You do not need eyes to see.

A person can have 20/20 vision and still be as blind as the man who needlessly cuts down a tree, caring not for its life and the canopy of shade that it makes for the little girl who sits beneath its branches and reads To Kill A Mockingbird.

Hitler could not see.

He could not see the beauty in the millions of God-given lives that he mercilessly stole because their eyes were not blue and their hair was not blond and they did not fit into his ignorant straitjacket of what the supreme race should look like.

(There is no supreme race. There are only people made of stardust, working to make something magical out of this earth.)

The Ku Klux Klan could not see.  When they set fire to the houses someone spilt their sweat and blood to build, when they lynched families because they could not see the beauty of a black mother and a white father, of a black father and a white mother, of caramel coffee colored, beautiful birch bark blended babies, they did not realize they were blind.

He used to see the towering buildings in his city.

He used to see the lush and glorious gardens his wife planted every spring.

He used to see the sky, open and inviting, stretching further than any ocean, applauding its sun and its clouds in their motion.

His eyes, once bright like a shiny new 2016 copper penny have faded like old jeans, yellowing with age like the original Declaration of Independence, changed by the weathering of the sun and old age.

The expansive lawn and shimmering shrubbery have blurred to a blank in his eyes.

His eyes stare out into the nothing of blind pupils, the wilderness of emptiness.

He can hear the sparrows, he can hear the sun shining, he can hear the plants growing...

He cannot see the birds, he cannot see the moon nor the sun, he cannot see the green tomatoes sprouting from their vine, but he can see. He can see the people.

He can see that they are beautiful.