Speaking of Audism in a hospital I had endured back last February 2013, it is something that it cannot be cured. That doctor who asked me if I want a cochlear implant during my heart attack stage tried to lock me up in a cage like I need to act like hearing person. Any doctors in that day who believes in witch doctoring along with medical doctoring should not be wandering outside on her own. During my two days there, I thrived and survived, I was one of those patients of their “think-hearing” mode through doctors’ orders that they should be on endangered list. Even though I had an interpreter during the whole time, it is one thing for a doctor to subscribe to believability as a sort of death wish to make Deaf patients act and think like hearing. It is something else that that doctor tried to make me suffer for my own delusions.
Cochlear implant is a mad fraud. The truth is that what has distinguished this smooth talking and congenial tool is that the cochlear implant companies have a plan to make Deaf patients even children suffer the worst of all. Their plan is to make a dream and Deaf children getting their nightmares. It leads with a lie—namely to control money by spending money and false myths—the companies’ plan is clearly about lack of insecurity, not only that but making Deaf people suffer and work longer before receiving curtailed benefits, threatening their lives not to act like Deaf person anymore instead to invest more into “hearing” mode. That doctor opened my floodgates to understand and protect future Deaf children to the rapacious cochlear implant companies to feed the sharks with money to make profit.
Are those cochlear implant companies too busy to challenge the truth and also too fearful of trying to defend their lies and plutocratic values to the likes of their own theories? The cochlear implant companies also sets up complicated relations between belonging and alienation, identity and identification, subjectivation, and subjectification inside the hospitals. Deaf people’s everyday lives are articulated by and with culture. It needs to investigate how Deaf people are empowered and disempowered by the particular structures and forces that organize their everyday lives in many ways, and how their lives are also articulated to and is strongly influenced by economic, social, cultural and course, political power. Audism is at best to describe the mood there.
Perhaps the single greatest camera technique occurs at the culmination of each episode. Reversing the famed Hitchcock’s God’s Eye Shot, the camera shoots from low to high, pulling slowly up and away from the characters so that a panorama of the entire street, then the entire city, can be seen. As the street becomes visible, the viewer sees a larger area of devastation and some kind of infestation. The camera pulls away further, suggesting a view of human live as very small. If the God’s Eye Shot represents as unseen worldly omnipotent vantage point, then the inverse of this shot suggest something more sinister. The camera angle suggests a godless state, spiritual hopelessness, and no omnipresence to suggest hope for the future.
Comfort and complacency juxtaposes with poverty, myth and survival. I was placed in a hospital, emerging from a heart attack, to face a new apocalyptic reality if I receive cochlear implant. The same hospital I stayed at, it was supposed to be a place for health and healing, is now a repository for genocide to wipe Deaf people out. Society no longer responds to the needs of its members. The hospital, like society is now deserted. The only signs of “life” emerge from a desperately quarantined room with an ominous warning on the door: “DO not open! Deaf person inside!”—I watched in disbelief and fear as the door heaves forward, opening slightly. I am not a child anymore!
Did I get a chance to emerge from the freedom accompanied by an unearthly cacophony of calling moans of the doctors? My experience had been physically and metaphorically allowed me to close my eyes to the realities of horrors in civil society. Now, in a frail human state of emotional disorientation, and physical weakness from heart attack, I refuse to become an unwitting candidate in a living nightmare for cochlear implant. I stay with Deaf identity now and forever. I shall die Deaf. I rather pick heart attack over forcing to get a cochlear implant anytime. Now this is my second time I suffered heart attack. Most recent: November 1st, 2013. This time, they did not ask me if I wanted a cochlear implant. Smart move!
-JT
Copyright © 2014 Jason Tozier
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...And the Truth Shall Set You Free. 