Deborah Kendrick commentary: Video on beauty serves only to highlight our differences

Swimming in the excess of information and entertainment that is the hallmark of our time, I didn’t want to think about the particular YouTube video any longer than the five or so minutes it took to play it.

But it continued to taunt at the outskirts of my conscious thinking.

“Blind people define beauty,” or “Beauty According to the Blind,” or some similarly insipid title was the gnat-like bit of enlightenment I can't manage to rid myself of entirely, even after a week of competing information abundance.

Of course, when I first encountered that link, I had to investigate. Beauty according to the blind? Who asked? Who answered? Was the intention profound or ridiculous? Curiosity was piqued; I had to know.

What I found was an array of men and women, all apparently legally blind, spewing mawkish platitudes about beauty. Beauty is hearing the ocean, feeling the grass beneath the feet, being alive — these were the kinds of one-liners offered.

Not to be misunderstood here, I personally adore being alive, hearing the ocean, feeling the sun on my face or fresh grass beneath my feet (at least the kind we have here in Ohio that springs back rather than stabs your unsuspecting soles!)

But why the melodrama? Who doesn't enjoy being alive, hearing birds sing, or smelling fragrant hyacinths? (No one in the video mentioned hyacinths or other flowers, by the way. I threw those in for free.)

The point of such cloying endeavors is not to unveil any deep mystery of life. It is, instead, to point out yet one more time in one more way that people who can't see (and you could substitute “can't hear,” “can't walk” or “can't do math” and net the same effect) are screamingly different, alien, not quite the real deal in the humanity department.

What could possibly be the point in singling out one group with such a question as “What is beauty?” other than to underscore a belief that if this group of poor creatures experiences beauty at all, it is worthy of discussion.

It might be more instructive to ask, “What is grammar?” of the respondent who talked about people who “think about theirselves” too much.

Or “What is honesty?” as opposed to “What do you think the uninitiated would want to hear?”

I’m saying that if any ordinary mortal — with or without sight, with or without hearing, with or without an IQ above 135 or strong and nimble limbs — is going to answer truthfully what ranks Numero Uno in the beauty department, all those who say bird song and ocean roar are the same ones who, in their dating profiles, love nothing better than a walk in the park with a soul mate and who adore classical music, holding hands and snuggling by the fire.

Everyone likes the idea of such things, but most mortals among us, if zooming in on moments of personal beauty or joy, are more likely to focus on that sick joke that almost made the beer come out your nose, the realization that your five-year-old has spotted you in the audience, last night’s great sex, that first bite of a perfect chocolate cake, and crossing the finish in your first marathon.

Sure, some of these are as schmaltzy as some of those quoted in that pesky video, but there’s nothing in them that marks them as belonging distinctly to someone who is blind or deaf, fast or slow, male or female, Catholic or Hindu.

Beauty and the experiencing of it have nothing to do with seeing or not seeing. To suggest that they do is just one more way of saying that if you don’t have a disability, you are inherently superior to anyone who does.

Plenty of people with multiple disabilities have the souls of poets, artists, musicians and visionaries. And, regrettably, many people with no discernible disabilities are too spiritually obtuse to smell the rain or see the sunrise.

When we stop playing the one-up, one-down game, that’s what I call beautiful.
