As I learn about Deaf Culture I stopped....

What is a Handicap?  Is is a physical impairment?  Is it something to be pitied? Should you help? If so, when do you help?  How do you help?

My first lesson in being handicapped was back many years ago when I was in England.  I met a man from Ireland whose leg had been permanently disabled in an accident. I thoroughly enjoyed just listening to him talk because I enjoyed listening to the lilt of his Irish accent.  The only part of our conversation I did not enjoy hearing was his constantly referring to himself as a cripple.  In our Politically Correct society we have almost compleatly wiped that word from our vocabulary as if it were a curse word.  In my conversation with this Irishman I kept trying to get him to stop using crippled and start using another word like disabled or handicapped, but I couldn't.  Crippled was a word that was so ingrained into him that, even if he wanted to, he couldn't change and no amount of persuading by a 21-year-old American college student would make any difference.

My second lesson came about 10 years later when I met and became best friends with 6 women: AM who is 5 years younger than me, SEJ who is 12 years younger, LMT who is 14 years younger, CS who is 15 years younger, SL who is 16 years younger and D who is 17 years younger.  When we met AM & I were the only ones of drinking age.  The rest were still considered "girls" at the time, but they have all since matured into wonderfully beautiful and talented women. One of the women, SL, has cerebral palsy, a condition that does not allow her legs to straighten without effort or her feet to be flexible.  Both cause her to have a very distinctive gait. It was from SL that I learned that a handicap is only as disabling as the person who has the handicap: a disability may slow her down, but it will never stop her. Whenever any of us were out with SL, especially if we were walking, she could out walk all of us, which was quite a feat since AM and LMT were both 5' 11" and CS was 6'.  We would all have to run to catch up with her. Then one day, one of the other women, I think it was SEJ, or maybe it was AM, was talking about SL.  Bear in mind that both SEJ and AM are people who occasionally mix up words or come out with a spoonerism.  So we were all talking about SL and her disability, and instead of saying "Handicapped," whoever it was said she was "Handiclad."  Handiclad?? We all had a good laugh over that one. But then SL said that she liked that label because it was unusual and because it better fit who she was.

My third and most important lesson came when I decided to go to school to learn American Sign Language (ASL).  It is through my classes and the most especially through my contacts with the Deaf Community that I've learned that there are many disabilities in life. The biggest lesson I've learned is that being deaf is neither a disability nor a handicap.

In the Fall of 2010 I had to take a class about Deaf Culture. In this class I learned a lot of things about Deaf Culture, the most important being that the Deaf are not handicapped, nor are they disabled. They are simply not able to hear.  It is the hearing that have the handicap.

Back in my first semester in Spring 2009 I picked up a book at the bookstore entitled Deaf Like Me.  It was the story of a woman by the name of Lynn Spradley and is written by her father and uncle. It begins about the time Lynn was conceived when her older brother came down with Rubella. Her parents had been trying to have another child and her mother discovered she was pregnant about the same time.  Her mother agonized over whether the rubella would cause a problem but all she could do was wait to see what happened. This was in 1964 so there were no definitive tests to be done like there is today.  The book goes on to detail the family's struggle to deal with Lynn's deafness.  The prevailing thought at the time was that if you gave a Deaf child hearing aids and enough speech therapy then the child would learn to speak.  Manual communication (a.k.a. sign language) was out of the question because speech was the arbiter of intelligence.  Her parents eventually came to learn that being Deaf was not what defined Lynn, it was merely one aspect of her personality.  Over time the entire family come to understand that fact and Lynn is now a fully capable adult woman.

As I learn about Deaf Culture I stopped.... thinking of people in terms of their disability, thinking that all Deaf can lip-read (they can't and they would rather you write out what you want to say to them, or, better yet, learn ASL),  thinking the Deaf need to have their deafness fixed, and thinking that all people with conditions that different than normal should be pitied. 

People who are differently abled from the mainstream population just want what we all want: to be treated with respect and to be allowed to live their lives on their terms.