But Lusi Radford has a pretty good excuse: She's blind.

Radford, the head of the Wake County chapter of the Federation of the Blind, organized a short-lived protest of the movie "Blindness" Friday night at Crossroads 20 cinemas in Cary.

This was no screaming, shouting, in-your-face throng of agitators getting in moviegoers' faces, trying to prevent them from entering the evil movie.

Nope. This was a small group -- seven people, two guide dogs -- gathered on the sidewalk outside the theater to try to educate the sighted viewers about what blindness is truly all about.

Several in Radford's group wore sandwich-board signs saying things like, "I'm not an actor but I play a blind person in real life."

They piqued moviegoers' interest.

Unfortunately, they hadn't gone through the necessary steps to secure a protest permit. As a result, by the time I got to the theater Friday night, a theater manager and a security guard were disbanding the group.

There's nothing so dangerous to business as a half-dozen blind people quietly and respectfully gathered on a sidewalk in the dark.

It was unfortunate they didn't get to stay longer. "Blindness," the movie, starring Julianne Moore as the last sighted person on Earth, is about the spread of a disease that causes blindness. The film is supposed to be an allegory about a society breaking down.

Radford's group wanted to tell people that, first of all, true blindness is caused, in the vast majority of cases, by a congenital disease. This was true for Radford, who was born legally blind and whose sight got worse, thanks to a double whammy of eye conditions.

In a small percentage of cases, blindness is caused by accident.

No one, Radford said, can "catch" blindness, as the movie suggests.

But what grated on Radford most about the movie is its portrayal of people who "turn blind" and become almost animal-like in their helplessness.

"There's not a single person in history who wakes up blind and forgets how to bathe or dress or walk or act like a regular human being," Radford said.

At a time when the blind community was just feeling like maybe, just maybe, it was gaining some understanding in the community at large -- heck, David Paterson is governor of New York -- this movie was a sucker punch.

"There is a 70 percent unemployment rate among blind people," said Radford, a former teacher who also sings and is mother to a teenage daughter.

"We have people with college degrees and incredible talent who cannot get a job because people wonder how they'll get to work or how they'll interact with others."

The movie, she worries, only reinforces unjustified biases among the sighted.

Oh, as for due diligence, Radford did what she could to investigate "Blindness," the movie, before launching her protest. She used a computer program to convert the text on the movie's Web site to audio, and then she listened to the movie's trailers.

She had this assessment: "It was one time I can honestly say I was glad to be blind."

(Listen to Ruth on the radio at 3 p.m. today on WPTF 680 AM's Bill LuMaye show.)

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