Wednesday, May 23, 2007

A Reply to Intolerance

It should come as no surprise to the readers of this blog that I subscribe to a Yahoo list for people who wish to be deaf. Though that list I came across this link to the See/Hear message board.

The post is about a soap opera in the UK called Holby City which had a storyline on the 17 May 2007 episode about a deaf wannabe. Well needless to say some people are vocally against us and had something to say about this episode.

However, the reply I made is to the aforementioned See/Hear message board.

I'll reproduce the original post and my reply here for clarity:

Original:

It was a scary reminder that these people still do exist, and have in the past as a few of us will remember used and pretended to be deaf on these boards.

Within Holby the girl had to go into hopital (as you do with it being a hospital drama) her new boyfreind thought or was uner the impression she was deaf..she had done her level one and thats it.

She bought a hearing aid of the net and wore it, comments beign that people looked at her differently, she got free bus passes and more help.

lt was different for Holby to cover something like this, and I don't know if they covered it as well as they could have..problem with throwing something like this in the wider eye of the public is that it's going to give people ideas.

By Jippers (U1364431) 5 days ago.

My reply is:

I don't see what the problem is.

Are people so uptight that they can't let people make the decisions they want? How would you feel if the hearing world expressed disgust and claimed that all deaf people were mentally ill because they weren't immediately having cochlear implants implanted and undergoing intense hearing and speech therapy to function?

It is a hearing world, after all.

It's also an intolerant world, too.

How does someone becoming deaf (for whatever reason) impact anyone other than them? Surely there are concerns that they should be aware of for family and workplace but it's their responsibility.

It is not your responsibility to live their life for them.

I suspect the veracity of claims that people "become deaf" for the exclusive reason of drawing public funds. It seems a long way to go in order to obtain a bus pass or public assistance whereas it'd be arguably easier to simply pretend to be deaf instead. Pretending to be deaf in order to obtain public funds, however, is fraud.

Of course, I expect this post to be largely ignored and criticised but whatever; has to be said.


I want to let my reply speak for itself.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Damn, that's good.