AG Bell protest: Thinking back, looking ahead

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Blog reports from the AG Bell conference in Arlington, Va. brought back old memories. The video freeze-frame that captured the hotel manager’s intensity as she confronted people, the look of contempt in her face … I’ve seen it all before. I don’t know this woman, but I know her type. They’ve always been around us and probably always will. They find it easier to bully us rather than take the time to communicate with us.

I’ve heard conflicting reports, including one that said the police OK’d flyer distribution in the hotel. But the hotel manager was really keen on making sure those flyers wouldn’t be seen, going so far as to snatch them away from the distributors, including an 8-year-old deaf girl. Brianna DiGi suffered a scratch to her hand in the brief altercation and is left with her memories as a young deaf activist. Who knows, years from now she may laugh about the incident from her office as president of the NAD.

But the whole situation is pretty sad. Personally, I don’t see how anyone can argue against the idea of deaf babies and children learning sign language. To sum it all up – duh. Unfortunately it is human nature for hearing parents to want their children to be like them. They will only reluctantly agree to “give them up” – how they see it, not me – to the deaf community. And learn to sign?  Perish the thought.

 The medical community is going to do what they’re going to do, and they don’t care if a few hundred deaf people show up to protest a conference every year. AG Bell has the money to go after the doctors and sway the parents’ opinion right from the start. NAD doesn’t seem to make the same kind of effort. In general, people don’t have a very positive or accurate impression of us … they think we can all lipread effortlessly (or at least should be able to if we weren’t so lazy) and they only hear or think about us when we’re protesting something.

Scientists will continue to do their thing with barely a thought to our concerns. It’s funny, the recent protest made me think of researchers in a lab where suddenly the subjects come to life and the scientists don’t know what to do – in all their years of study, they’ve never learned to communicate with those they study – or they’ve resisted the idea altogether.

Ultimately, there’s not a whole lot we can do about it. We can certainly express our opinions, especially in regard to the urgent need for young deaf people to be exposed to sign language, but in the end it is probably a losing battle. With all the varied research presently underway or still to come, it is hard to believe in 100 years people will still need to live with deafness.

In the future, there may well be a very small core group of people who have had deafness in their families for generations and who maintain the “deaf way of life.” Maybe this small future generation of deaf people will find a way to make money off of their situation – perhaps banding together and become a tourist attraction somewhere in the middle of the country, Marvin Miller’s vision of Laurent finally coming to fruition.

I don’t say this to make anyone mad, but there is no harm in thinking into the future. In the long run, we face the fact that society will never understand why anyone would want to live with such a “debilitating disability” if they didn’t have to. It’s an uphill battle to explain that one to anyone, now or in the future.

Of course, if we’re thinking about the future, in 100 years we’ll all be dead and the icecaps will be melted and world will be flooded and Al Gore will be saying he told us so.

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