The White House spent close to ten years of my salary to take a picture of Air Force One.

I’m speechless.

Who signed that check? I’m sure it was someone who sits at a desk all day, making barely more than I do, stamping their boss’s signature on checks for hundreds of thousands of dollars.

What does that person do when they go home at night? How do they swallow their dinner knowing that they spent 8 hours shoveling taxpayer money into a furnace in quantities best measured in tens of salaries?

If you tally up all the various taxes we pay (income, social security, sales, etc.) our effective tax rate is close to 50%. The French pay 50%, but it in return they get medical care, retirement, housing subsidies, welfare, and free college. Here, we get pretty pictures of the president’s jet. I think it’s time for a taxpayer revolution.

I don’t normally consider my colorblindness a handicap, because there are far more serious disabilities, but from time to time it really gets to me that I can’t tell when meat is done, or what color a highlighter is.

One recent incident that really got on my nerves was at a dinner for an SFSU orientation. When we signed in, they gave us survey cards to fill out. Since there were so many people, they had to split the dinner service between two floors, and guess how we were supposed to tell which floor we got to eat on? That’s right, the color of our survey cards. Problem was, the cards were fluorescent pink and purple: two of the colors I can’t easily distinguish. So, I was left with a choice between potentially showing up at the wrong dinner line, and asking a complete stranger what color my card was. I went with the latter because I thought it would be less embarassing.

Again, I know that this isn’t that serious of a disability, but it is really frustrating sometimes. One of the worst things is color-coded topographical features. Like this map of France, which supposedly shows a geographical feature called the ‘Massif Central.’ Not like I could ever tell.

(Keep in mind that I have the most difficulty with orange, red, green, and yellow, because I see them all as the same color: your yellow)

It’s true that it isn’t colorblindness per se, rather a color deficiency in the warm end of the spectrum, so I can usually tell what is going on if I look hard enough, but for some reason, neon colors are near impossible. This means that for all these color-keyed things, like maps and diagrams, I usually have to resign myself to not getting it.

I just wish people could be a little more sensitive to my kind. I feel bad comparing colorblindness to a real disability, but there are surely more of us than, let’s say, wheelchair bound people, and they seem to get accommodated at great expense. All it would take for us is using different colors for color coding. It’s not like there aren’t plenty of them.