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What Causes Vision Problems?
Our eyes are one of the most sensitive organs in the body. Fond memories of your mother telling you not to read in the dark or not to sit too close to the TV spring up. While you might have ignored your mother’s pleas back then, she was only trying to help you maintain your vision.
There are plenty of people in the world who wear glasses. Others seek help from doctors, who use various ophthalmic instruments, like the scanning laser ophthalmoscope and surgical CO2 laser to repair vision problems.
Causes of Blurred Vision
As eyes are so sensitive, there are a wide variety of catalysts for blurry vision. Several diseases like cataracts and glaucoma can cause vision impairment or even blindness.
Age-related macular degeneration is the most common cause of vision loss and blindness in older adults. The macula—the part of the retina responsible for sharp vision—degenerates, causing a blind spot in the center of the eye. Some people learn to use their peripheral vision, but macular degeneration makes it difficult to read, recognize faces, or perform most simple, everyday activities.
Perhaps the most common cause is age. As you age, the lens in your eye loses its flexibility. Your eye then loses its ability to change its focus to see objects that are nearby. This condition is known as presbyopia and is actually a natural part of aging, affecting everyone at some point in life—generally appearing around age 40.
Environmental Factors
Of course, you can’t forget all the environmental factors. Your eyes are subject to a lot of wear over the course of a normal day, and after a while, it starts to show.
- Reading is an enjoyable, wonderful activity, but reading a book in the dark or too close to your face can actually damage your vision. It might not be initially noticeable, but we all know the pain and discomfort in our eyes after hours of reading or studying. The same can be said of using a computer for too long. Too much close vision work causes stress on the muscles of the eyes, eventually leading to myopic vision (nearsightedness).
- Many people resort to squinting to read in the dark or see from afar. Squinting or straining puts undue internal muscular stress on your eyes, damaging your eyesight.
- Just as much as the rest of your body requires the right nutrition, your eyes require various nutrients to maintain proper eyesight and even improve your vision. Other nutrients like lutein and vitamin A help to prevent glaucoma, cataracts, macular degeneration, and other diseases that may affect your eyes.
While it may be too late to go back to your childhood and heed your mother’s good advice, it’s not too late to make some healthy habit changes that could improve your vision or prevent disease. If you have glasses or contacts, be sure to wear them—no more squinting or straining. Give your eyes a break from hours at the computer, read in a well-lit area, eat a healthy diet, and as always, get your eyes checked regularly.
The Vagueness of the Occupy Movement
Unless you have been living under a rock the past few months, you are probably well aware of the current Occupy Movement. What started on Wall Street has spread to over 70 major U.S. cities and 600 communities, not to mention similar movements across borders and overseas.
Initially, the movement began as a protest of the widening financial gap between the rich and the not so rich (the 1% and the 99%, respectively), a sensitive subject that hit a nerve with many of the country’s citizens.
The Labor Share and the Occupy Movement
In a recent article, Peter Orszag, vice chairman of global banking at Citigroup, notes one of the fundamentals of economics. The shares of national income received by labor and capital remain roughly constant over long periods of time. According to Orszag, the decline in labor’s share in recent years at least partly explains the frustration expressed by the Occupy Movement.
Peter Orszag goes on to note that in 1990 about 63 percent of business income in the U.S. took the form of labor compensation. By the middle of this year, the percentage had dropped to 58 percent. That 5 percent difference in the labor share, as miniscule as it might seem, amounts to over $500 billion each year. In other words, if the labor share had not dropped, overall income received by America’s workers would be about $500 billion more.
A Vague Effort
Still, if you were to ask someone exactly what the Occupy Movement stands for, you are likely to get a confused look or a wide range of vague answers, from the high unemployment rates and massive federal budget deficit to inaction caused by political gridlock—and of course, the classic response of “bailouts and corporate greed.”
Part of this is caused by the many people who see the movement as a vehicle for their own divergent messages, from environmentalists to anti-war activists. Many conservative media outlets generalize the protestors as groups of drug-addicted, unemployed, unhygienic hippies.
Although the lack of definition to the Occupy Movement often makes it an easy target for ridicule as a gathering of bored, hip kids with nothing better to do, the vagueness also proves to be one of the movement’s strengths. The fact is that the Occupy Movement is a protest of numerous different issues. Protesting a singular issue assumes the necessity of one solution that would miss all the other issues surrounding that one issue.
In general, the Occupy Movement is a call to action, a show of unrest. The masses are unhappy and want something to change. They want their voices heard.
It seems to be working so far, but what do you think the next step should be for the movement?
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