Deaf

I know many people who are aching to be public speakers with oratory skills and have no idea how to begin. There seems to be a great gap like an open wound. What about people who are cut off from the others because of deafness? Will they be desperate to have hearing?

For decades, cochlear implants have been promoted to make the hearing world easier. The small electronic device has an external portion sitting behind the ear, and a second portion surgically placed within the skull. Signals from the external transmitter will be converted into electric impulses, to be sent to the auditory nerve via an array of electrodes. For a long while cochlear implant was thought to be a cure for deafness and remedy for deaf children to learn oral language. Or is it? That is more controversial than what I have believed. 

Enter the visionary exponents of Deaf culture. Deaf culture believes in having membership in a beautiful culture. The Deaf culture doesn't feel they lack something. Strange as it may seem for us, the deaf community is proud of their membership. A previous school newspaper poll, as I have read from the book Far From the Tree, asked whether students would take a pill that would give them hearing instantly, and the majority answered that they would not. When I watched a movie on Deaf culture with my family today, I was reminded of the bioethicist Teresa Blankmeyer Burke who said, "It is rare that one grieves for something that one has not lost."

Hearing parents are, therefore, thrown back on their own dichotomy: do they have a deaf child, or do they lack a hearing one?