I was blind, and now I see

Tim Craig

I grew up a military brat, in playgrounds and schools on Army bases all over the world, with children of every nationality, every color & creed, every race & religion, in a musical theater family, performing arts, and concerts, and shows in playhouses all over the country, where all the kooky, crazy, misfits go to be themselves. I was hopeless. I was destined to grow up color-blind. I couldn’t tell one color from the next, there were too many of them to count! I thought “normal” meant to be unique & different, and the more eclectic & eccentric the person, the cooler they were to me?

I remember the very day my father tried to take my blindfold off, as if it were only yesterday. It was 1976, I was 11 years old, living on an Army base in Wurzburg, Germany, and my father had received his orders to transfer to Ft Bragg Army base in Fayetteville, North Carolina. It’s a day that will be forever stuck in my social memory. He sat my sister and I down in the living room, and began to tell us about what it’s going to be like moving to the “South” in 1976. He showed us tapes of the Martin Luther King riots where people were yelling and fighting, police dogs were attacking people, and there were fire hoses being sprayed on women and children. I was so confused and I didn’t understand. I asked him why they were doing it? His answer was only that because they were “different”. I was too young to understand racism, or discrimination, or the civil rights movement, and I was certainly never exposed to anything like that growing up? So, I just put my blindfold back on and forgot all about it, as if I had never been told.

We moved to Ft Bragg in 1977, and I was right back in my comfort zone, living in Normandy Heights on Ft Bragg Army base, back in the schools, and the playgrounds, and the DYA, and playing sports on another military installation, surrounded by kids of every color & creed again. Finishing the 6th grade at Bowley Elementary School, then 7th & 8th grade at Irwin Jr High School, right on the base as usual. Nothing had changed? All was the same! So, I quickly forgot everything my father had tried to warn me about, had tried to prepare me for, and with my blindfold tightly fashioned over my eyes, I went on to public school at Reid Ross High School, in Fayetteville, and off the sheltered facade of military base living and growing up with other Army brats of every color and creed, from all walks of life. You would think this is where my blindfold fell off, but you would be wrong. Read the rest of this entry »