Illiteracy

 

I heard someone identify as being illiterate. It gave me pause.

Illiteracy is the inability to read or write.

It is the 21^st century and I just assume everyone can read and write. I was wrong.

How can someone survive in the world without reading and writing? With all the paper signs on doors or direction signs on the highway or menus or applications or contracts, how can one not be able to read?

Yet if I was to travel to a foreign land, I would not be able to read a book or a menu or sign a contract without an interpreter. I would be illiterate.

There are still things I can’t read and need Google search to find the meaning to understand words and themes.

I did the public education process to attend classes that taught reading, writing and arithmetic. I struggled with combining words for sentences. Neither of my family were avid readers. There were few books in the house. Textbooks bored me.

My education came from the television rather than losing myself in a fantasy novel or philosophical wonders (other than the Bible). Being illiterate would never know about Harry Potter until the movie came out.

Still I got a piece of paper that read I’d been approved as being educated enough to buy a house (without reading the small print) and signing my name to a check.

When I go to the store and pass a person in the aisle I assume they can read and write. I don’t know for sure but like everyone eats, I figure everyone reads.

Unlike someone wearing glasses or holding a book there is no way of telling who can or cannot read. Unlike the clothing we wear or our haircuts, in passing it doesn’t show if you are literate or not.

For that matter who is intelligent? Readers assumed to be well read and thus more informed. As social media has shown us, it is not how much you read, but what you read and how you consume it. Does being illiterate equal ignorance?

Illiteracy is invisible. You can’t smell it or taste it. Illiteracy doesn’t have a color or gender or height.

The same is true for a pedophile. The same is true for mental illness. The same is true for domestic abuse. The same is true for animal lovers. The same is true for poets. The same is true for doctors. The same is true for lawyers. The same is true for alcoholics. The same is true drug addicts. The same is true for gun owners. The same is true for renters. The same is true for those in foreclosure.  

When in public, unless our behavior is unacceptable, we all blend in to conformity. We are invisible to each other.