I've seen this a lot recently. It brings me out in a rage whenever I see it and I feel like pointing the person out to my ocular brethren and exposing them for the clear-sighted charlatans that they are. People who don't need glasses and who wear plain lens specs, or, worst of all, wearing a pair of frames without any glass in at all. The shame of it.
We glasses wearers have a physical disability. True, as disabilities go, it's a pretty insubstantial one, but it is nonetheless one that we have had to learn to deal with. Through centuries of hard work and suffering, our near-and-far sighted ancestors have battled to lesson our burden, not through the technology of the lenses themselves (although this too has improved), but through the gradual acceptance that wearing glasses is not a condition preferable only to leprosy.
It is true that the eyeglass community fractured terribly when technology allowed the comtemptible adoption of contact lenses by some of the vain, self-loathing members of our fraternity, but the true-hearted carried on, safe in the warm, brotherly glances thrown in solidarity between glasses wearers around the world, on trains, between candidates and employers in job interviews and as we pass eachother in our daily lives. If you don't wear glasses you will never have felt the warmth of this brotherhood. It is closed to you, in all your 20-20 perfection.
The despicable fake glasses wearer seeks to infiltrate this sanctified alliance. If people started to walk around with superfluous crutches or a colostomy bag jauntily worn only to match a particular sartorial ensemble, we would rightfully think them offensive idiots, yet almost every time I walk around Harajuku or Daikanyama (and I have to presume this is the case all round the world), I see people swaggering around, thinking it permissable to attempt to appropriate the socio-intellectual cache that generations of optical-inadequates have worked so hard to achieve. Never for these crass social peacocks, the embarassment of attempting to chat-up a girl at a swimming pool without your glasses on, only to realise you have been talking to a poster. No, never for these abhorrent imbeciles the fear of playing ball games without their eyes being able to distinguish distances past the end of their nose.
The usurpation of our specs must stop. It is despicable and opticians should refuse the sale of glasses to anyone who, when asked if they can read the letters on the test sign on the wall, do not react with genuine shock that there was a sign there at all. Or a wall.
This has gone far enough.
