Jul 24, 2022

The Dress

Sylvia Shawcross

Warning. This is a vaguely humorous piece during a time when humour has basically crashed and died a thousand deaths. If you haven’t laughed since 2019, it is not likely you will now but you know, it’s always worth a shot.

Now, it is definitely getting very hard (even if you’re an atheist) to deny we’re living all of the biblical plagues at the moment—war, pestilence, famine etc.

I figure the only thing different right now is we’re expected to actually eat the locusts because they’ve got a factory somewhere in Ontario, Canada producing a facsimile for our protein consumption. And who knew that cricket poo can replace chemical fertilizers! Take that Putin!

But never mind all that—If this is biblical I figure we need not worry because there’s always the Rapture to save us and I’m fairly sure there’s an Ap for that now.

The point is that it is all about “The Dress.” And we’re all bloody idiots for not having figured that out by now.

[Source: Wikipedia] The dress is a photograph that became a viral phenomenon on the Internet in 2015. Viewers of the image disagreed on whether the dress depicted was coloured black and blue, or white and gold. The phenomenon revealed differences in human colour perception, which have been the subject of ongoing scientific investigations into neuroscience and vision science, producing a number of papers published in peer-reviewed scientific journals.

The phenomenon originated from a washed-out colour photograph of a dress posted on the social networking service Facebook. Within a week, more than ten million tweets had mentioned the dress, using hashtags such as #thedress, #whiteandgold, and #blackandblue. Although the dress was eventually confirmed to be coloured black and blue,^[1]^[2] the image prompted much online discussion of different users’ perceptions of the colour of the dress. Members of the scientific community began to investigate the photograph for new insights into human colour vision.

Why is it that scientists are always studying things “after” the fact anyway? But I digress…. These are hard times but if we can just remember “The Dress” we’re going to get through it all famously.

We will change the usual course of history and avoid all the misery that such things usually bring when it comes to dealing with each other in trying times and best of all we can avoid having to download yet another Ap.

Yes, we do not have to be miserable during this Great Leap Forward… oh wait… wrong one… the Great Reset. (I always get those mixed up.) We have choices and we can be happy while owning nothing, including our dignity as we munch larvae lasagna and June bug canapés at our next cocktail party. It’s about how you package it really. We’ll do what we’re told if it sounds fashionable I figure.

I’m actually writing this whole thing in defence of cocktail parties. You see, nobody is going to cocktail parties anymore. And this is where “The Dress” comes in. Everybody who is anybody who was venturing out to cocktail parties during these dark times were all completely prepared to “not” discuss every conspiracy theory out there because the unspoken is much more evident than the spoken usually don’t you find?

Cocktail parties were turning into marathon mucky slugfests for those with foot-in-mouth disease. Those who dared discuss Trump, vaccines, Russia, China, Gender, Abortion, Race and the WEF, WHO, or the IMF at a cocktail party in 2021 learned their lessons pretty darn quick.

Most of them gave up after realizing they needed to bring a bullet proof vest, iodine tablets, a copy of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, an index to the British Medical Journal and three layered face masks. And that was just for the dog. It was getting ridiculous.

And the most ridiculous part of it all is that we could have prevented all the divisive raging at each other over everything if we’d simply worn the right dress—the one from 2015. Or at least learned the lesson at the time.

One photo of a dress. One dress and two people looking at the same photograph and one saw gold/white and one saw black/blue. We all went and looked at “The Dress” and started arguing.

That’s when it started. There was no grey, just gold and white or black and blue. Were you one who chose black and blue, all bruised and tortured by the state of the world and its future? Or were you one who chose white and gold where everything was bright and shiny and lovely and the future was gleaming with optimism? It was one or the other.

Although there were lots of theories I don’t think they ever did figure out why it was the way it was. All we knew was what was in front of us, indisputable objective reality and nobody could agree on one reality. And that my friends was how they told us how they were going to change the world and mess us all up. That is why they stormed the Presidential palace in Sri Lanka and invaded the Ukraine and crashed economies. It’s all about the divisiveness.

Now, I’m not saying we can save England or Syria or the fishermen of Newfoundland or the farmers of the Netherlands or the banks in China but I am saying that if you’ve got one reality sitting in front of you and nobody can agree then it is only about motivation. And that is where the two types of people come in.

The first type are elitist and it is all about being right. They are very impressed with themselves and are sure they have the answers to all that is wrong but really they don’t.

The second type is the one that counts—the majority who understand after arguing for weeks that there are different points of view. The one that sees the dress as black/blue “needs” you to see the dress is black/blue because they care about you and so too with the one that sees the dress as gold/white.

You see, the lesson of “The Dress” is that we can see things totally differently and disagree but still care about our future together.

So now, in an effort to create a better world, when we disagree we can all just say “The Dress” and it is understood that caring is caring but raging debates and judging/ostracizing/stigmatizing/slandering/censoring/cancelling the other is utterly pointless. We can move on to doing things together happy in the knowledge that we cared and they cared and the dress is still the dress.

Back in the days when people’s innate caring wasn’t weaponized we could laugh with incredulity at our differences. We can do it again. Fight for what you believe in if need be. Just don’t fight each other. Wear the right dress people. Our future depends on it.

Oh… P.S. Some would say there’s the third type of person. They’re the psychopaths who promoted the picture of “The Dress” in the first place and didn’t explain it to us all. Why do I think “they” are not the ones who will be eating worm waffles?<