Liberty, Equality, Electronically

Dear readership, I have a confession to make. I am short. No, really. It's true. I've been discussing a phenom, whereby the words I write, both in emails in my various yahoogroups, and here on this blog, seem to impact folks, whereas in my real life, I can talk about some issues until I'm purple, and no one hears me. What does that have to do with being short? I have been told by quite a few people that they picture me as bigger than I am. Apparently, my shadow is larger than I (Peter Pan had the same problem; alas, I know no Wendy to stitch it back on). And stature is related to attention. Small people are assumed to have all kinds of "issues". Thank god I'm not short *and* male; everyone assumes short men have problems with their height. But not only am I short; I'm also getting older. Study after study has proven that older (read: no longer sexually available) women get worse service, less attention, and are generally marginalized within this youth-obsessive culture. The fact, and the fabulousness, of the online world, is that ideas are presented purely, and the reader is forced to take them at their value, without having physical cues or prejudices. You don't know the physical appearance, ethnic origin, sexual orientation, religious conviction, or really, anything else about the person who wrote the words. You have to take the words as written, and evaluate them purely on their own merit. And what is it that makes it so that if you can't see me, I must be just like you and you can accept what I say, but if you can, I couldn't possibly be? They say that vision is not a pure sense, that it's the combination of the data the eyes collect merged with what the brain processes. The eyes transmit roughly ten times more data than the brain uses to create the images we see. According to the groundbreaking work of Dr. Bates, most vision malfunctions are a result of either overstress of the eyes, or of mental/emotional impacts. So is it that dismissiveness of truth that happens when the messenger is Not Like Us is a function somehow of how we see them? Could it be that prejudice isn't a social malfunction, but is actually our brain's frantic attempt to throw up another filter against the overwhelming data coming in, to process it by wholesale flinging some of it beyond discussion? Wouldn't it be interesting if, after all these years of fighting for equality, for liberty, for civil rights, if all of those things were finally found in a new age of purely electronic communication?