I had been a Portland Trail Blazers fan all my life–I had met Clyde Drexler, Buck Williams, Kevin Duckworth, and Jerome Kersey. They had been in NBA Finals 1990 and 1992. The team would come to my mother’s workplace called Monte Carlo on 10th and Belmont in Portland, Oregon–a very popular Italian restaurant. Drexler, Kersey, and Williams were happy partygoers there and would order two large of pepperoni pizza to bring home for the weekend. I remember my mother telling me some stories about it. Oh, by the way, my mother was pretty damn good waitress earning a lot of tips!

I met Drexler and Williams in person when they were doing autographs for cards and books at Jantzen Beach Mall and found out that Drexler knew bit of American Sign Language (ASL), yes, he did! In 1991, my father took me and my brother to a car-racing event called Budweiser/G.I. Joe’s 200 where Michael Andretti won the event and my brother ran into Kevin Duckworth and I ran into Jerome Kersey and they allowed us to take pictures with them with our old polaroid camera. (it is in my old photo box somewhere) We both were very thrilled to seize the moment! So, I thought I would be lifetime loyal to the Trail Blazers until now.

After finding out that there was a newspaper by the name of Willamette Week, a local and weekly newspaper called Give! Give Central, it is an annual effort to raise funds for local nonprofits and one of the nonprofits: Tucker-Maxon Oral School (TMOS). It was one of 136 “great” non-profits that need your help this holiday season. Every year, they said in their words, “we make it easy for you to make a donation–and a connection–to groups in your community. What you give today will help make Portland a better place all year long”

Portland Trail Blazers has agreed to help TMOS to do some fund-raising at one of those games earlier this year (November 13, 2014) and I was pretty heartbroken to see that. Please look at this link and see what TMOS had typed, “Teach deaf children to listen and talk, with an intentional focus on spoken language, and emotional intelligence for all of our students” and raised $3661.00 so far. (https://giveguide.org/#!/section:nonprofits,category:education)

Why did I choose to write this post? Because TMOS made my life a living hell when I was only two years old child and stayed there for a short stint of two years. TMOS stole my father’s dream car and caused one of many reasons my then parents end up getting a divorce through TMOS’s lies and corruption. FUCK YOU, TMOS! The school philosophy that does not promote sign language and that made my education accessibility harder. My response for Willamette Week: You have no idea how TMOS was a big threat to Deaf children and they have a corrupt perversion of the mind, a complete heartless mind.

Not only that but TMOS also have the habit of shunning evil actions against Deaf children’s language and culture and they are not ashamed to be more cowardly and mean-spirited than “runaway” millionaires. Wretch! They are going so blind, not seeing what road such a lack of necessities leads to and they have not read, they have not written many things of this kind to insult Deaf children. How often they arrogantly boasted that they are fairly confident with regard to insult at least.

President Abraham Lincoln, the first Patron of Gallaudet University said, “it is a sin to be silent when it is your duty to protest” and I hereby protest the source of all insults, and mean-spiritedness and cowardice is not evil, but rather the fear of the evil. TMOS must be stopped and shunned. For the first time, I hereby protest the source of Portland Trail Blazers for helping TMOS out and thank you, Willamette Week for the idiocy and bred when emotion conquers intellect. It is important to have a balance of both, sure, but at the end of the tunnel, it is more important to think about Deaf children rationally than to gossip about the wonders of listening and talking.

These emotional, intellectual, and spiritual realities are what so much of contemporary life seems scrupulously designed to insulate Deaf children from abuses. Again, the failure of educating them ASL does not invoke the casting of spells: it involves the breaking of spells, especially those spells that may hold their language and culture in captive. Deaf children would be viewed as “radical”, in that it addresses the roots of their experience, and it is subversive, in that its intention is to overturn and banish illusion–illiteracy in educational system. Personal, social, and cultural rationalizations concerning Deaf children and the world around them are the spells that have to be broken.

I am very much saddened with Trail Blazers’ organization for failing their extensive research what ASL would have benefit Deaf children 100%. It is like someone is wearing a T-shirt “I can’t breathe” at a NBA game. Is it fair for Deaf children not to sign at all?  I decided not to support Portland Trail Blazers anymore.

Thank you for deliberating my concerns.

Read my previous blog posts about TMOS:

https://audismnegatsurdi.com/2013/06/13/oralism-stole-my-fathers-baby/

https://audismnegatsurdi.com/2014/01/11/tucker-maxon-oral-school-pitfall-a-cult-of-ignorance/

https://audismnegatsurdi.com/2014/02/03/tucker-maxon-oral-school-teachers-are-blameless/

-JT

Copyright © Jason Tozier

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