There is a growing protest movement among the hearing-impaired community to prevent deaf children from receiving an implanted device which in certain cases enables them to hear.

As recently reported, a group, styled the "Deaf Culture," opposes the cochlear implants because "the emerging technology is a threat to a deaf child's birthright of silence.

Oh please! Their birthright of silence? Are they saying that it is the child's karma or God's plan for them to be born deaf -- and who are we to meddle? Yeah, right!

Who is to say that God didn't provide the knowledge, the will to figure things out to scientists and engineers, just so they could help these same children? Hmmmm.

Theology arguments aside, let's face it folks, sometimes bad stuff just happens. Does that mean we just lay there and take it, or de we use all that gray matter between our ears to figure a way to get out of the mud?

We try to improve our lot. Frankly, mankind's history is nothing more than the story of man improving his condition, dragging himself out of the muck again and again.

This protest group is Luddism at its worse. For those who may not remember this lesson from high school history classes, Luddites were men and women who went around destroying early industrial tools and factories in Great Britain.

Whether for religious reasons (some considered the machines the devil's handiwork) or for economic reasons (machine-made versus man-made goods and consequently less people employed), this group did much damage before finally being stopped. But whatever their reasoning, they protested any type of industry and worked as a whole to try and stop the industrial revolution.

Although these protestors of the early textile machinery are long dead, their philosophy of opposing any type of industrial improvement keeps cropping up in the screwiest of places and issues. One such issue seems to be Deaf Culture's focus in trying to prevent deaf children from receiving an implant which will allow them to hear.

The implant will not help all hearing-impaired children, only those with certain conditions. The child must have a healthy neural pathway from the inner ear to the brain for the implant to work (the device takes the place of the damaged hair cells in the inner ear which send electronic impulses along the neural pathway).

To be honest, the device, worn just behind the child's ear is bulky and ugly. For that reason alone, many teens who could benefit from its use, are refusing it.

These Luddites of the deaf world have jumped on the device's cosmetic value as a perfect excuse for not using it.

This protest group is meddling among the deaf community in another area. They also oppose teaching the hearing-impaired how to produce vocal sounds regardless of their inability to hear. Simply put, they don't want deaf people to learn how to talk.

If that is not the most ridiculous thing -- I don't know what is!

Why shouldn't a hearing-impaired person learn to speak? Good grief! Look at the contribution Helen Keller made in the world because she learned to speak. Not only was she profoundly deaf but blind as well.

Look at the contribution Heather Whitestone, the 1995 Miss America, who is also deaf, has made in rasing awareness of the hearing-impaired. Deaf Culture has tagged Whitestone as a charlatan of the deaf world, simply because she has learned to speak.

Deaf Culture would prefer that sign language be the communication of the deaf world. Well, guess what! There are major problems with that nifty little solution.

It seems that signing for the English language, whether American or British, has not been as completely organized as most would think. Apparently a symbol for a word on the east coast may not be the same symbol on the west coast or at any given point between the coasts.

This was demonstrated this weekend when I was talking to a woman from southern Great Britain about her hearing-impaired grandson. She said she had been talking to her sister in Scotland, who had learned sign language there, about an upcoming meeting in Redding. According to my friend, as a way of practicing their signing skills, most of the conversation took place in sign language.

"My sister signed to me that she would be at the meeting in Redding," the woman said. "Except that according to the sign language I learned, what she was telling me was that she would be at the 'orgy' in Redding."

Another example the woman gave of the differences in signage in the English language are those found in the movie, "Children of a Lesser God."

"Watching that movie, and the sign language used, was like watching a foreign film," she said. "There was so much that was completely different than the signs we use in Britain," she said. How odd it is to find that for the hearing-impaired there is so much difference between sign language that one is like a foreign language to the other.

Seems that if Deaf Culture needs something to focus on, to make life easier, better, richer or the hearing-impaired, they should concentrate on codifying sign language so that the hearing-impaired from different areas of the country could understand each other.

Leave alone those who would improve their lot with a hearing implant or by learning to vocalize. Clean up what needs to be fixed, first, before trying to meddle with what ain't broke!

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If you would like to drop the author a note about the article please email to deborah@ipa.net

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