Making the Visible Invisible

Do you see what I see? My first response to this letter was to wonder what is meant by "see." I'm tending toward the opinion that "not seeing" is NOT just because people don't know or don't care, as I'd thought in the past, but that it's also because of mental repression of dissonance, repression of the unbearably sad, shocking or vulgar--a sublime process that withholds from consciousness that which is in plain sight. Perhaps, at times, the precondition for such repression involves fear of the consequences of taking action coupled to the guilt that results from not taking action. In vernacular, "damned if you do, damned if you don't, so just don't think about it."