Deborah Kendrick commentary: Video on beauty serves only to
highlight our differences  Swimming in the excess of information
and entertainment that is the hallmark of our time, I didn’t
want to think about the particular YouTube video any longer than
the five or so minutes it took to play it.  But it continued to
taunt at the outskirts of my conscious thinking.  “Blind people
define beauty,” or “Beauty According to the Blind,” or some
similarly insipid title was the gnat-like bit of enlightenment I
can't manage to rid myself of entirely, even after a week of
competing information abundance.  Of course, when I first
encountered that link, I had to investigate. Beauty according to
the blind? Who asked? Who answered? Was the intention profound
or ridiculous? Curiosity was piqued; I had to know.  What I
found was an array of men and women, all apparently legally
blind, spewing mawkish platitudes about beauty. Beauty is
hearing the ocean, feeling the grass beneath the feet, being
alive — these were the kinds of on