E tenebras, lux dormiens

We are really seeing some advances in science that fortunately came after the civil rights movements that recognize all individuals that whatever their aberrations might be that they will be considered equal to the full extent of the law and cannot be discriminated against. The African American Movement pioneered this radical concept of treating people as equal not in social class, but in colors of the skin. This Movement spawned many other movements of races, including the American Indians. Eventually, the GLBTQ Movement took hold to bring ideas that gay people are people. Afterwards, the Deaf Movement came about with the media coverage of the Deaf President Now movement at Gallaudet University, the premiere federally-funded university that cater only to Deaf people from all over the world. Even if the number of deaf people were placed at only 0.1% of the world-wide population, that is still a lot to consider. I must not forget to include the Women's Movement, which is also very important. It started in the late 19th century, or the early 20th century when new technologies gave women more free time at home, and more times to think and suddenly realize that they have no freedom to participate in world politics. So they campaigned for the right to vote, but failed to take advantange of that right, failing even now. They campaigned for Women's Rights again after the Civil Right Movement to allow women to divorce, and to gain custody of their children when the fathers might not be capable of taking care of them.

But I digress . . .

Many decades ago, before there were enough people who might be considered the "permanent minority" including gays and lesbians as well as deaf individuals to form "critical mass" that would change the the societal landscape of the United States, the GLBTQ, the deaf, the blind, and the disabled communities were considered unnatural and experimented on. Countless numbers of cruel experiments were performed on the permanent minority in hope of eliminating the pathologies of homosexuality and deafness.

On the gay populace at large, the "scientists" performed lobotomy (usually "reducing the frontal lobe of the brain to a hemmorhaging pulp" _from The Atlantic, a publication magazine accessed March 26th), shock therapy, castration, hormonal infusion, in crazy and idiotic attempts to cure homosexuality.

On the deaf populace, the teachers of the "oral methods" deprived them of language, of communication, deprived them of, indeed, the ability to give names to things so they can control them. Everybody understands that names help to understand feeling and actions. If there was no names for sexual abuse, women could not outright find the means to explain their guilt and overwhelming feeling of helplessness when their fathers sexually abused them. In the 18th and 19th centuries, the deaf people were experimented on like the gay population, this time in the mouth and the ears, surgical methods to make them talk. How painful it must have been, and without an ability to protest! The process of surgery still continued, but this time primarily in the ears, with advances made in cochlear implants. Yet, for much of the 20th century, the oral methods took hold. While oralism was a noble goal, for the deaf people who cannot hear a SINGLE sound, who will not know what sounds sound like, is there one iota of evidence that without sign language, the deaf can learn to speak, can learn to communicate?

As we can see, oralism works only for people who are hard-of-hearing, like me, who can use residual hearing and lipreading skills to understand what people are saying. But still, sign language remains the only reasonable noble language of choice and communication for all individuals with hearing loss. Is it reasonable for them to struggle with lipreading, which is nightmarishly difficult for a language such as English, where words look the same. (Try it yourself, plug your ears and see if you can learn.)

I digress again . . .

The point of this blog was to say that it is fortunate the medical advances that could have removed the permanent minority completely if we hadn't reached the critical mass with which we could protest for rights and against discrimination. Otherwise, genetic information would allow us to remove "gay gene" or "deaf gene" babies or to modify them so that they would grow up "straight" and "normal."