed people are becoming extinct – that decades from now there won’t be any more babies born with baby blue eyes. The reason, geneticists say, is the increase of interethnic marriages. Blue eyes are a genetic anomaly, a chromosomal mutation unique to fewer and fewer people… like Paul Newman and me.
A 2002 study found the prevalence of blue eyes in the U.S. to be 33.8% for those born between 1936 and 1951, compared to 57.4% of those born between 1899 and 1905. And get this – if you have blue-eyes like Paul Newman and me, we may be related! Researchers in Denmark have found that every person with blue eyes descends from a single ancestor whose genes mutated 6,000 to 10,000 years ago. Before then, everyone had brown orbs. Troubling? I’m not sure, but if we’re concerned about saving snail darters, why not protect endangered, blue-eyed people like me who see the world a little more… pastel?
In broadcasting this alarming news, CBS played “Old Blue Eyes” in the background. I saw Frank Sinatra (twice) at the Latin Casino outside Philly years ago. His voice had already taken on that “gravely” rasp, more compelling, I feel, that his more nasally tone from the 40s and 50s. Sinatra’s aging, though still bright, blue eyes twinkled confidence and naughtiness. He seduced everyone, just like Paul and me, and other blue-eyed stallions do every weekend. We’re all brothers, you see. Charismatic!
I prefer to think of myself as visionary – looking forward instead of backward, optimistic rather than negative; leaving mistakes, worries, and battle wounds far behind. Visionaries aren’t psychics, mystics, or even good guessers – but they dream a lot, reliving them over and over, then acting upon them; convicted they will most assuredly come true! A bluer version of rose-colored glasses? Perhaps, but most necessary in an otherwise gray, gray world.
Dreams, goals, even hope are sadly deteriorating in many households and markets. Like blue eyes, they too could become extinct. But is visioning a genetic anomaly, or can it be adapted by everyone? I sure hope so, because we need all the visionaries we can muster up. If it weren’t for our dreams and imagination, we might as well go blind. We could borrow goals and lofty mission statements from others, but in order to seduce life, each person must harbor his own hopes and dreams, lest we all be squelched by mediocrity, cynicism, or worse, despair. I’ll buy contact lenses, if necessary, to continue seeing the world for what it can be and ought to be. Like Old Blue Eyes did – seductively, confidently, positively, twinkling, with only a little gravel.
“Do-be-do-be-do! Don’t it make your brown eyes blue…?”