All right, let me get this straight. First the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) told Oscar Pistorius that he was ineligible for the 2008 Summer Olympics… not because he’s a double amputee without a chance in hell of beating, much less competing against, “able-bodied” runners, but because he has an unfair advantage over them (the IAAF claimed, however, that their decision was not directed at Pistorius personally). Pistorius appealed to the Court of Arbitration for Sport, and the Court ruled that the IAAF had not provided enough evidence that Pistorius’ Cheetah Flex Foot carbon fibre transtibial artificial limbs (or prostheses) gave him an advantage over able-bodied athletes.

So Pistorius, jubilant, competed recently in the paralympic Dutch Open and won the 100 and 400 meter races last Sunday. He came in at 47.92 in the 400 but needs to be under 45.55 to qualify for Beijing. He plans to participate in what FOX Sports calls an “able-bodied race” on July 2nd in Milan, Italy, another in Rome on July 11th, and another one in Lucerne, Switzerland five days later.

So far so good, right? Pistorius is at last making some headway toward qualifying for the Olympics. I personally hope that he not only qualifies, but eventually brings home the gold.

But let’s backtrack a few laps.

Pistorius’ prostheses, his J-shaped Cheetah blades, are apparently a wicked pair of running limbs. I’m neither an amputee nor a prosthetics engineer, so I can’t tell you much about the capabilities of a good prosthetic limb. And what’s more, I know even less about running in general (which is to say that I generally run only when chased). So please don’t expect me to weigh in heavily on either topic.

But I find it utterly fascinating that the “disabled” label used to describe Pistorius has remained constant through a mind-boggling variety of “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” situations–an issue that is probably overlooked because so much of the controversy surrounding Pistorius’ prostheses focuses on whether or not the blades are making him a little bit “too able.”

In almost every news article I have read on the guy, Pistorius is set up as a disabled person/runner. This is done directly using thorough (if not quite exhaustive) descriptions of his legs and through the use of the label “disabled” itself. If he is not immediately labeled “disabled” in one of the opening paragraphs, then it is noted (for example, in the FOX Sports story mentioned above) that he’s going to compete against “able-bodied” athletes, a statement that implies Pistorius is not a member of this group.

Now this alone isn’t what gets to me. After all, the whole thing isn’t that much different from cochlear implants. Put the implant on, and you can supposedly hear better. But take it off, and you’re the same deaf, hard-of-hearing, hearing-impaired, and/or disabled person (pick the label you like best) that you were before. The only difference is a question of degree. I’ve not yet heard of an implant model that enables a deaf or hard-of-hearing person to hear better than a fully hearing person.

Such is not the case, apparently, with Pistorius. Remember that it is being argued that he has an advantage. Maybe his prostheses make him lighter, give him more spring, more tilt, more whirl, whatever. I don’t know. The point is that some people seem to think that Pistorius’ prostheses makes him faster than flesh or blood legs and feet would make him (though again the Court of Arbitration for Sport has not yet seen compelling evidence for that claim).

No matter. My question here is if a prosthetic or otherwise “assistive” device propels a person over the line that divides “equal to” and “better than,” then why is that person still “disabled” even when he has the device on?

Let me reframe that. I’m profoundly deaf. Some people consider my deafness a disability (I don’t personally, but that’s beside the point). Fine. It’s arguable that the whole thrust behind the invention all of these “assistive” devices is the fact the world sees me as disabled in the first place—if it didn’t, why put so much effort into inventing something to “assist” me?

And so far as that goes, I can even see why a lot of people would still consider me to be disabled even with the implant on. After all, considering the technological capabilities of the cochlear implants currently on the market (I suppose this goes double for digital hearing aids), if I put the implant on, I probably wouldn’t now be able to hear “perfectly” or even “better than perfectly.” I might be able to hear “somewhat better” (though maybe not—the effectiveness of the implant varies from individual to individual, but that’s also beside the point), but “perfectly” or even “better than perfectly” does not enter the equation. At least not yet.

Keep that in mind: “At least not yet.” Because if assistive devices were all in a race against each other, the current capabilities of Pistorius’ prostheses are way ahead of the current capabilities of cochlear implants. Whether the argument that Pistorius has an advantage is correct or not, it will be a while before anyone can make that argument about an implant user. Pistorius’ prostheses are not making him “equal to” everyone else in the race (something implants still can’t do). They’re supposedly making him “better than” than everyone else.

And yet he’s still disabled. Do you notice how nobody has let go of that yet? With the prostheses on, with them off… with an advantage, without one… it’s all green eggs and ham in the media. Pistorius remains “disabled,” and everybody else remains “able-bodied.” Think about it. Why the need to hold onto this psychology? Why the need to continue to label someone disabled if he has now apparently been rendered better at something than an able-bodied person could ever hope to be?

The world at large seems to be making three simultaneous and contradictory statements. Statement One: “You are disabled without your prostheses.” Statement Two: “So long as your prostheses are not the equals of (take note of the phrase “the equals of”) flesh and blood limbs, you are also disabled, even when you have the prostheses on.” And finally, Statement Three: “When you make use of prostheses that are not only the equals of flesh and blood limbs, but in fact advantageous over flesh and blood limbs, you are nonetheless still disabled.” To see what kind of disturbing implications this type of thinking has in store for deaf people, replace “prostheses” with “cochlear implants” and “flesh and blood limbs” with “normal hearing ability.”

Someone will have to explain the justification of Statement Three, because I don’t get it. It seems to me that as the capabilities of assistive devices advance, the only disability that will really be left will be the inability to see beyond the device itself.

I have a friend who used to be a mid-level manager of a bank. During a restructuring phase (not of her design), she was ordered to fire somebody–a good, hardworking guy. He hadn’t done anything wrong or failed to perform his duties in any way. He was just the low head on the totem pole. It was the first time my friend had ever done anything like this. The night before she had to fire him, she became so nervous she went into her bathroom and threw up. The next day, twenty minutes before the close of business on Friday (five minutes prior to the time she was supposed to call him into her office to fire him), she went into the bathroom and threw up again.

Now while I feel bad both for my friend and for the guy she fired (who might even today still be looking for work—you never know), I’m honestly glad that there are still people left in the world who react in this manner, and puke at the prospect of having to tell somebody that today is his last day. If this type of person didn’t exist, the world would soon be overrun by people who propose amendments to amendments of amendments.

I should pause here to tell you that I have nothing against parliamentary procedure per se. In truth, I don’t really know all that much about it. I have never read a parliamentarian’s guidebook. I’ve never chaired a meeting. But I’ve sat in on many, both in organizations I worked for and in organizations I didn’t. I know how to propose things, second things, discuss things, and vote. I’ve skated through my entire career on these four skills alone. I used to think that’s all I would need. After all, the point of any workplace meeting—especially a meeting in full parliamentary swing— should at its core be about improving conditions by solving problems, right? If you solve problems you create a better product, and if you create a better product you attract more customers, who in turn create more business. These truths would seem to apply equally to workplaces where the “product” is a college education, a better video phone, or a matching set of stainless steel mouse traps. The more business you have, the less “restructuring” you have to do that involves going into to your bathroom and throwing up.

Which is why I don’t understand amendments to amendments of amendments. Whenever they’re made, everyone in the meeting has usually been sitting there for two hours already. The issue on the floor has been there for years in one form or another—this is simply its latest incarnation. Somebody doesn’t agree with the wording of the original proposal, so—bam!—the original friendly amendment is produced, the wording of which in turn inevitably generates further disagreement! Then the wording of this amendment is discussed for a while. If the disagreement can’t be resolved, presto! There is a motion to amend the amendment!

It should be pointed out that both the amendment and the amendment to the amendment are considered “friendly” at this point only because a mere three straight hours of meeting time have now elapsed. I have never seen a meeting entering its fourth hour in which an amendment to an amendment of an amendment was still preceded by that adjective. Rather, “friendly” is replaced by tittering.

Titter, just in case you weren’t aware of this offhand, means “restrained, nervous laughter” (I looked it up). There are many reasons, I think, for why people titter. Four straight hours of doing anything, even if the activity is pleasant for the first hour or two, runs the risk of wearing down on the nerves. I also argue that most people do not consider the act of amending amendments (not once but twice) to be pleasant. Additional strain is generated by the fact that once an amendment of an amendment has been proposed for amendment, nobody knows what the hell anybody else is talking about anymore. Nonetheless a vote must be taken or the issue ends up getting tabled, where it becomes old business to be resolved—or not—in the next meeting. Thus, titter.

Well, far be it for me to complain without proposing some sort of method for overcoming these obstacles to effective workplace governance. Here’s what I think should be done: One, take the amount of customers you have at any given point in time, paint that number on a big sign, and hang it up in the room where you’re having the meeting. Two, count the number of employees you currently have and put that number on another sign (hanging it up next to the first). Three, look at your business projections and come up with a simple mathematical formula showing how the former number affects the latter. If the latter number now has to be reduced because the former was never all that high to begin with (in part because the organization, after wasting its time crafting amendments to amendments of amendments, never actually got around to solving problems), then four, make a declaration at the end of the meeting that the organization is now officially in tough times. Any declaration of this sort should in turn require a scan of the notes of the last five years’ worth of meeting minutes in order to ascertain (and make a list of) exactly who proposed an amendment to an amendment of an amendment at any given point in time. If possible, such a list should also include the names of those who tittered after this phrase was uttered.

And finally, five: require each person whose name is on that list to become a member of the Firing Committee. These individuals should be charged with the task of informing everyone who will have to be “let go” of this year that they’re in fact going to be let go. Also charge each member on this committee with the additional task of following these ex-employees home to take down the further minutes of any subsequent family meetings that will no doubt occur once they (the people who got fired) tell their spouses. These minutes should be as complete as possible, and include a thorough analysis of any nonverbal cues that might be expressed (at the dinner table that night, for example, as the two spouses in question now try to hide the worst of their feelings from their young children).

Make them do all of this, and provide them with no bathrooms to throw up in.

Titter ought to vanish from workplace meetings fairly quickly after that, I suspect. Amendments to amendments of amendments, likewise, should also rapidly turn into rational, coherent discussion from there on out. But if that doesn’t happen, consideration of some new workplace policies might be warranted. People who turn what is supposed to be a problem-solving session into a friggin’ farce in the name of parliamentary procedure (or at least what they think is parliamentary procedure) should be shown the door at the outset, if not the backdoor of the workplace… then at the very least the door to that particular meeting room.

You might be tempted to think that because I’m from Wisconsin I have no real sense of objectivity when it comes to Brett Favre and the Green Bay Packers. But you’d be wrong. To say that Favre is a football god is by no means any type of exaggeration. One of his rocket balls could drive nails through oak—no, through rock—from a hundred yards out. I’ve seen him get slammed into the frozen tundra so hard the impact carved out a miniature canyon. In fact I’m pretty sure I’ve seen him stagger (while entirely unconscious) the last ten steps to the bench after a particularly ugly hit. How he ever made it I’ll never know, but give him a couple of plays to recover and he’d be right back out on the field again. He never missed a start in over two hundred and fifty regular season games. That’s over sixteen years of professional football, of dragging himself out to the huddle no matter what body part got smashed up this time. The guy is my age, for God’s sake—right around thirty-eight—and I shudder daily at the thought of climbing three flights of stairs just to get to my office.

With that in mind, you’d think I could forgive him for retiring.

And I can… I guess. Reluctantly. It’s not easy. You have to understand. Brett Favre is crazy, albeit a different kind of crazy now than he was when he first started. When he was younger he was completely nuts. He’d throw into double and even triple coverage without breaking a sweat. I’ve seen him win games with Hail Mary passes that bounced off of the helmets of the defenders and into the hands of our guys. Feats such as that are how he earned the nickname “The Gunslinger.” Half of the time you couldn’t tell whether a reception was a miraculous accident or simply a case of him getting bored with the ease of throwing directly to the receivers. The other half of the time you didn’t care. You were jumping up and down in living rooms and bars all across Wisconsin with your friends—beer splashing out of the pitchers, nachos flying in all directions—because in the fourth quarter he finally stepped on the gas. I can remember an entire decade in which it seemed that the Pack was always trailing in the last five minutes of the game. But no matter. Ten point leads, twenty point leads… Favre could demolish them all. Five minutes was an eternity to that guy. It was an eternity to you, too, and your lungs. If you had to hold your breath any longer, they’d explode.

The thing I’m going to miss most about Brett Favre is his touchdown victory sprint. In the seconds that follow a score he will literally drop thirty years before your very eyes, and go from being thirty-eight to being eight again. It’s like watching a colt gallop around a corral, only this colt will jubilantly tackle his own receivers in the midst of the excitement. It’s almost more fun to watch him do the touchdown sprint than it is to watch him play.

But so what, you’re probably thinking. All NFL quarterbacks are like that. You don’t understand. It’s different with Favre. It’s different because if you saw the Packers-Raiders game back in December ’03, then you’ve seen the dark mirror of that jubilant energy. You understand what he’s been through.

I remember the game because Favre’s father had just died the day before. Favre was already in California, and decided to stay with his teammates and play the game. He said his dad would have wanted him to. If you read the newspapers the next day you would have seen the cold statistics… final score 41-7 in favor of the Packers. Favre threw for very nearly four hundred yards and four touchdown passes, accumulating a near perfect passer rating by halftime. He completed twenty-two of thirty attempts by the end of the game, squarely hitting twelve different receivers.

But the statistics don’t really do justice to the enormity of what actually happened out there. Favre was devastating in the opening half of that game. His precision, however, came at a price. In a way you could only understand that game if you had been watching Favre for years; the colt, the gunslinger, the football god. Favre in the ‘90s was full speed ahead and damn the torpedoes. With every Hail Mary pass he threw, he also threw the heart and the hope of every Wisconsinite watching up in the air along with the ball. He had us praying on a play-by-play basis. We loved him because he forced us to believe not only in him but also in our team and probably even in God again. Even if he was stoppable as a human being, and even often as a flesh and blood quarterback, you knew that no opposing team would ever make him quit trying to win—nothing would crush that resolute gung-ho energy.

In Oakland he was still crazy, but he was a grim sort of crazy. He still threw into double coverage, but this time you didn’t need to pray that he’d connect. And what’s more, you knew it immediately. That night he was unstoppable as a human being and as a flesh and blood quarterback. This is my opinion, and I could be wrong, but I don’t think he could bear to be human just then. His mind was nowhere else but on the ball and where he had to throw it—not on his wife’s battle with breast cancer, not on his recovery from painkiller addiction and a drinking problem, and probably not even on his father. If he let himself think about anything else he would have cracked. Thus he focused all of his enormous energy on becoming the Brett Favre we prayed for every time he threw an interception in dozens of games past: a machine of accuracy.

But as I said, he paid for it. He aged years during that game, and he was never quite the same from there on out. He never got that total focus completely back, and he never got his former wildness completely back. He was just as magical as he ever had been, and he commanded just as much hope and faith in Wisconsin as ever before. He was still “our” gunslinger, just as much as Green Bay has always been “our” team. But somehow, something was different. And it wasn’t long after that game that he began flirting more seriously with the idea of retirement.

I am going to miss Brett Favre. He wasn’t just a football player. He wasn’t just Green Bay’s quarterback. He is beyond legendary. He is beyond even awe.

To me, Brett Favre is football.

There’s a double meaning in that title. Watch for it.

I’m writing this for a friend who is having a hard time making a major life decision because she’s afraid. I understand. All of us to an extent have to worry about what other people will think of us—whether we blog or not, whether we take a stand on something or not, or even whether we stay in our current positions of employment or not. Everything is political in this community now. Maybe everything always has been.

I spent the first two years of my career working in a signing environment, but eventually I moved and started working in an elementary school that happened to house an oral program for deaf students. Laura*, the hearing woman who interviewed me and the overall supervisor of the program, said she wanted more deaf people working in the school because both of the Lead Teachers there were hearing.

Now back in 1995 I still wasn’t really all that into the politics of our community. I had always talked—even after I learned to sign. When I was informed that I wasn’t supposed to sign in that particular school, I was fine with it. It was, after all, an oral program. If I had a problem with what was being asked of me, I could have simply requested to be placed in a different school, and that would have been the end of it.

But I didn’t care, as I said. I wanted to work with deaf people. Oral deaf children are deaf people. I had total confidence in my ability to speak clearly and make myself understood to those kids. I had a bit less confidence in my ability to pick up on what they might say to me, but so what? Name one job in which you as a deaf person must interact with either hearing or other deaf people who speak where that particular challenge isn’t going to be a challenge. You have to eat, and in order to eat you need a paycheck, so how many options do you really have?

Anyway, I remember arriving for my first day of work just as the school busses were dropping the kids off that morning. A young woman came up to me and asked me if I was Chris and I said yes. Her name was Michelle and she was one of the assistants who worked for the program. She welcomed me and introduced me to another woman—April—the Lead Teacher I was scheduled to work with that day.

April said something that I didn’t catch, but she also wasn’t facing me fully, so that wasn’t surprising. She and Michelle exchanged a few words and then April turned and walked through the front doors of the school. She didn’t look angry, she didn’t stomp away or anything, and to tell you the truth I had no idea at the time that something was wrong. But something indeed already was. About three weeks later, after Michelle and I had gotten to know each other a bit better and were having a beer after work one Friday (Michelle could sign, by the way), she told me that April wasn’t too happy about having me around.

By now I already suspected this. I saw a lot of things go on in that classroom that I’m not going to get into here, because if I did that you might be tempted to attribute the rising tension between April and myself to those particular incidents. But they had nothing to do with what Michelle signed next:

“Do you remember when you first met her? On your first day, when she and I were talking right before she turned around and walked away from us both?”

I nodded.

“She said, ‘I question Laura’s decision to hire a deaf man to this position.’ And then she went inside and called Laura to complain.”

This remains a personal record for me to this day. Workplace politics are inevitable and unavoidable. Hence the title of this story—You Can’t Hide. But I have never been able to re-accomplish the impressive feat of irritating someone (who had never heard of me before, mind you) within two minutes of meeting that person. Well wait, that’s not precisely true. I’ve irritated quite a few Blockbuster and Starbucks clerks in my day by telling them I’m deaf. But April already knew that I was deaf. So that makes her somewhat unique.

“What did she have to complain about?” I asked.

“Don’t let her bug you,” Michelle said. “She’s always like this.”

“But what’s the problem?”

Michelle hesitated for a bit. Then: “…You’re a deaf person who doesn’t lip read well working in an oral program.”

Now that’s scary for a lot of reasons. It scares me that a part of me can see where April is coming from—after all, the last thing an oral program needs is yet another communication barrier, and in a way (in April’s view, anyway) that was me. It’s scary because to accept that argument—not just understand it but really accept it—is to shut down entire career avenues for myself, and therefore starve, or go on SSI, or work on some soul-killing job where I rarely even see other people. After all, where should it all stop? If I want to work for the Washington Post as a reporter, for example, shouldn’t I consider their needs as well? Why should it only be the Washington Post that has to consider mine? Why do they deserve to have to put up with a communication barrier and run the risk of possibly ending up with a story that contains wrong information because I didn’t lip read something accurately (or even with no story at all)? Or if I wanted to become a doctor or a counselor for non-signing people… How is the communication barrier that my weak lip reading skills pose for others some sort of a boon on those jobs? In fact how are my weak lip reading skills not an even worse risk?

It’s also scary to live your life sensing that on some level certain people, especially people like April, expect you to be conscious of this. They expect you to justify for them their inability, their unwillingness, to find a way around those barriers. Preferably without ever having to talk to you at all. In fact they think you’re somewhat selfish—no, unrealistic—to even expect them to look. You make them uncomfortable with these unrealistic expectations, and the bottom line is that they want you to stay away. If you won’t stay away, if they have to put up with you, then they don’t want you to complain or stand up for yourself or even seek to better yourself. You’ve already used up your stress-production allotment around them, you see. You exist.

Unfortunately you can’t hide from these attitudes, my friend. There are people all around us (again, hearing and deaf alike) who wholeheartedly buy into these types of messages even though they will vehemently deny it… or may not even be aware of it. That’s probably the scariest thing of all—to acknowledge that because we live in their midst, many of us will never feel welcome no matter where we go.

I’m telling you this not to frighten you further, but to give you hope. Which do you think is more likely, given the fact that April had a problem with me within two minutes of meeting me: I did something wrong, or she had a pre-existing set of attitudes and beliefs that had nothing to do with me? If you think that the latter answer is the correct one, then try to list all of the things that you can possibly do that will resolve somebody else’s pre-existing problematic attitudes. Especially when you can’t read his mind or know anything about his past experiences or current perceptions.

You probably won’t be able to list anything. And what’s more, you shouldn’t try. Not “shouldn’t have to” (though that’s true also). Shouldn’t, period. Because if other peoples’ prejudice or fear or irritation (or even their innocent inability to figure out what to do about us at any given moment) becomes the driving force that decides the quality of our lives, then our lives will become miserable, isolated, frustrated, lonely durations of existence in which we realize nothing of our true potential nor explore any of the paths that we otherwise would have freely taken.

So you can’t hide. That’s the double meaning. “You can’t hide,” meaning you can’t escape any of this; and you can’t hide, meaning you have to fight this. You have to fight to make things better, if only just by making the decisions you need to make without worrying overtly about what anybody else might do to you or say about you once you’ve made them. Because if you don’t deserve to feel unfulfilled and constantly deprived, then you can’t escape the conclusion that nobody else does, either. Thus refusing to live in fear isn’t just a choice.

If you truly want others to fulfill their potential as well, it’s a responsibility.

*All names have been changed.

I’m a regular blogger here on Deaf DC.com, but I have been away from the blogsphere for the better part of a month now because my son was born just a few weeks ago. He’s a full-time job in and of himself–if you have children of your own I’m sure you can understand what I’m talking about.

I mention my son here only because his birth factors into something that I want to say to the both of you as two current leaders of the Alexander Graham Bell Association for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing. The first blog that I read on your recent letter to Pepsico was written by my fellow DeafDC.com blogger Shane Feldman. He didn’t print your entire letter, though he did provide a link to your website. To be honest with you, I didn’t click on the link in order to read the original letter—nor did I comment on Shane Feldman’s post—because I was just too exhausted. To be clear, my exhaustion does not stem from my new role or responsibilities as a father. My exhaustion comes from having to deal with attitudes such as yours.

It appears that not so long ago Catherine Murphy, your Director of Communications, issued a memo to the Indiana AG Bell Chapter Leadership outlining how to deal with those who have been protesting against your organization as of late. This memo contains several planned “media messages.” I would like to draw your attention to three:

1) AG Bell recognizes there are many choices available to parents when their child is diagnosed with a hearing loss, including spoken language, sign language and total communication.2) AG Bell supports informed choice and serves as a resource for those parents who specifically choose spoken language education for their deaf or hard of hearing children.

There are no doubt many people who believe that the above three statements are true. I do not.

In his blog, Shane Feldman did not post the parts of your letter to Pepsico that read:

“Your advertisement perpetuates a common myth that all people who are deaf can only communicate using sign language and are, therefore, isolated from the rest of society… We would also like to remind you that with the amount of money Pepsi will spend on just one 60 second spot to air during the Super Bowl, you could help an untold number of families obtain hearing aids and other professional services that are costly and in many cases not covered by medical insurance.”

These statements are analyzed elsewhere (by fellow blogger Mishka Zena). In fact it wasn’t until I read what she had to say that I finally clicked on Shane Feldman’s link and read your letter in its entirety. Upon reading it, even though I am still as exhausted as I was before I sat down at my computer, even though I’d much rather be spending this time with my son, and even though the Deaf blogsphere is by now replete with outraged postings regarding your recent letter to Pepsico, I have nonetheless decided to stay at my computer and write my own response to you. Would you like to know why?

I am not entirely sure yet whether my son is hearing, deaf, or hard-of-hearing.

He failed his first hearing test at the hospital, you see, and even though the doctors reassured me and told me not to worry—that many newborns’ ears are still filled with fluids shortly after birth and therefore many of these newborns fail their initial hearing test… they’d test him again in the morning—I didn’t sleep that night.

I wasn’t worried about him “being deaf.” I’m deaf, after all, and I have proudly made my deafness into a central part of my identity. I was worried about him growing up deaf in this world. I was scared for him to grow up deaf in our current educational landscape. I was scared of fourth grade reading levels. I was frightened for him to grow up facing the same rejection and outright hostility I faced at times—not only from the “Hearing World” but also from other Deaf, deaf, and hard-of-hearing people. I was frightened because I’ve spent my whole career hearing horror story after horror story from (or interacting with outright) parents who had to ceaselessly fight “the System” to get basic services, or parents who didn’t care enough to fight at all. I have always dreaded coming into contact with the latter group—but that doesn’t necessarily mean I’m ready to join ranks with the former as a parent myself.

I have a friend with two kids. He told me that the moment you hold your child in your hands for the first time after he or she is born, the psychological remnants of your old life will drop away; the life that you lived largely for yourself. You will truly realize that your world is bigger than just you. I’ll be honest. When I first held my son in my hands, all I could think about was how beautiful he was. I didn’t have that “moment” my friend spoke of until my son failed his first hearing test. After that it wasn’t a moment. A “moment” ends. What I feel: this disturbance, this lingering sense of fear and unease, still hasn’t gone away. I don’t think it ever will. And I think that one source of of these feelings is you. By that I do not only mean you two as individuals—Karen Youdelman and Alexander T. Graham—nor even through your representation the Alexander Graham Bell Association for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing.

I also mean you: people who recreate the world I grew up in, intentionally or not; a world that apparently neither understands Deaf people nor makes more than a superficial effort to embrace them (or American Sign Language). Now it’s one thing when you create that world around me. I have survived despite the unceasing interference of you in every step made, no matter how simple or positive, toward building a world where American Sign Language is truly considered by parents as a feasible communication option for their deaf children; a world in which they do not fear this language, or buy into the same “isolation” myths that you imply they (as members of “society”) believed from the very beginning, through no doing or undue influence of your own. I think you play a much bigger part in that myth’s perpetuation than you’re willing to accept or ever have been. I think this myth that ‘Hearing Society’ supposedly believes is actually your projection onto them. Without your influence they probably wouldn’t have otherwise known what to think about the impact of American Sign Language on the so-called “isolation” of deaf people.

I don’t know how I’m going to do it yet, but I swear this to you: I will not let the world I grew up in, the world you helped create, become the world my son grows up in.

Perhaps I will start by comparing your letter to Pepsico with the three statements made in the Indiana AG Bell Chapter Leadership memo, and sharing my analysis with anyone who cares to read it: To me, you are not an organization that recognizes that there are indeed “many” choices available to parents… including sign language. Your organization is not a mere “resource” for those parents who specifically choose spoken language for their deaf or hard of hearing children. You don’t just “simply support” them. Those terms imply that you are far more neutral than you are. And while I personally never seriously entertained the notion that your organization was anything but neutral, in my book, your letter shows me that I was right not to. I see your letter to Pepsico as a criticism against ASL-users (as well as those who support them or otherwise assist them in advancing awareness and appreciation of the language and of American Deaf Culture) that you need not have made. Pepsico is not the problem. You are.

My son passed his second hearing test, though we will have a follow-up hearing test soon just to be sure. No matter what we find out, you can bet that American Sign Language and English will continue to be the two primary languages used in our household. In fact, we will be a family because of American Sign Language. If my son is hearing, through ASL I will not be isolated from him, and he will not be isolated from me. If he is deaf, or becomes deaf, the result will be the same. American Sign Language will bring us together, just as ASL brings together—and always has brought together—countless souls in our society.

The day you find within yourselves room for this truth will be the day I’ll be less afraid for any deaf child growing up in this world.

In almost every blog I read these days about a deaf person standing up for himself, there will usually be at least one comment that looks something like this:

“Oh, grow up! Not everything is about audism! You can’t blame hearing people for not knowing how to react…”

This type of comment rarely varies with the story. The deaf author of the original blog might have assertively resolved a problem with an airline attendant, a pet store employee, or anyone else. Nonetheless this type of comment informs him in every case that he was wrong to do what he did. It also doesn’t matter what type of assertive action the deaf author actually took. Calmly talked to the guy? Oh grow up! Assertively expressed frustration by saying, “When you said that, I felt irritated”? Not everything is about audism!

Don’t you find that kind of response disturbing? I do. For one thing, it’s an expression of frustration in and of itself (indicating that the commenter can tolerate his own frustration but not anybody else’s). I also find it disturbing because I happen to agree with one part of it: indeed, not everything is about audism.

But so what? Plenty of things are about ignorance, and ignorance is bad enough. Many of us know all too well how it feels to put up with hearing people’s ignorance day after day. The hearing flight attendant didn’t know what to do with us; so now we’re a bit weary of flying. The hearing pet shop employee had no idea how to meet our communication needs, so now we’re on guard against the next clerk that might say something insensitive. We can let these things go, but if we don’t do so efficiently, an isolated incident can quickly feel like an unrelenting bombardment of ignorance. And ironically enough, this is when we’re most likely to respond with anger—not assertiveness.

Why should that be so?

Some people unfortunately believe that anger and assertiveness are the same thing, and furthermore, they’ve been trained to believe that anger itself is inherently bad (rather than a natural emotion). Thus they shy away from developing their own assertiveness skills—in much the same way that they shy away from expressing (or even allowing themselves to consciously feel) anger. But in the end that system cannot work, because anger is generated from stress. If a customer service rep hangs up on you during a relay call (thinking you’re a telemarketer), that causes stress. If the flight attendant wants to bump you up to first class because your original (and the only remaining) seat in the coach section is right next to the emergency hatch—how will he be able to open it if he can’t hear the instructions?—that causes stress. It causes stress even when you get a freebie out of the situation (a first class seat for the same amount of money as a coach seat, for example). You might argue: Who wouldn’t want to be bumped up to a first class seat from a coach seat? Good question. But how good will you keep feeling once you realize the airline attendant apparently didn’t think enough of you to hand over the laminated set of illustrated instructions that she was holding right there in her fingers?

Where do you think all of that stress goes? It adds up, and you’ve got to deal with that stuff. If you aren’t dealing with it, rest assured that it will someday deal with you—probably by giving you a heart attack. Stress doesn’t magically dissipate just because you’ve trained yourself to stuff it down and ignore it. Stress doesn’t acknowledge your dysfunctional belief that irritating events will somehow simply bounce off of you. You can’t cheat your way out of getting rid of the stress, either, not even through so-called “healthier” outlets. A hard game of racquetball won’t help you get over the way the ignorant hearing clerk at Blockbuster treated you last week because the racquetball isn’t the problem. The clerk has been clueless since you first met him a year ago, and he’ll still be clueless tomorrow. No matter how many times you smash the ball into the wall; in the back of your mind you’re going to wonder whether or not that clerk might have long since learned from the error of his ways if only you had said something to him!

What if all of your silence, all of your “good,” non-confrontational behavior in fact helped create a large part of your resentment toward the guy? Maybe that’s why we keep seeing these types of comments. Some people cannot handle their discomfort over watching other deaf people stand up themselves because it reminds them too much of all the responsibility they never took for their own lives. That’s why they need to emphasize so strongly that “not everything is about audism.” The criticism might be true, but nine times out of ten it’s also irrelevant. Thus it distracts others from the process of developing their own healthy boundaries, their own healthy techniques for resolving conflicts. And why should that surprise anyone?

If you don’t know how to assert yourself, distraction is probably the only coping skill you have.

We could do much to counteract the political paralysis in our community if we realized something once and for all: The “hearing world” in a very real sense does not exist.

Now before I get into this, I want to admit that I probably as much as anyone else am guilty of perpetuating the propaganda responsible for causing so many deaf people to believe that it does. When I talk about “Hearing America” being largely closed to deaf people, for example, I’m doing the same thing others are doing when they say that this world is “a hearing world.” I’m creating the image of overwhelming, crushing numbers, united against us in hostility.

For the sake of figures we can work with, let’s leave the 6.5 billion* people (yes, most of them hearing) currently vying for closet space on this smoggy globe of ours out of the argument and focus instead on just America. Because you can bet that when John Average from Somewhere, U.S.A. starts talking about “the hearing world,” he isn’t talking about illiterate Chinese peasants (illiterate in both printed English and Chinese, by the way) currently submerged up to their butt cracks in muddy rice paddies who have never owned or even seen a computer. He means people like himself: in possession of at least a high school diploma with a job, 2.5 kids, and a mortgage loan he probably now sincerely wishes he had never taken out. To him the world is “English-speaking” because that’s the language his paycheck is printed in.

All right, fair enough. Let’s pause here for a second to consider not only what “Hearing America” actually is, but also what it’s capable of doing at any given point in time. Say that the population of this country is currently 300 million, and of that number, 30 million are deaf or hard of hearing. That leaves 270 million hearing people for deaf people to contend with.

And you will contend with them. You will eventually someday have a job interview with a hearing employer, have your knee whacked by a hearing doctor, or try to order a cheeseburger without pickles from a hearing waiter who apparently equates deafness with mental retardation. These will be frustrating, maddening, oppressive, and humiliating experiences. They will collectively grind away at your soul, eroding you from within, increasing your sense of helplessness to improve your lot in life.

But you will speed that process along considerably by multiplying one isolated, hostile idiot by 270 million, because it is highly unlikely that you will face such a number at once. In fact it’s equally unlikely that you will ever face such a number at all.

Other writers have already made the point that, just as 30 million deaf people are not shaped by the same cosmic cookie cutter, hearing people are also probably quite different from one another. I agree with this argument, and don’t want to expand on it very much here. When we refer to deaf people, in many ways there is no “we.” There are Deaf people and deaf people; deaf people with cochlear implants and deaf people without them. There is widespread disagreement amongst D/deaf people regarding how deaf children should be educated, and so forth. We’re united only in our disunity. If any deaf person seriously believes that all deaf people want the same things, many of us would probably place him in the category we’ve assigned to airport accessibility personnel, since that group seems to be the final stronghold for those who believe all deaf fliers should be pushed to their connecting flights in wheelchairs.

But if there isn’t a “we,” then for the same reasons there also isn’t a “them.” Or at least not a “them” that’s 270 million hearing people strong. And that leads me to the topic I really want to discuss here: logistics. The gathering and transport of people to the place they’re needed at the time they’re needed.

Don’t you find it kind of ironic that when D/deaf people scrape together two hundred protesters to go and fight something, their critics will say, “See? This cause is so very important to all deaf people everywhere; only two hundred out of 30 million bothered to show up!” Or twenty. Or two. Well, out of 270 million hearing people, supposedly united in hostility (against that particular cause, anyway, if not against all deaf people everywhere), how many of them bothered to show up? If it sucks so much that a small group of D/deaf people could only organize two hundred active and visible supporters out of thirty million, shouldn’t it suck even worse if “the hearing world” can’t match their numbers at the site of a given conflict? If they’re so numerous and all-powerful and dead set against what’s happening, I mean? When we talk about how the reputation of the Deaf community has been trashed in the eyes of the hearing world (after all of the recent protests that have happened, for example), is it so unreasonable to ask whether or not the minds behind those 270 million sets of hearing eyes actually agree with this statement? I’ve never seen 270 million negative comments under even one negative online editorial in the Washington Post. I’ve seen maybe a hundred, tops, and many of them seem to consistently come from the same people.

I’m not just asking here for an accurate assessment of the actual physical numbers “the hearing world” can definitively align against any given group of D/deaf people who decide to stand up for something. I’m not even only questioning whether or not those opposing forces are going to be neatly divided between hearing and deaf people, because in reality there might end up being many hearing and deaf people who support a given cause, just as there could potentially be many hearing and deaf people who are against it.

I’m asking whether or not D/deaf people who currently feel oppressed and helpless need to keep feeling that way. Especially if they managed to whip up twenty people to join the picket line, while the other side (with 270 million “supporters” supposedly at their disposal) apparently couldn’t whip up anyone to counter them.

Don’t you think maybe that our sense of oppression doesn’t just stem from hearing peoples’ raw numbers? Maybe it’s more about the fear generated from false beliefs. Maybe more than a few of us (and I’m not talking about hearing or deaf people here anymore, I’m talking about anyone who happens to unite for a common cause) have been living our lives as if we expect the other’s side’s cavalry to come charging in at any moment and cut us to ribbons under a million swords. But exactly how is that supposed to happen if the place we’ve chosen to fight doesn’t have room for even one of these cavalrymen to draw his sword without poking the cavalryman seated up high next to him? In fact, how many horses can you actually fit into an area the size of a high school gym? If that’s the place where the conflict is occurring, what you’re going to see is maybe thirty horses inside and the rest of them outside doing little more than standing around creating steaming heaps of horse dung.

Translation: If we need to fight “state governments,” what we’re probably going to actually end up doing is fighting certain individuals within state governments, and not the whole government. Making things seem bigger than they are doesn’t do anyone any good. In any given System, you can always find the terror-stricken and bitter (or both) who will oppose any type of change whatsoever, those who will passionately fight alongside of you for reforms, and the lethargic who don’t really care one way or another. Yes, those you end up fighting can be incredibly powerful. They can be well funded, and have at their fingertips a devastating Propaganda Machine.

But one function of that Machine, part of its way of keeping you down, part of its strategy for smothering every spark of external dissent before it can blaze into a fire, is the repitition of the message that if you take on that group, you’re actually taking on the whole world. That can’t possibly be true. You’re just taking on that group. And even if their group numbers thirty thousand to your two hundred, even if their group has $18 million to your $374.36, there is still an immense psychological victory to be found in cutting their group down to size. Thirty thousand isn’t God. And once it becomes apparent just how determined you are, their thirty thousand can be rendered just as helpless, bumbling, and as scared senseless as your two hundred probably feel right now. Or your twenty. Or two.

So take heart. And the next time you feel helpless and overwhelmed, step out once again into “Hearing America,” albeit this time with eyes that are open to the truth. Your neighbors, the people looking for Christmas bargains in Walmart; that’s Hearing America. The postman delivering your mail, the guy in the beat up Toyota driving up the street right now on his way to his factory job—are they going to oppose you? Do they even know you? Do they know anything about deafness? That’s Hearing America. Multiply them by 270 million. They aren’t organized. They haven’t made any detailed plans to genetically engineer you out of existence. In a determined fight they’re essentially non-combatants. In many ways they don’t matter very much at all, not even when false implications of solidarity are constantly being used to frighten you into submission.

If you want to be effective, narrow down your targets. If all you’ve trained yourself to see is “the hearing world,” everything that you can change blurs out of focus.

*I am grossly (and probably unforgivably) rounding off all of my numbers here. Please do correct me if you have precise figures.

I was never really a big fan of Shop class as a kid. You know what I’m talking about; that junior high school nightmare of woodworking, metal welding, and plastic cutting/ heating/bending. I think the only thing I successfully constructed in Shop during my entire middle school career was a plastic picture frame that only stayed in one piece because it was exactly that: a single piece of plastic that I found in the trash which happened to be the exact size of the picture that I wanted it to cover. Or at least it was after I took a pair of scissors to the picture itself. Paper is easier to cut than plastic, after all. Call it the Thinking Man’s approach to the problem.

Beyond that everything I drafted, glued, hammered, or soldered in Shop was a disaster. One day we were supposed to convert this miniature plan in our textbooks for a birdhouse or something into a full-scale blueprint before construction. I couldn’t figure out how to do the math and ended up just drawing another miniature birdhouse. Mr. Reese* asked me what I was doing and I said I was drawing it as a joke. He said “Ha, ha, very funny, if you don’t finish your real blueprint before the bell rings you’re getting a zero.”

Thank God my arch-enemy at that age, Todd Meshke, ran by five minutes later and yanked the lever under my drafting table, which made the top slam down on my hand. This was a popular trick amongst the upstanding young men in the class at that time, ranking right up there with atomic wedgies and the like. I ended up with three bashed fingers that were black and blue under the fingernails for the next three months (after that the nails all sort of rotted off by themselves and then re-grew—a process that made one of my sisters physically sick to watch). But at least I got out of having to turn in my appropriately converted full-scale birdhouse blueprint. In fact, looking back on it, that incident is probably what nudged my grade up from an “F” to a “D-.”

Now if you would have asked me back then what my problem was with this class, I would have shrugged my shoulders in wordless mystery. But I can tell you now: It was embarrassment. I didn’t have an interpreter in that class (not only because ADA laws didn’t exist back then, but also because I didn’t know ASL at that time). So I never really got too much out of the explanations that the other guys would pick up on in five minutes flat.

That wasn’t why I was embarrassed, though. There are certain things I just cannot make heads or tails out of—whether I have an interpreter or not—and math is one of them. Blueprints are another. It’s simply the way my brain is built. I’m not great at converting the abstract to the physical. Well actually that’s not entirely accurate, because all thought is abstract, so any expression of thought almost has to be physical (such as the words on this page, for example, which you can physically see).

What I really mean is that there are certain things that I can only understand by seeing and touching and feeling and experiencing—explanations and lectures before the fact won’t help much. Tell me about interest rates on credit cards, for example, and I’ll smile and nod cheerfully through the whole presentation. 22%? I’ll yell “Great!” and splurge away at Best Buy with no clue whatsoever as to what the hell I’m doing. It won’t be until after I see my first monthly bill (or even my second after letting the first month’s balance carry over) that I’ll freak out.

But once that happens, let me assure you, I most definitely won’t remain so shy about cutting plastic—in fact I’ll probably use the same scissors on my credit card that I used to hack up that photograph back in Shop class. I’m not lazy. I’m not irresponsible. I’m not dumb. I just don’t learn in the same way as all those other guys back in Shop apparently did. How do I know that this is true? I figured it out during the month Mr. Reese was sick.

I never found out what happened to him—I just heard years later that it was a long-term health problem. The sub who took over, Mr. Jay, was a much older guy… probably somebody who came temporarily out of retirement. He had a very easy and laid-back style of teaching. You could immediately see the difference between how these two men managed a classroom. Mr. Reese wasn’t a bad teacher or anything; far from it. It’s just that he was crisper, more abrupt, more by-the-book. Read this, draw that, build that. One, two, three. He had his classes divided down to the precise minutes allotted for each activity. And as you worked he’d ceaselessly pace the room, checking on everything, never leaving anything or anyone unsupervised for very long.

Mr. Jay had nowhere near that much speed. He stood only with great difficulty and seemed greatly relieved to reach the stool at the front of the classroom each morning. At first a lot of guys gave him a hard time, thinking he’d never be able to control the classroom. How wrong they turned out to be! All he had to do was sit down and work his magic.

Mind you now, I couldn’t actually follow most of his words, but I didn’t have to, because he made a much bigger show out of what he wanted us to understand than Mr. Reese could ever hope to be capable of. Let me give you an example: One day Mr. Jay brought this little plastic tube to class. It was maybe about as long as a common pen. He spent around ten minutes talking about the tube in that easy drawl of his. The exchange of energy between him and the class was incredible. In those ten minutes everyone there laughed twenty times. I’m talking bullies; real jerks—the types of students a teacher would dread having to face every day. Yet these guys were sitting there rapt with attention.

Anyway, at the end of his little drawl, Mr. Jay said something like, “Now for our next class, I bet you that I can take this plastic tube here and tie it in a knot.” Then he passed the tube around so we could see that it was hard plastic and not bendable in any way.

Now I’m not going to exaggerate here and say that everyone left the class debating how Mr. Jay would do this. It was a normal day, you know? By the time Gym rolled around two periods later, Todd Meshke was back to his usual bullshit, stealing Tony Suttcliffe’s shorts and whipping Wiffle balls at peoples’ heads. But the next day everyone in Shop was quiet and waiting patiently while Mr. Jay shuffled over to his stool and sat down. Mr. Jay didn’t have to tell anyone to pay attention or to get their books out or anything like that. He owned that classroom.

Long story short, Mr. Jay ended up simply holding the tube over a Bunsen burner that he borrowed from the science lab up the hall. He heated the tube until it turned red in the center and could be stretched out into a fine little thread, and then carefully tied it in a knot, just as he promised he would.

Looking back on it now, the thing I remember most about that class was the grins. It was obvious what Mr. Jay was going to do as soon as he lit the burner, but nobody minded the predictability. They appreciated how thoroughly they had been tricked.

No, not even that. They appreciated how thoroughly they had just been entertained.

Mr. Jay is probably the only guy who actually managed to teach me something about the subject of plastic in Shop class. He also taught me what kind of teacher I wanted to be, even though I couldn’t have told you back then that I would even end up being a teacher.

I also learned something else. I learned that I don’t like it when people approach the art of teaching in the same way that factory workers approach the construction of a standard cardboard box. This flap goes here, that flap goes there—one, two, three. Fold, tuck, seal.

In my head, I guess, I understand the need for terms such as a “curriculum plan,” and a “rubric” and “outcomes.” In this world of budgets, accountability, and manpower hours, these things are certainly important. But in my heart I harbor a growing irritation for people who speak only this language. And believe me, the feeling is mutual. You can see the hostility in their eyes. If it’s not meticulously mapped out to the point where it deprives both the teacher and student alike of every last vestige of enjoyment either one might have otherwise gotten out of a classroom, then it’s not really education. If it’s spontaneous and surprising, it’s not rigorous enough. A laugh of wonder or a grin can’t be converted to raw, hard data. Enjoyment can’t be used to track performance (“engagement,” on the other hand, can, but that’s primarily measured by “time on task,” and not by curiosity or awe).

I don’t know if I’m off base here or not, but I think we need to get back to the educational world that had enough room for Mr. Jay. Even if it sometimes seems that we’re falling behind everyone else in terms of performance; even if our deepest instincts tell us that real life is often not fun or easy or enjoyable, and we would be doing our children a disservice if we didn’t prepare them for such a world… we should still slow down and ask ourselves exactly what it is that we wish to accomplish. Do we want our students to actually understand and relate to what we teach them, or do we want to develop an educational system in which they’ll have to clock in and out every time they enter or leave the classroom?

Because if we keep on going like this, that might just end up being the only performance assessment we’ll have prepared ourselves to trust.

*All names have been changed.

Now you see, in Wisconsin we do not believe in the game of “touch football.” If the other team needs one more guy and there’s a hapless Minnesotan standing around or something, fine. We’ll call it that at first to lure him in. Otherwise, any football game that occurs on our hallowed frozen tundra is to be played in the style of bone crunching, blood splaying, stomp-on-his-face-and-snarl-at-his-momma tackle football. We don’t do helmets, we don’t do pads, and we don’t need ambulances. If he can’t get up we’ll drag him to the hospital behind the snowmobile, trusting that the slush will keep him numb.

Thus it came to pass that one day, at the tender young age of twenty-two, a Red Route 54 gone horribly wrong saw me propelled by the force of what would soon become six man pileup teeth first into a stone only partially buried under the snow. I say “only partially” because I’m fairly certain that the first guy to hit me did indeed see the rock (and in fact steered me into it). He lived two floors below me in our college dormitory. I often helped him with his English; he helped me with my geometry. And while he nonetheless ended up failing the former subject while I ended up passing the latter, it was because of his excellent tutelage that I was in such a good position—literally—to appreciate the precision of the angle at which he drove me into the ground.

What can I say? I picked myself up, wobbled unsteadily back to the huddle, spat a gob of blood and saliva into the pristine white snow, and clapped my hands when the next play was called. Of course I had no idea what the next play actually was, because my post-impact lip reading skills were impeded by the fact that I could now see five sets of blurry and rotating lips on the quarterback’s face. But I faked my way through well enough until the next tackle knocked my head straight again.

Later that day I was able to examine the damage in my bathroom mirror. As far as I could tell my teeth were still intact, straight, and pearly white. But the gums were purple around my top and lower right front teeth, and if I pressed too hard blood would bubble out from various micro-rips. I rinsed as well as I could, put a plastic Zip Loc bagful of ice on it, popped some Bayer, and soaked the rest of my battered self in a very hot tub. Within a week my bruises went from black-purple to mere black, and my gums went from purple to crimson. Women refused to date me for the remainder of that year, but this was okay. Tackle football is sacred, and at times requires sacrifice.

Skip ahead a year and half a continent west to Los Angeles, California. Over time my crimson gums went back to a healthy pink again, but my top right front tooth never recovered. It slowly went from white to a light-dust-storm-over-the-Arizona-desert brown. And a crack had developed. But it didn’t look or feel deep, so I let it slide.

Then one day my buddy Freddy says “Hey, let’s drive down to Mexico in my pickup truck! We’ll camp out of the back of the truck and it’ll be cool and rattlesnake-free!”

So I climb into the back of his flatbed pickup truck and we go bouncing around on the 405 to test out how comfortable it would be. At seventy miles per hour he hits a pothole and I fly up into the air a little bit… not an impressive launch but one with enough force to give two hundred-plus pounds of deaf person a split second break from gravity. Then gravity returns with a vengeance and—bam!—I bite my lip. Only my lip must be made out of solid granite at this particular instant in time, because my bad tooth shatters under the impact.

In a spray of blood and a white hot bolt of pain that rocketed from my nose to my toes, I hammered on his back window and told him to get off the freeway. I didn’t manage to get the bleeding fully stopped for another two hours. And since that was a Friday night, I couldn’t get in to see my dentist until the following Monday. I looked downright frightening that whole weekend, with my tooth chipped at a wicked pair of intersecting slashes that made it resemble a fang. My lip didn’t fare too well, either. Women still refused to date me, probably since they realized that the act of kissing might carry with it the risk of needing stitches.

Warning: If my story at this point finds you feeling somewhat squeamish, allow me to inform you the remainder is also not pretty. Proceed at your own risk.

Enter Monday… and Dr. Bloop. You’ll see in a moment how he earned this fine nickname; but first a few other descriptions. Dr. Bloop was an unremarkable-looking man of deft focus and unwavering aim. A good thing, too, because his right hand was perpetually attached to the longest friggin’ needle I have ever seen in my life (which includes countless hours of watching Intervention reruns in which morphine addicts accessed the few veins they had left through injections under their eyeballs).

His left hand was perpetually attached to a drill… Or should I say auger? You know what I mean… the tool one might choose for drilling oil out of an iceberg, or perhaps a vein of silver out of a stubborn mountainside.

“You need a root canal,” he says from behind his facemask, “and then I’ll need to pack that and grind part of your tooth down to a stump so we have something to place the cap over.” Only from behind his facemask this sounds like “You need a mute channel, and I need to whack your mind fart of a poof into a pump so we pass something through the nap fever.” It didn’t matter too much, however, that nothing he was saying was making any sense. My reply of “Okay, fibe, jub be carebul wib dat dwill… I’m quibe tebbified” probably didn’t make too much sense to him, either.

So he injects me. After the initial flare of pain, half of my face goes numb and my eyes stop watering for the first time in days. Dr. Bloop proceeds to drill and hack away, pausing here and there to select a small pickaxe for one portion of the job and something that looks like a miniature bolt cutters for another. Then he says something again about it being time for my “mute channel,” focuses intently on the auger, and leans in.

Now there is pain, and there is agony. Let us pause here to appreciate how finely crafted the latter word actually is. Agony. Ah, it rolls off the tongue (and the hands!) in both English and American Sign Language with equally morbid fluidity. Pain is a paltry thing in comparison. When you break your pelvis in a rollerblading mishap, for example, or when your fluffy white childhood kitten Oscar was squished by a Mack truck and your sadistic older brother gleefully told you that Mom was lying—there was no such thing as Cat Heaven, and Oscar was not up there chasing birds through the dandelions; that’s pain. Agony, on the other hand, is in a weight class unto itself. Agony thinks that pain is a plateful of tater-tots on Thanksgiving Day after a twelve-hour fast. When agony has a tough day at work, pain is the soothing music it puts on its CD player while it waits for an “Oh you poor baby” massage from its wife.

Agony was the sensation I felt when Dr. Bloop… maneuvered (this is one of the less graphic verbs that comes to mind)… the auger a bit, latched onto whatever it was that he was trying to hook, and (brace yourselves for this)—with an actual wink—yanked downwards.

When I came to, Dr. Bloop was wiggling the bloody rope of nerves that had only seconds ago been safely lodged in my tooth (where it belonged). Give him a fishing pole, waist-high rubber boots, and a three-foot long trout—he could’ve been posing for the cover of Outdoor Life. He looked so proud!

“Bloop, all done!” he exclaimed. I want you to know that I lip read him perfectly—my quivering, traumatized Inner Child is as certain of this as he is of the fact that the Boogeyman is still hiding in the closet, licking his lips and biding his time. Bloop. Not “Well” or “There” or “Yep.” Bloop. A chilling, stark word, ranking above even “agony” in its perfect dark beauty.

To wrap up, I never went back to Dr. Bloop’s office for my cap or crown or whatever they call it. Took another three weeks to switch over to a dentist who wasn’t bat-flipping insane. And let me tell you, eating with a tooth that has been chiseled down to a stump makes for some pretty dirty restaurant napkin adventures (in particular I highly recommend one avoid the consumption of Olive Garden’s spaghetti in this type of condition). I also went through about a crate of Orajel®—a gum-numbing wonder drug that every Wisconsinite should henceforth pack in the storage compartment of his or her snowmobile. If a semi-conscious football player had any root canal work done, trust me, frozen-tundra slush is not going to be numbing enough.

Oh, and my reason for telling you this little gem of a story? I don’t really have one. But if we classified this tale as yet another account of a deaf person suffering horribly under the tortures of oral practices…

…we still wouldn’t be that far off the mark, would we?

I was intrigued by a number of comments made recently on DeafDC.com regarding whether or not an “oral deaf person” (note the lower-case “d”) can become a member of “Deaf Culture” (note the upper-case “D”). I do not wish to further pursue that particular discussion here–rather I have an entirely different set of questions. But first some background. . .

Here are a number of web definitions that I have found on the word “culture:”

• Culture refers to the cumulative deposit of knowledge, experience, beliefs, values, attitudes, meanings, hierarchies, religion, notions of time, roles, spatial relations, concepts of the universe, and material objects and possessions acquired by a group of people in the course of generations through individual and group striving.
• Culture is the systems of knowledge shared by a relatively large group of people.
• Culture is communication, communication is culture.
• Culture in its broadest sense is cultivated behavior; that is the totality of a person’s learned, accumulated experience which is socially transmitted, or more briefly, behavior through social learning.
• A culture is a way of life of a group of people–the behaviors, beliefs, values, and symbols that they accept, generally without thinking about them, and that are passed along by communication and imitation from one generation to the next.
• Culture is symbolic communication. Some of its symbols include a group’s skills, knowledge, attitudes, values, and motives. The meanings of the symbols are learned and deliberately perpetuated in a society through its institutions.
• Culture consists of patterns, explicit and implicit, of and for behavior acquired and transmitted by symbols, constituting the distinctive achievement of human groups, including their embodiments in artifacts; the essential core of culture consists of traditional ideas and especially their attached values; culture systems may, on the one hand, be considered as products of action, on the other hand, as conditioning influences upon further action.
• Culture is the sum of total of the learned behavior of a group of people that are generally considered to be the tradition of that people and are transmitted from generation to generation.
• Culture is a collective programming of the mind that distinguishes the members of one group or category of people from another.

Now, when people speak of “Deaf culture,” what they usually mean (or at least allude to) is signing Deaf culture (in America, ASL-signing Deaf culture, to be precise). They aren’t usually talking about the “Deaf community,” which includes a broad range of D/deaf people who use a broad range of different types of sign communication, and they aren’t usually talking about “deaf” people (note again the lower-case “d,” which denotes biological and not cultural deafness).

All of that might seem a complicated enough mess to make sense out of. But here’s a new question that might potentially complicate things even more:

Is it possible for an oral deaf person to be a member of “Oral Deaf culture?”

I confess to extensive ignorance regarding the following questions, and I’d be fascinated upon learning the answers: Are there residential oral schools for the deaf? If so can they pass on systems of knowledge, a way of life, and other things that fit the criteria listed above? Can they offer a unique sense of identity that is separate and distinct from what is known as “hearing society” (although “hearing society” is so diffuse it is difficult to argue that it is capable of generating a universal set of values, norms, or mores related solely to “hearing”)?

If the answer to any of the above questions is yes, then what we may end up with is evidence for the argument that a non-signing, oral deaf person can indeed be culturally deaf… but he or she would belong to a “deaf culture” (or would it be “Oral Deaf culture?” I have no idea) that has nothing to do with American Sign Language.

Now again, I don’t know the answers to these questions. I’m no sociologist. And truthfully this isn’t an area I’ve really explored. So I leave these questions to the readers, and we’ll see where the discussion goes. However, I’d like to propose a modest guideline for anyone who might wish to comment. It’s not my intention to start up another debate on who can rightfully claim a place in ASL-using Deaf culture. That’s not the point of this post. To repeat, the primary questions here are whether or not an oral deaf culture is even possible, and if so (or not), why or why not? And how would such a culture be distinct from hearing society—in other words, how would we know that we’re talking about “oral deaf culture” and not “hearing people in general?” Remember also that we’d be talking about people who were raised under oralism, and by virtue of being so raised, this particular group would by definition exclude deaf people who are “merely” biologically deaf (such as late-deafened people who were born hearing, went to mainstream schools their whole lives, never once had to sit through a speech therapy session or a lip reading class, etc.). So a lower-case “d” would no longer do the job of adequately distinguishing these two groups.

What are your thoughts? To start the discussion off, think on these things: Do the vast majority of hearing people take speech training classes or lip reading classes? No. Thus the oral deaf are distinct from the hearing not only because of their deafness, but also because of a set of skills that they can certainly pass down to later generations if they so choose. Do the oral deaf in America have their own language? Well, perhaps not their own, (whatever that means. . . who living amongst us currently invented ASL?) but they do have one: English, and so far as that goes, their language is just as symbollic as anyone else’s…