Ophelia Gets Her Glasses

Several years ago, I was out having dinner with a girl I had recently started dating. For the sake of privacy, we’ll call her Ophelia. Ophelia had misplaced her contacts, and this was the first time I had seen her wearing glasses. I asked her when she started wearing them. She was an incredibly candid person, shockingly so at times, so she didn’t hesitate to tell me a self-deprecating, albeit heartbreaking story that would resonate with anyone who has navigated the confounding passage of adolescence.

The year was 1986, and Ophelia was twelve. This particular year, it seems that eyeglasses had somehow managed to escape the oppression of previous fashion associations more closely connected with dorks, nerds, geeks, and dweebs, and rather had found refuge as an accessory in the cool kid camp. Now, Ophelia was not a geek or a dweeb, but nor was she in the upper echelon of popularity. She was in a social purgatory of sorts. The middle school middle class. For this reason she had hope, hope for a ride uptown to Popularville. Naturally she believed the sure ticket for a ride to Popularville lay in acquiring one pair of eyeglasses with frames of the most contemporary style.

Life has a funny way sometimes of setting up a perfect storm of events, which once unfolded, will forever change everything. The fact that Ophelia’s school scheduled the annual school wide eye exams only a week after she had begun having these obsessive thoughts of eyeglasses was a crystalline example of one of these perfect storms. Ophelia felt like the luckiest girl in the whole seventh grade. As she was precocious beyond measure, the idea came to her immediately. She just had to make sure not to overdo it.

The day of the eye exam came. When Ophelia positioned herself in front of the line exactly twenty feet from the chart hung on the wall, she cleared her throat, and began to recite letters on the chart. She recited the first three lines without flaw. Then once she reached the fourth line, she recited three letters that were not on the chart. At the fifth line, she incorrectly recited a different letter for every one she saw there. Three days later, she had her new pair of glasses.

At first, it was difficult for Ophelia to see when she was wearing her new prescription glasses. The prescription wasn’t that strong, but she had perfect 20/20 vision. However, after time she grew more accustomed to the glasses. Well, that’s what she thought anyway. What was really happening is that the glasses were ruining her eyes. The next year, she took another eye exam. She didn’t pass that time either. As a matter of fact, no matter how hard she tried she never passed again, because she had ruined her perfect eyes in the name of appearances.

Of course I’m not telling this story just because it’s an interesting perspective into the mind of an adolescent girl. I’m telling it to draw a parallel. Republican pundits are essentially doing the same thing Ophelia did. A trademark of the Republican Party has always been a position against public health care. It is an appearance that they have always maintained, and continue to do so today. Just as Ophelia lied to achieve the appearance she desired, so too are conservative leaders and pundits. They are lying about the fundamentals of the issue, and if they succeed as Ophelia did, the future of America will be worse off for it.