Halloween parties are the worst events for deaf people to go to, in my opinion. I’m not discounting the family and holiday gatherings, where a majority of deaf people–those with hearing relatives– suffer from being left out of the conversation at the table. It sucks when family members leave you out of the loop whether it’s intentional or not.

In general, “What?” is used a lot with hearing people, screaming that word at each other over the din of loud bass music at parties. But logistically speaking, Halloween soirées in particular take the cake for deaf people. Think about the communication difficulties. People wearing costumes and masks that either cover or obscure important parts of their bodies–namely their faces and hands–that has us deaf people saying, “What’s that you said?”

One of my deaf friends recently went to a Halloween party with a Mexican theme. “Ah, nobody had masks there so that was nice,” she noted. That helped ease her communication difficulties she may have otherwise encountered. At one bash, a hearing friend was wearing vampire teeth that distorted his lip movements. I got exasperated from attempting to lipread and told him to go bleed someone else dry, conversation-wise. I must have been very good company, because he took them off when I explained to him about the problem I had with his fanged dentures.

Another deaf friend donned a gorilla costume, and he was the hit of the party. Literally. When he tried to sign, the gorilla hands were so huge that people around him were fearful of getting slapped in the face from his hand movements. Becoming frustrated, he took off the hands. It was funny to see skinny white hands flying against the backdrop of this huge black gorilla costume. Another friend attempted to write back and forth with me using pen and paper, but was done in by her artificial and elaborate long nails she put on to complement her costume. She couldn’t hold a pen to save her life.

The atmosphere at these parties is usually dim, like a seedy bar out in the middle of nowhere. You already know how difficult it is to communicate with anyone without adequate lightening. And don’t get me started on the cigarette smoke! But the worst offender at these parties? The manmade fog. People don’t realize how irritating that is to certain body orifices. When the “fog” particles crept into my eyeballs and nostrils, both body parts started to itch like something fierce. I was squinting, rubbing, and sneezing. Not a pretty sight to behold.

While I’m battling the ill effects of the fog, I heard noises emitting from the person standing next to me. I then realized, “Oh crap, she’s talking to me!” At this point, I was NOT in the mood to strike up a conversation. Putting up my hands to indicate I wasn’t interested, I darted out of there in search for some fresh air to clear the senses– or sinuses. The fog effectively dismantled my tools (eyes) to engage in a friendly dialogue with that person.

To steal a line from Jay-Z, a popular rap artist, it’s a Hard Knock Life for a deaf person at these Halloween parties! In particular…

It’s the hard knock life for us
It’s the hard knock life for us
Instead of treated we get tricked
Instead of kisses we get kicked

How you deal with these parties can be like the human body’s response to stress: fight or flight. You can either fight your way to a good time or take flight to the nearest corner and be a wallflower. You can seize the bull by the horns, or be that bull in a china shop, breaking dishes left and right. Deaf people laugh it off among themselves because the difficulties aren’t that serious, especially for Mr. Gorilla. My hearing friends learned to either adapt to my communication needs at these parties, or save the conversation for later and join me in nodding our heads to the music beat. Halloween is about tricks or treats. The trick is to know how to have people treat you right.

Ladybugs and germs, in that vein,- *slurp*- I hope you have a boo-ti-ful evening tonight!

(Day of the Dead: To each land, its customs)

Most of the time, I think living in two places has its advantages. Sure, it is incredibly frustrating to want to put your hands on a book right this very minute and realize that it is 1,892.25 miles away (according to Mapquest), but the benefits of experiencing two vastly different locales often outweigh the disadvantages. One of the perks of living in two places is exposure to different cultural communities and traditions. Yet every so often, like my books, I’m not in the place I want to be.

Don’t get me wrong — there are plenty of things to like about Washington DC, but there are times when I long to be at home in my adobe casita in Barelas, an historic neighborhood nestled next to the Rio Grande in Albuquerque, New Mexico. This is one of those times. My favorite holiday of the year is coming up, and Día de los Muertos just isn’t the same in Washington DC.

Día de los Muertos Altar National Hispanic Culture Center October 28, 2007
Photo copyright Venerable Photography

In case you haven’t spent much time near the US/Mexican border, or are not fortunate enough to live near a community that makes a point of celebrating this holiday, Día de los Muertos is a holiday of Mexican origin that honors the dead. The holiday stretches over two days; on November 1st the day is dedicated to remembering deceased children, los angelitos; November 2nd is reserved for remembering adults who have died. Contrary to what you might think, Día de los Muertos is not a solemn holiday marked by tears and somber eulogies; instead, it is a holiday filled with colorful flowers and colorful memories, good cheer and good food (For more detailed information about Día de los Muertos, check out this website of an American/Mexican joint celebration of the holiday in El Paso, Texas, USA and Ciudad de Juárez, Chihuahua, Mexico).

There are private and public holiday rituals. My family always starts by setting up an altar in our home. First, we carefully select photographs of those we want to remember and honor, looking for pictures that show a person’s essence — whether it is a shy smile or a candid snapshot capturing a favorite pastime. We surround these pictures with traditional orange-yellow marigolds, papel picado candles, pan de muertos, calaveras or sugar skulls (I prefer the kind with names written on the forehead), a glass or two of water, and bottles of vino y cerveza. Then we include special items that once belonged to the deceased. These can vary wildly — from a first edition of Paul Lawrence Dunbar poems to a hunk of schist dotted with quartz collected in the Santa Ana Mountains of California to a dog collar with tags.

Día de los Muertos Altar honoring Diego Rivera at National Hispanic Culture Center October 28, 2007
Copyright Venerable Photography

This will be my 4th Día de los Muertos in Washington DC, and I’m still trying to figure out where to get the best pan de muertos in DC, and which panaderías will personalize sugar skulls with names piped in icing, and where to buy armfuls of locally grown marigolds without breaking my budget (Reader tips welcome!). But I have figured out where to spend some of my Día de los Muertos time this year, and that is at the Cultural Institute of Mexico’s annual opening of the Altar de Muertos (Altar of the Dead) on November 2 at 7 pm in Northwest DC. This year’s altar will be dedicated to famed Mexican artist Frida Kahlo, commemorating the 100th anniversary of her birth in 1907.

Did I say there are disadvantages to living in two places? Let me correct that. There’s something serendipitous about the public celebrations of the holiday in my two cities, starting last weekend with the National Hispanic Culture Center in Albuquerque whose Día de los Muertos altar was dedicated to the master muralist Diego Rivera and wrapping up the holiday by honoring the contributions of Rivera’s artist wife Frida Kahlo at the Cultural Institute of Mexico in Washington DC. We should all be so lucky.

Disclaimer: Although Teresa Blankmeyer Burke has many institutional and other affiliations, the contents of this blog represent Teresa’s personal views only, and are not associated with any of her professional affiliations.

By Aaron Rose

This summer the AGBell Talk for a Lifetime Summer Conference took place in Arlington, Virginia (the same one where the AGBell protests took place). The focus was current research and applications in the field of neurodevelopment and its relationship to auditory processing and language development. Keynote speakers connected their work to spoken language, auditory brain development, and readiness to learn in infants as well as older children. The goal was to create strategies for “managing demanding caseloads“. As we all know, AGBell’s campaign “Hear from the Start: Talk for a Lifetime” implies that spoken language is the overall goal for deaf and hard of hearing children. Surprisingly, one of the founders of the Audio-Verbal Therapy (AVT) approach shared, in front of many auditory-verbal therapists, professionals, and parents, that visual input is just as important as auditory input in language development and literacy for deaf and hard of hearing children. Party-line AVT proponents chose to ignore these assertions while thanking the keynote speakers for validating the AVT approach.

A Summary of the Keynote Presentations

Dr. Anu Sharma, Ph.D. and CCC-A at University of Colorado at Boulder and University of Texas at Dallas, gave a presentation titled “Central auditory development and plasticity in infants and children with hearing aids and cochlear implants.” A significant finding in her research was that children implanted under ages 3-4 years had better speech perception and language skills compared to children implanted at a later age (6 years or older). She drove home the point that the earlier the implantation, the better off children are in regards to speech perception and language.

Dr. Janet Werker is the research director of the Infant Studies Centre in the Department of Psychology at the University of British Columbia, which focuses on speech and language processing. Her presentation, “Infant Speech Perception Sets the Stage for Language Acquisition,” focused on the way children’s perception of spoken language plays a role in the development of their home language. According to Dr. Werker, language has many properties such as speech sounds, rhythm, sound sequences, and syllable structure (all aspects of phonology). What sets apart languages lies in the difference in those properties. In order to retrieve and process words from print, it’s necessary to understand these properties and connect them to their meaning. Through previous research Dr. Werker found that infants also gain information from what she describes as speech-reading (reading lip movement and facial expressions) along with auditory input. Therefore, infants are just as sensitive to visual information as they are to the information contained within signed languages.

Dr. Werker also touched on another research that included auditory and visual speech discrimination in babies and adults. She contrasted speech across different languages, soundless phonetic units in ASL and the lip movements that accompanied specific speech sounds. Werker said that native speakers of a certain language would be prone to discriminate that language better than non-native speakers (the same way natural lip-readers can pick up more of what a person says without hearing them). She claims that babies “prefer native language(s) from birth.” Werker also concluded that listening facilitates word learning through awareness of the structure of native languages, i.e the foundations. In processing language, children can use this ability to perceive these building blocks. By diagnosing the ability to comprehend the foundations of language, one could possibly estimate future language delay in children.

The third keynote presentation was given by Dr. Maria Mody, who works in the Developmental Language and Reading Research Laboratory at the Antinoula A. Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging as the principal investigator. The lab carries out research regarding reading, language and attention disorders, with little or no focus on deaf and hard of hearing children. In her presentation “Neurobiological Correlates of the Language-Literacy Connection in Normal and Atypical Development,” she describes the connection between phonological processing abilities and reading skills. According to Dr. Mody, at the heart of reading disabilities is a lack of understanding in the phonological component of language. Phonological processing is the ability to break down words for speaking and listening and making the connection speech (or spoken language) to written language. She describes the relationship between language acquisition and reading development as being dependent on early exposure and full appreciation of the phonological characteristics of one’s language (phonemes being the simplest units of language without meaning, but not necessarily tied to sound).

Dr. Mody said that 10-15% of children have issues with reading despite typical intelligence, motivation, education, lack of neurological issues, and normal sensory perceptions. She describes a common predicament in hearing children, Developmental Dyslexia, as being caused by a breakdown in recognition of words, decoding, and spelling. Characteristics of Dyslexia include speech perception in demanding situations (i.e. noisy environments), phonological awareness, verbal memory, and lexical retrieval (pulling from your brain’s dictionary) (Author’s note: These symptoms can also be found in deaf and hard of hearing children who have issues with language and literacy). In her research, Dr. Mody examined the brain’s structure and its functions to determine which areas are important in reading and auditory discrimination. During her presentation, she discussed the results of two studies that focused on auditory discrimination of phonologically similar vs. dissimilar words (i.e bat/pat vs. rat/pat). One study focused on discrimination of isolated words while the other included sentence context (Authors note: A deaf person, whether through hearing aids, CIs, or lip reading, could have difficulty telling the difference between bat and pat if one didn’t make a reference to baseball or the mammal, hence the need to understand how context plays a role in hearing people with reading issues). Dr. Mody concluded her presentation by stressing the importance of early and appropriate intervention based on critical understanding of reading disorders as the key to successful remediation.

Seeds of Change

As expected, the contributions of American Sign Language (ASL) and Cued Speech to the reading abilities of deaf and hard of hearing people were not discussed at length, if at all. Given the nature of the conference organizers, Auditory-Verbal proponents used the findings to bolster arguments in favor of their approach. Yet, something else, unexpected, took place.

Pamela Beck, former president of the National Cued Speech Association, who attended the conference and wrote a report, published in the fall 2007 newsletter of the On Cue, found that the majority who attended the conference were not professionals, but parents who had many questions that were left unanswered. She explained that in discussion groups and panels, parents would often ask about bilingualism, multiple disabilities, and insufficient progress in older children, only to be ignored.

The most surprising turn of events at the conference came when Ellen A. Rhoades, an AVT leader, bilateral CI user, allegedly is “the world’s only totally deaf certified auditory verbal therapist”, and a member of the conference program committee said that AV therapists were wrong to “cover their mouths and insist on a unisensory approach,” citing research that indicated the need for a multi-sensory approach. This statement was a bold departure from current trends in AVT.

While a number of individuals stood outside the hotel protesting the AGBell organization, the true seeds for change had been planted inside the conference. These seeds could lead to a significant shift in the field of deaf education, especially pertaining to the need for visual input for deaf and hard of hearing children. ASL is a visual language in its own right and Cued Speech is an avenue towards visualizing spoken language at the phonemic level. Could both modes of communication be used as the standard dual approach to ensure that deaf and hard of hearing children get the auditory and visual input they need to increase their chances for success in literacy and language? Only time will tell whether AGBell will change its practices, and incorporate ASL and Cued Speech in its methods.

Aaron Rose, a recent graduate of North Carolina State University in Raleigh, NC, just relocated to Oakbrook Terrace in the suburbs of Chicago, Illinois. He is enjoying his time off before returning to school for studies in Education of the Deaf and Hard of Hearing. Aaron spends his free time searching for places to surf on Lake Michigan, reading intellectual narratives, and putting together challenging puzzles. Aaron, a native cuer, is also eagerly improving his signing skills slowly, but surely.

DC police cars are now outfitted with new toys called “Rumblers”, which literally shake the ground with low-frequency sound waves, to get your attention (in addition to the car’s light and sound sirens) when they’re headed your way. According to The Washington Post in, “With New Device, Police Shake, Rattle and Roll“, 49 DC police cars currently sport the latest device. “It vibrates everything,” said DC police officer Lou Schneider. The DC police department claims that it can be felt from about 200 feet away. They also believe:

…that it will be helpful for the deaf and hard-of-hearing community. ‘Vibrating sirens is an interesting idea, and it could benefit all drivers, not just deaf drivers,’ agreed Erin Casler, a spokeswoman for Gallaudet University.

I applaud this effort to get drivers to pay better attention to speeding police cars, but more importantly I am encouraged by the DC police department’s effort to consider the possible benefits to the deaf and hard of hearing community. So the next time you feel that shaking feeling in your car while in DC, swivel your head around because it may be the police. If it is, better hope that Sheriff John Brown isn’t coming for you!

I’m writing this at the witching hour, and thinking about pixy sticks. You don’t see them much in the stores out here these days (either that, or I’m looking in the wrong places!). I’m also thinking about caramel apples, mulled cider, and popcorn (but not so much popcorn balls…).

Yep, it’s that time of year again. Time to figure out what creative costume to wear, what decorations to put out, and what candy to salivate over prior to Halloween night. I do miss trick-or-treating, but the Halloween parties and events I attend these days make up for that, I think. *grin*

One of my favorite things to do this time of year is watch scary movies. My favorites happen to be ghost stories; I confess to owning the DVD of “The Sixth Sense.” Although the plot twist is old news to me, I never tire of watching the various ghosts in the film, and wondering about them.

A lot of other people seem to have an affinity for ghosts, or at least some experience with them that’s not limited to the silver screen. Over the weekend on CNN, it was announced that a third of people believe in ghosts. According to an AP poll,

…nearly one out of four, 23 percent, say they’ve actually seen a ghost or felt its presence…

The AP itself had the better title, though (in my opinion): That’s the Spirit: Belief in Ghosts High. The AP poll found that

About one out of five people, 19 percent, say they accept the existence of spells or witchcraft. Nearly half, 48 percent, believe in extrasensory perception, or ESP.

Obviously they didn’t poll a lot of Harry Potter fans, or that 19 percent might just be a wee bit higher.

I’m not sure I believe in ghosts, but at the same time, I’m not sure I don’t believe in them. Sometimes there are strange things that happen, and you just never know… the same is true for ESP. I think there’s a lot that science can explain, but there’s also quite a few things in life that there is no answer for.

What do you think? Had any personal experiences? If not, know of any good ghost stories, whether on film or in a book, collection of short stories, or some other artistic or literary form?

In the meantime, stay in high spirits and have some spirited fun this October 31!

Uninvited. Again.

I’m getting tired of being uninvited.

The first time this happened was when I was an eager M.A. graduate student, new to my academic discipline and flush with success from my first experience of filing an ADA complaint with the US Department of Justice. A professor in my department told me about a local academic conference in my field and suggested I attend. I filled out my application, popped it into the mail, and waited to hear from the conference organizers about arranging accommodations for communication access.

After a few weeks, I started to get concerned. I hadn’t heard anything from the conference organizers, so I followed up by e-mail. Their response was decidedly mixed. First, I was told that since I was not a member of the organization, they would not provide accomodations. When I pointed out that I had paid the member fees along with my registration fees, they told me they’d get back to me. Less than a week later, I was told that I could not attend the conference. The letter was signed by a graduate student who was helping to organize the conference.

I figured this was a mistake. Maybe the graduate student did not understand the legal implications of what he had done by “uninviting” me, but surely the people in charge (whoever they were) would understand that this was not appropriate on a number of levels. Wouldn’t a professional organization using the word “ethics” in its name and identifying itself as focused on an inclusive creed of compassion think carefully about the moral implications of telling a graduate student with a disability that she was not welcome? (Trust me, this organization was not aware of the Deaf/disability debate, and would have framed this entirely in terms of disability). Less important, from my view, was the fact that they were likely breaking the law.

I was a bit wiser this time around, so I contacted the professor who had told me about the conference in the first place. He got in touch with the organization and received the same response: I was uninvited. Fortunately for me, he also disagreed with their decision. To make a long story short, we went to Protection and Advocacy, they dealt with the conference organizers, and I was “re-invited”, this time with accommodations. It took precious time away from my studies and irreplaceable time away from my family, but I believed it was worth it because I wanted to be a philosopher, and participating in conferences was part of what philosophers did.

Fast forward a decade or so to Autumn 2007. This time, I was part of a mixed group of scholars (deaf, hearing and hard of hearing) invited to submit papers for a conference taking place outside of the U.S. Since this would be the first time the organization would present a panel with analysis by scholars working in deaf and disability studies, both the panelists and the organization were excited about the possibility of having a rich discussion period following our presentations. Perhaps we could even build future collaborative efforts! We scholars wrote and submitted our papers, had them accepted, and then started dealing with the logistics and costs of having several deaf people attend who were relying on different signed languages at an academic conference. At the end of the day, the sponsoring organization just didn’t have the funds for full accommodations. We were politely “uninvited”.

The story of being uninvited plays out in many other ways. A hard of hearing colleague working in a large organization mentioned to me that she had been “uninvited” recently – it seems that a person putting on an event had wanted to include her in an all day meeting because of her professional expertise, but did not want to deal with accommodations. The disturbing part of this is that the hard of hearing person had been working for this company for more than 20 years and this was the first time this had occurred – long after the employee had proven her worth and loyalty to the company.

There’s also the story of the hard of hearing mother, who was uninvited from the school carpool after one of the other parents found out about her hearing loss. And the deaf professor who was invited to give a presentation at a prestigious liberal arts college, and then upon arrival, was told that she could not stay in campus lodging facilities because she was a danger to herself. In this case, she was still invited to give her talk, just uninvited (at midnight) to stay at her arranged lodgings and left to scramble for a place to stay in an unfamiliar city with no TTY or internet access available to her.

Other issues lurk in the background. Is there a moral obligation to include people who want to participate – even if they cost more money? If so, who should pay? Is there a limit to how much money is reasonable? Granted, the ADA mentions undue hardship for small businesses. As a granddaughter of small business owners, I know how tough it is for small businesses to survive and thrive, and I certainly don’t want small businesses going bankrupt providing access. On the other hand (to paraphrase a famous colloquialism) accepting that “my right to access ends where it hits your pocketbook” seems to equate justice with how much money is available. Something about that assumption just sticks in my craw.

I could go on, but you get my point: don’t invite us to the party if you think you might uninvite us later on.

Disclaimer: Although Teresa Blankmeyer Burke has many institutional and other affiliations, the contents of this blog represent Teresa’s personal views only, and are not associated with any of her professional affiliations.

Last week we announced a new feature for DeafDC.com — video comments. However, we were bummed to learn that Mac users had trouble posting their comments. Well…good news! We now have instructions to make Mac video comments possible for people who have iSight. And it worked with several of our Mac buddies. Yay!

Mac users, here you go:

Why doesn’t the Flash recorder work with my Mac’s iSight webcam?

This is a problem with iSight/Flash and is not specific to Riffly’s recorder. Click the “Add Webcam Comment” link to bring up the Riffly recorder and then click “Allow”. Hold down the Control key and click with the mouse in the Flash recorder window. This will bring up the Flash menu, select “Settings…”. Then click on the camera tab at the bottom of that settings window. Select “USB Video Class Video” from the drop down list and it should begin to work. Press “record” to begin recording your video comment and then press “Stop” when you are done. The application will automatically add the URL for your video to the comment window.

Obviously we can’t post screenshots because we don’t have a Mac (we know, we know, they’re real cool!). Please give it a whirl and let us know if it works with your Mac/iSight, post your video comment below!

We felt that we needed a break from the usual Bethesda DPHH in Maryland which has been going on for…too long. So we looked all around the metro Maryland area. Silver Spring? Been there. Rockville Town Center? The new bars are small. College Park? Been there too. So it came down to…Wheaton.

The Washington Post has dubbed the city a “little Adams Morgan,” but that’s probably a stretch. Wheaton is up-and coming, and they recently added a new nightclub to bolster its reputation, the Ocean Drive Nightclub & Lounge where we will host the November 2nd DPHH!

Ocean Drive has a Miami motif, a large wooden dance floor, a 13-by-10-foot projection screen, and some awesome salsa music. There will be a DJ that night spinning bachata, merengue, and reggae. Let’s spice up the dance floor, come prepared to mueve el culito til 3 a.m.!

DPHHers who decide to travel by metro will have an added adventure, they will take the longest single-span escalator in the Western Hemisphere! At 230 feet, the trip takes two minutes and 45 seconds, enough time to cook, eat, and wash the dishes. However, if you decide to forgo the adventure, there’s free parking on the public lots around the area.

There will be a $10 cover charge. DPHHers must be 21 and dressed to impress. For those who noticed, yep, we’re breaking from the traditional MD/DC/VA/DC sequence, the next two months (December and January) will be in DC.

Ocean Drive Nightclub & Lounge
11230 Grandview Ave.
Wheaton, MD 20902

A couple of weeks ago, it was in the news that China celebrated the one year countdown to the Beijing 2008 Olympics. I looked at my wife and told her: “I can’t wait!” Then I caught myself.

Do I really want to root for the USA team as they compete in a country where reports and allegations of human rights violations have occurred? I’m stuck between a rock and a hard place. On one hand, I want to root for my country, but not at the expense of rooting for the Olympics in a country with a track record of oppressing human rights.

Just over the past several decades, China has done the following:

• Enacted religious repression of Uighurs in Xinjiang.
• Demolished buildings or private dwellings owned by people who were living in the areas where the government wanted to build public structures.
• Secretly hid behind “closed doors” people suffering from HIV/AIDS.
• Unlawfully occupied Tibet since 1950.
• Negligence of orphans in state orphanages.
• Repression of democracy movements (Tiananmen Square).
• Refused to publicize how many executions the government does every year. (Data speculates nearly 10,000 people are executed for minor crimes)

This doesn’t include what China has done over the recent years as they prepare for the Olympics. Amnesty International reports that in its efforts to “clean up,” China has actually gotten worse.

Beijing police have used China’s hosting of the Games as a pretext to extend abusive detention practices such as RTL and ‘Enforced Drug Rehabilitation’, in the name of ‘cleaning up’ the city.

“Efforts to ‘clean up’ the city ahead of the Games through extending detention without trial raise serious questions about the commitment Chinese officials have made to improve their human rights record at the awarding of the Games to China,” said Catherine Baber, Head of the Asia-Pacific Programme at Amnesty International.

The International Olympic Committee had hoped that by awarding the Games to China, China would step up their efforts to improve human rights. Jacques Rogge, the IOC chairman, said in an interview in 2002 that “We [the IOC] are convinced that the Olympic Games will improve human rights in China.”

Amnesty International has asked China to remove the death penalty, make sure all forms of detention are in accordance to international human rights laws and standards, allow for human rights defenders to continue their peaceful activities, and end unwarranted censorship of the Internet. (PDF media kit can be viewed here.)

Not to go off tangent too much here, but while we’re on the topic of China and their human rights violations, we need to take a good look at our own. We have:

• denied rights to detainees at Guantanamo Bay.
• ignored the Tutsis in the Rwanda genocide in 1994.
• not pushed for other countries to enforce an embargo of Sudan due to the Darfur genocide.

Another even more shocking thing is that many people don’t know that eugenics laws in place in the 1920’s prohibiting interracial marriage became models for the policies of the Third Reich and Germany’s “racial hygienists.”

So, where’s the line here? Where do I, as a citizen and a fan of sporting events, find a common ground in supporting my country during the Olympics at a place known for its human rights violations when we have our own?

I can’t get back the eight and a half minutes of my life that was used watching this stupid video. The video suggested that the American Sign Language (ASL) “I Love You” (ILY) hand sign was the work of the occult, along with the sign for either the Texas Longhorns or “Rock On!” at rock/heavy metal music concerts. I explained to several people who also saw the video the difference between the signs–the ILY sign requires an outward thumb, while the Texas Longhorns/”Rock On!” signs do not. The ubiquitous gesture came from the fingerspelling of the “i”, “l”, and “y” being combined at once on one hand. Here is an example from a screenshot of a frame in the video:

I’ve heard these types of accusations before, but this video went overboard in lumping the ILY sign in the same group as the “Rock On” and Texas Longhorns hand symbols. But you can’t tell the people who made the video that. According to them:

The Horned Hand or “Cornuto” represents the Devil, Satan, the Goat (the bathomet). It is a sign of recognition between those that are in the occult.

Then the video showed images of famous and political people sporting the ILY sign as well as the other signs. The apparent conclusion? The ILY sign is EVIL!!! BAD!!!! You’re buying a one-way ticket to that fiery place down there…and I’m not talking about the tropics. Being funny, a friend started singing the lyrics to “If Loving You Is Wrong, I Don’t Want To Be Right.”

Now I must confess that I get tired of people, upon finding out that I’m deaf, flashing me the ILY sign to show some kind of solidarity about the deaf people. Nice gesture of goodwill, but it doesn’t say a damned thing! How can you declare your love (friendship-wise or otherwise) if you don’t even know me? But despite being über-sick of the ILY sign, I strongly think it doesn’t purport any sinister ties to the occult. C’mon…it’s just an expression with good, and sometimes misguided, intentions. This is the same line of thinking people use in accusing deaf people of being in gangs, just because some of the signs are similar to the gang signs, as illustrated here.

The video even went as far as attempting to analyze the hidden satanic meaning of barcodes. Craziness bordering on paranoia, I tell ya. But please, leave ASL out of it, mmmkay?