These are troubling times, not just for the United States, but for the world. To be sure, there has been tremendous progress over the last 50 years with regard to human rights and equility. But today the remaining factions that support racism, hate, sexism, and other-ism have grown more vocal, more frustrated, more visible, and more extreme. Those who persist with their misguided attempts to categorize and repress people based on nothing more than the circumstances that they are born into have many lessons to learn and many opportunities for personal growth.
I had been thinking about this in the days after the election of Donald Trump as POTUS. In that moment, I was thinking about aliens someday descending on our little planet. They’d surely see a bunch of humans in a variety of shapes and sizes. But would they even seen things like black and white? Gay and straight? Boy and girl? Muslim and Christian? Certainly not. These things would be terribly minor and inconsequential as differences between us, from their point of view. Most of us would have two eyes, two arms, two legs, and one head. In our cities, they’d see our sameness everywhere they looked. I thought to myself, they’d be just as likely to judge us by our eye color as our skin color.
A year or so later, I had the honor of meeting Eliot Peper in person after admiring his work from afar for some time. When I told him about “being a blue” myself, it led to a long and enjoyable conversation and ultimately to this writing. We hope the story that Eliot so masterfully captures in TRUE BLUE might inspire at least one person to recognize the absurdity inherent in judging, categorizing, and mistreating others simply because of a particular attribute. People are people, after all, blue eyed or not.
Eliot turned this idea into an incredible short story that you can go get starting today at Amazon. Let me know what you think of the premise and the short story in the comments!
