Do You See What I See [FICTOID]

“Do you see that?  Do you see how they move?  Do you catch the grace?”

“Grace?  They waddle like obese grandmothers who just soiled their drawers.”

The sociologist sighed.  “Don’t you see?  Can’t you see?  There’s a pattern to their movements, a profound pattern that speaks of truth and beauty.”

“I just see a bunch of polar bears stumbling about like drunken sailors on a rough sea.”

“Can’t you see?!?!?” the sociologist shouted.  “Or do you refuse to see?  Are you some sort of self-centered nihilist hellbent on destroying the world to satiate your own feelings of miserable unworthiness?”

“Whoa!  Where the hell did that come from?”

“You deny --0 “

“You’re the one making extraordinary claims, pal.  You want to say waddling polar bears -- “

“Dancing!  Dancing polar bears!”

“Whatever, guv.  You want to say polar bears can tell us all about peace, love, and understanding, you need to provide the evidence, not me.”

“there are none so blind as those who will not see!”

“That and seven bucks will get you a venti Mexican mocha at Starbucks.”

The sociologist scrunched their eyes shut, close to weeping in frustration.  “The proof is in their movements.”

“The ‘proof’ is in your interpretation of their movements.  Other people see them differently.”

“Other people are blind!”

“Perhaps other people aren’t sharing their head with a dozen different personalities.”

“Are you saying I’m possessed?”

“I’m saying you see things nobody else sees.  Yeah, we see the damn polar bears ‘dancing’ if that’s what you want to call it, but there’s a huge gap between seeing any random event -- “

“It’s not random!”

“So you say.  Yeah, yeah; I get your point, back to mine.  We see purely random phenomenon.  You want to ascribe it to some form of deliberate intelligence.”

“Well…it is!”

“Dude, it’s just polar bears acting polar bearish.”

“And you think that means they lack intelligence?  That they don’t want to communicate with us?”

“Nobody denies polar bears possess a certain animal cunning, but it’s a huge leap from that to claiming they have a message for us.”

“Well…they do!”

“Look, a message implies some sort of passage of information.  They need to pack the cognitive ability to formulate an idea, render that into symbols that passed on and interpreted by others.  Not just the facility to do so but the actual desire to communicate.”

“Are you saying a rattlesnake doesn’t communicate when it rattles?”

“Not in the sense you’re referring to.  It rattles because it feel threatened and evolution gave it the ability to avoid predators by warning potential foes off.  There’s no conscious thought involved at all, much less an actual message.”

“How would you know?  You’re no rattlesnake.”

“And you’re no polar bear.”

© Buzz Dixon