perspectives, perception

You know those pregnant belly thingies they put on teenage girls or sometimes guys to make them understand what it's like, or at least give them an idea. And then later they get the creepy doll thing that cries and needs all the attention a real baby would need and it goes on and on and you fall asleep in middle and high school health classes because the whole thing is just so boring. Well, for some strange reason I started thinking about that today as I was walking home in the hurricane this afternoon. The whole point of the body suit and the baby is to make kids think in the proper perspective about the consequences of their actions.

Perspective is such an important part of who we are, but it's also very important to understand where other people are coming from. Things like racism, discrimination, and just sheer disregard for others all root from an inability or nonexistant desire to see from another perspective.

So how could you actually see from another perspective? Once I got to this train of thought, I remembered the story Harrison Bergeron by Kurt Vonnegut, from his short story collection Welcome to the Monkeyhouse. In the story, people are all made physically and mentally equivalent by the government. Everyone is handicapped down to the same level by all sorts of weird means. It's not exactly the same idea, but that's where my head went. Anyway, how interesting would it be to see through someone else's eyes? How much does that entail? How would you go about changing yourself, if only temporarily, to understand the world as another does?

It reaches a totally new level of interactivity, at least the way I see it. To become another person, to understand all that entails is not only a (dare I say it) impossible task, but it requires each and every sense to be transformed. To regulate eye sight, to abridge the sensitivity of the nose, to heighten or perhaps dull hearing, and even taste. A person's sense of observation would be varied. In all reality the brain would have to be totally altered.

It's basically unfathomable.

But... what about a smaller scale version? Where do you even start?

When the change does occur, when a new perspective is understood... how does that change the one that experiences it?