Volta Bureau – …And the Truth Shall Set You Free.

ASL: The Meaning of ‘Justice for All’

July 17, 2017July 17, 2017 The Last HiccupLeave a comment

There are millions of visitors who visit District of Columbia, the nation’s capital. What I did not realize that today on this date, July 16, 1790 when DC was picked as nation’s capital while the first American president, George Washington signed The Residence Act that made a city.

There are indeed still consequences in today’s Deaf community. The fracturing of the social media takes a larger scope and understands that it is not OK to attack Deaf community.

District of Columbia’s motto: Justia Omnibus, which means Justice for All. When President Abraham Lincoln signed the bill to create higher education for Deaf people: National Deaf Mute College (Now Gallaudet University) in Washington, DC; Deaf people have the right to carry rightful justice that they have every aspect of human right to use sign language for communication, knowledge, and information. That was the main topic. Simple.

The creation of the university was built by many stories you cannot imagine how much it meant to them. DC was only 74 years old city when Gallaudet University founded. As Alexander Graham Bell was 17 years old living in Scotland that time, did you ever think what would AGBell think about that day, 8th April, 1864? Did his father or grandfather tell him the news? Did AGBell have a plan to destroy “all for justice” policy and erase sign language in favor for oralism? Was it the plan to preserve Bell family’s name and legacy to destroy an American motto at what highest cost possibly be?

Exactly 100 years after the founding of nation’s capital, AGBell had the nerve to set up American Association to Promote the Teaching of Speech to the Deaf now known as Volta Bureau, AGBell’s headquarters in the same city. AGBell challenged Edward Miner Gallaudet on the sacred ground of Gallaudet University that can be found in a book, Never the Twain Shall Meet by Richard Winefield. Help ourselves understand. The American democracy is not easily misunderstood.

Justia Omnibus, is an American motto, which means NO ONE CAN TAKE THAT AWAY FROM DEAF PEOPLE in 1880 and the next 100 years today. AGBell do not have the authority to prioritize and revoke all for justice in Deaf community’s favor of ASL.

The District of Columbia gave Deaf people a life to grow and teaches that justice for all to overcome Audism at Gallaudet University. Why cannot the Board of Trustees [BoTs] flesh out all the connections between AGBell’s headquarters and the university for dirty money? Make it ASL/Deaf-centered, ASL/Deaf-controlled, and ASL/Deaf-oriented. What’s wrong with that? Today, we will stand by human rights to use ASL—Justice for All! Justia Omnibus! ASL wins!

Happy birthday, DC! ASL JUSTICE FOR ALL.

-JT

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A Sad “State” of Being Deaf

June 20, 2013September 18, 2017 The Last HiccupLeave a comment

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

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Reference:

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

Mirror, Who Is The Fairest?

June 16, 2013February 12, 2018 The Last Hiccup4 Comments

The Deaf Mind by Nancy Rourke

Attention, attention, attention! It is time for us, Deaf people to urge people to wind down the war on Oralism and renew efforts to close down the Volta Bureau (Alexander Graham Bell Headquarters) for Oralism abuse. We demand: Democracy. AGB Association today is still responsible for their actions, the same people who works there had not been hold accountable with no crime on Deaf people’s land that is very much part of their American lives.

Oralism has been a harsh judgement for the last 130+ years, why is there not a law representing Deaf people in a major discrimination case against AGB Association and its friends? They had been bullying Deaf people knowing that we do not have the resources to fight back and tell our stories. There were no runaway train for fraud–they never proved that in our stories. Oralism is an institution roundly disliked by all who participate in it. Deaf children hate it for healthy reason because it makes their children unhappy.

Here is something Deaf people to stop that Alexander Graham Bell Association had been “grading Oralism” is part of teachers’ never-ending homework. Is Oralism part of body and mind? I will admit that it is difficult to write about body and mind. I was fascinated by Nancy Rourke’s painting called The Deaf Mind.

I had never really understood what DEAF means in my own body and mind until I met couple of Deaf scholars at age of 35, I am not talking about Deafhood. I am talking about DEAF people before my own eyes. I begun to embrace the state of being Deaf by seeing myself in Deaf people. That is a sociological term called generalized other, a term coined by George Herbert Mead whom I had studied in college, the word itself means the general notion that a person has of the common expectations that other have about actions and thoughts within a particular society. I would not write this now if I did not meet Deaf people. I learned so much through them. Their stories becomes my stories. Why suffer humiliation as the rejection of state of being Deaf?

Seeing human beings people in a human aspect, according to a French philosopher Jean Paul Sartre, means seeing them as free to make decisions bearing on their lives. Seeing a human being as a thing, as a “body” is seeing hum as unfree. When a person denies his ability to be free (what Sartre calls “having bad faith”), we see him as behaving according to a tag attached to him from the outside.

I needed to focus on my own Deaf body in good faith. A Greek philosopher named Epicurus that he made a strong statement that a self is not a soul, but a body that requires to see in the mirror. Hence the word, generalized other. See in other mirrors. You cannot escape from mirrors. It is important to use them and at the same time, the invisible spirit within your body will become self-talkative where it leads to a human brain which becomes the mind.

If the Deaf Mind does not exist, then it would not the human story that it is. There is a great void at the center of each Deaf people’s lives. A human detachment that eats us up. We need to connect with other Deaf people rather than detaching from them because the void is us is still alive and festering somewhere madness could be very real outcome. There is also this sort of void in the center of Deaf life. Why do we detach? The detachment either good or bad which is survival. The Deaf Mind has to objectify their stories outside of themselves to be able to make stories. I coast on waves of silence and can relay the most gripping messages using only my hands.

It is possible to use the Deaf Mind to describe inner turmoil in a descendent of the rites of passage taken by Deaf people in Deaf community, rites in which Deaf children had to use venture alone into the wilderness in order for their metamorphosis. The storm in Deaf mind is the first of many metaphors that the Deaf person itself needs to unravel around the people in order to relate coming of age and information in a tangible way. The difference in that the elements that Deaf Mind itself suffers through wage against their soul, attempting to destroy themselves with the completeness of their nature: State of Being Deaf. It is always there, hidden away somewhere in your mind.

Once the storm in Deaf mind is over, you will not remember how you made it through, how you managed to survive. You will not be even be sure, in fact, whether the storm is really over. but one thing is certain that when you come out of storm, you will not be the same person who walked in. That is what the storm is all about.

True to its description, the storm leaves the Deaf Mind changed and that person finds a purpose truer than any that person held before. Likening the Deaf Mind itself to the storm, tossing and turning the Deaf person repeatedly in their self and psyche, the same sentiment holds inescapably true. It is important to preserve the Deaf Mind in every aspect. I am all for generalized other in learning and seeing myself into Deaf people. After all, it is about the journey of Deafhood.

-JT

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