Yesterday I was surprised when a friend said the following in a comment for my Lindsay Lohan Proves Her Illiteracy article:
Nice to see you on the WordPress Top Posts list !
Continue reading → Lindsay Lohan Makes This Blog Super Hot!: Moral Depression Follows
Yesterday, in a watershed moment in the history of the disabled, U.S. District Judge James Robertston finally instructed the United States Treasury to find a way for the Blind to discriminate between paper money denominations.
Continue reading → Blind Discrimination: Paper Money Feels the Same
Gallaudet University in Washington, D.C. made the sort of history last night that one never wishes to make: The University gave in to small minds and ignorance and bullying bad behavior and lost both stature and grace in the process.
There are moments in our lives when we pause to reflect on our joy and our luck and our fate-of-birth while being confronted with the reality that others in the world must find joy in desperation and fight a luckless circumstance all while hoping others will care enough to stand with you. Here are the bright faces of the children who attend the State School for the Deaf in Accra, Ghana and they could use your help.
Continue reading → How to Help Deaf Children in Accra, Ghana
HIV and AIDS are infections that still plague the face of the earth even though there are drug treatment therapies that can buy time for those infected.
Without medical intervention and treatment the average incubation period for HIV is 9-10 years and death after a full-blown AIDS diagnosis is still only 9.2 months.
People and their deaths are not best understood on timelines and statistical averages. The value in the human component of living is in remembering those who have suffered and fallen before you.
To live is to remember.
I remember in the mid-to-late 1980’s how this unnamed “Gay disease” we now know as HIV/AIDS was eating people alive. It was a frightening time because no one really knew in a shared, universal societal understanding, how HIV was being transmitted or how AIDS was being contracted.
There were rumors in the mainstream community you could get AIDS — no one really understood the HIV component until years later — by sitting on a toilet seat or by someone sneezing on you or by just shaking hands with an infected person.
Continue reading → To Live is to Remember: A Brief History of AIDS
Is funny always funny? Or does the sense of what’s funny change with the cultural ebb-and-flow over time of what certain people find funny? In a recent thread of comments here, one regular commenter made a “joke” about work where the new management team were “Nazis” and the workers were “Jews.”
One of the hardest things for a minority culture to understand is the same history cannot be made twice. History only makes pioneers and always punishes imitators. There is an attempt to warp back to 1988 at Gallaudet, the premier university for the Deaf in Washington, D.C., as some of the 2,000 students enrolled there try to re-enact the historical — and successful — 1988 “Deaf President Now” campaign by erasing the appointment of a new president, Jane K. Fernandes, because she is “Not Deaf Enough” to lead Gallaudet. The students re-created a tent city from 1988 as they camp out to protest her appointment until she steps down. Fernandes cannot and must not be bullied down.
Continue reading → Not Deaf Enough at Gallaudet: Finally Is Not Enough
Few people know over 13,000 Deaf people — and
not just the Jewish Deaf — were killed by the Nazis in the late 1930’s.
Not only were the Deaf the first to find the executioner’s hand under Fascism, they were also viewed as inferior “useless eaters” by the ruling party.
Since the Deaf were unable to communicate in the Germanic mother tongue they were not heard or understood by the majority and fell prey to early graves.
The BBC has a wonderful companion website to help us always remember the Deaf who died. Here are three incredible blocks of quotes from the amazing show:
EducationErna Young who was sterilised as a young girl — estimated that some 17,000 deaf people were sterilised between 1933 and 1945 – the youngest was only 9 years old. Given that there was no national register of deaf or disabled people in Germany, many were given over to the authorities by teachers of the deaf – the very people trusted with their care and support. Some Nazi educationalists even began to question the right of deaf children to be educated at all, believing the education of the ‘inferior’ to be wasteful.
Continue reading → Deaf Holocaust: Finding the Executioner’s Hand
I have always loved the discovery of new words and ideas. I am also forever curious about the genesis of words and how they came into popular being in a culture. I learned two new words last week that are interrelated: “Audists” and “Audism” and the concept of those words has been around since 1977 and used in print in a scholarly book in 1992. “Audists” are Deaf or Hearing people who think they are superior to others with lesser hearing and that process of a climbing supremacy on the backs of the audibly disabled is called “Audism.” Here are some examples of Audism in action:
One of my favorite books growing up was Jay J. Armes, Investigator: The World’s Most Successful Private Eye written in 1976 and published by Macmillan. I remember holding the hardcover book in my hands and wondering how the man on the cover, Jay J. Armes, was able to shoot a gun with hooks for hands.
You must be logged in to post a comment.