Human Life – …And the Truth Shall Set You Free.

I would like to express something off my mind for couple of minutes. For the last couple of weeks, I’ve received ugly postings about me from my own Deaf community. I am aware that I had been dealing with hate to make sure I disappear off the Mother planet. I come to understand the dangers of hate mongers than ever. Times I would be warned not to write about my experience as a returning citizen. This could not be further from the truth. If you have hard time reading the print in the picture on the left, I apologize for sloppy marker.

The questions I wrote down: Do we believe that youth who make horrible mistakes deserve second chances? Do we believe youth can develop character beyond their crimes?

I believe in resistance and challenge against hate, as a means of survival and hope. I did not create hate in the first place. You did. For 21 years, there are people had been threatening me and put me in human exile. That sucks because I had been working hard to change my life around. I refuse to live in someone else’s shadow.

For the haters out there, please understand this—TAUNTS just does not work. I do not need shame and disrespect, shows that hate STILL kills’ people and corrupt systems. However, I’ve reached the underlying reasons for the resistance and I believe in second chances. Sadly, due to institutional and societal barriers, once I entered back into community, there were challenges of employment, housing, and help for support and I’ve faced hardships where I had to deal with mental and physical abuses for telling truth.

Gandhi writes,

Many people, especially, ignorant people, want to punish you for speaking the truth, for being correct, for being you. Never apologize for being correct, or being years ahead of your time. If you’re right and you know it, speak your mind. Even if you are a minority of one, the truth is still there.”

My journey as Deaf returning citizen as indirectly described, has been carried around with the educational champions of the Sociology world I fell in love with, and found my Deafhood identity. The hardships are claimed. Deaf Studies are claimed. It is a new birth: the “origin” of my stories. All the hard work of building self-confidence, all the bulwark in the face of hate that is often subtle, yet no less compassion, than hate in the community. I remind myself to live constantly in George Orwell’s “Journalism is printing what someone else does not want printed. Everything else is public relations.”

When I see this photo the other day, I see it as a metaphor for the intellectual decline of American people to understand stories.

Hate is virtually deserted, devoid of human life; surrounded millions of old souls, the stories will be unthinkable. Is hate an unforgiving society? Does that mean it also allows deficit thinking to build more fear? Even a single story of a Deaf returning citizen can change the world. Will we accept the fact that hate is a painstakingly back-up human error? Are Deaf returning citizens even part of Deaf Studies?

I just wanted you to know that I stand strong. Sure, I can be hard on myself for my imperfections and mistakes even my failures and I am aware of the haters who are obsessed with me as a Deaf returning citizen and try to pull my life down. I’m tired of crab theory. I am tired of rumor-mongers. The last words of this blog when I would like to say that I deal with hate a lot, I do not hide my face under a mask or nothing. Here is the thing: More and more people criticize it, but most likely shift the blame for who is responsible.

Last October 2015, I was invited to give a lecture for CSUN Social Justice conference sponsored by Deaf Studies Association, I felt very good what I’ve contributed back to the community. That matters the most to me.

I continue to complete my ultimate goals. I will not be intimidated. Let’s remind ourselves this month of October is National Bullying Prevention Month.

-JT

This text may be freely copied in its entirely only, including this copyright message.

Alexander Graham Bell in Disguise by Nancy Rourke

Once a baby is born Deaf, he or she is taken totally under the control of the State. It is rather sad to admit that the State is completely oblivious of what being Deaf entails. It often rely on an unjustified illusion that Deaf baby can be made to hear through such high technologies as amplification and cochlear implants (CI).

Alexander Graham Bell Association of the Deaf (AGBAD) has spearheaded a method called Oralism to educate Deaf children to listen only to the sounds, degrading their lives. It has reaffirmed an ideology that Deaf children are in danger of using sign language. AGBAD urges that Deaf children be cochlear implanted, learn how to listen and speak.

Deaf children are just like everybody else. However, AGBAD wants to have them habilitated and rehabilitated through CI or amplification. That is their punishment for being Deaf, their insult to a homogenous society where everyone else can hear and speak. However, Deaf children are normal people who should not be stigmatized by horrible discrimination against their being Deaf.

AGBAD and its sister organization, Oberkotter Foundation are really conservative groups that promote values of Oralism and fight against the Deaf community. Thank you, AGBAD and Oberkotter for attempting to destroy the Deaf. Everything that we the Deaf have worked so hard for do shed our blood for our own history since the 1880 Milan Resolution banning sign language everywhere. We the Deaf must remember that Alexander Graham Bell never attended the Milan Congress in 1880 but sent a telegraph message to let the Congress know that he supported the cardinal rule of using only “speech and listening.”

Those people who are loyal to AGBAD are less evolving than those who are innovative. Modern civilization is built upon cooperation. Those that believe in the philosophy of Oralism, should be rejected and be locked outside the city gates and left to fend for themselves with the other wild animals. Alexander Graham Bell of the United States of America, Samuel Heinicke of Germany, Thomas Braidwood of United Kingdom, Pedro Ponce de Leon of Spain—their vision is to “de-Christianize” the Deaf, to make Oralism more common and available. In the United States, AGB hated anyone who are Deaf because they are successful signing people.

AGBAD does not want to take any chance with the validity of ASL. It is practicing the humility—the segregation—by monitoring communities to make sure Deaf people stop existing. Also, AGBAD does not allow Deaf people to have all of the constitutional rights and freedom. Instead, AGBAD makes sure Deaf people are without credentials, be degraded, and have limited constitutional rights and freedom.

Talking about the constitutional rights and freedom, ask now: Why does the U.S. government allow the abuse by abridging the principles of equality under the law from the Deaf? The U.S. government has decided that democratic values for the Deaf are not applied anyway. They had created two class-like societies: One for normal (hearing) citizens and the other for degraded citizens known as the Deaf as well as people with disabilities. Why? Are Deaf people fallible. They fail. Paul Ricoeur writes: “What is meant by calling man fallible? Essentially this: that the possibility of moral evil is inherent in man’s constitution.” When will this anti-democractic, oppressive crap going to stop?

Deaf people are everywhere in our society. They may be eating next to you, they may be shopping next to you, and they may be standing behind you in the check out lines. But fact is that you should be more worried about those who hate the Deaf because they are the ones who will harm Deaf people’s lives. In a book called Looking Back: A Reader on the History of Deaf Communities and their Sign Languages written by Renate Fischer and Harlan Lane, in page 512, “…..because we, the hearing scholars, must by no means assume the role of evaluating from the outside the achievement or non-achievement of Deaf careers and leave the Deaf alone to overcome oralism. Instead, we intend to contribute to this goal, at the very least by not reproducing socially caused inequality under the banner of science…”

Using this “banner of science,” being Deaf is a biological condition—a very much part of human life. Support the repeal of AGBAD. AGBAD is idealistic and thoughtless. It was wrong of Alexander Graham Bell to attempt to exterminate a Deaf person which was both thoughtless and unthinkable. Finally, and, you, AGBAD, are a miserable bedpan emptier who wishes the State as very sad as you are.

-JT

This text may be freely copied in its entirely only, including this copyright message.

Reference:

Fischer, Renate and Lane, Harlan. Looking Back: A Reader on the History of Deaf Communities and their Sign Languages.

Tag: Human Life

A Sad “State” of Being Deaf