It has been about a week now since the video of Sarah Churman was posted on YouTube. You know what happened next… it went viral, major news networks picked up on the story and reposted the video on their websites, and since then there has even been a television interview or two.
Sarah Churman, if you’re reading this, let me start out with a disclaimer. What I’m about to write isn’t about you. If your implanted hearing aid works for you, that’s great. For the moment I say this with all sincerity.
Some of you, including Sarah Churman, might be wondering what I mean by that remark: “…for the moment.” By way of an explanation, let me tell you a story.
I’ve been deaf for roughly sixteen years. But I was born hearing. I had a progressive loss. By the second grade I had my first hearing aids. I didn’t like them. They didn’t clarify anything, they made my ears stick out, and they called attention to me that I didn’t want. One incident in particular comes to mind. It involved a classmate of mine—let’s call him Tony. I wore my hearing aids for about a week after getting them. Then they made a gradual journey from my ears to a box in the back of my desk. Eventually I stopped wearing them to school altogether. My mother and my teacher were not happy about this, needless to say. Every week, I’d alternately be either earnestly encouraged or screamed at (it was my teacher who did most of the screaming). Humiliation was a common manipulative tactic. My teacher sarcastically asked me once, in front of the entire class, where my hearing aids were. I tried to remain silent, hoping she would just finally go away and leave me alone, but she kept glaring at me for what must have been five solid minutes, so I was forced to answer that I had left them at home.
“Well they’re certainly doing you a lot of good there, aren’t they?” she stated pointedly, and after holding the glare for another minute, finally let me off the hook.
So where does my classmate Tony figure into this story, you ask? Well, sometime later in the torturous crawl that was my second grade experience, he cornered me in gym or somewhere and sarcastically asked me the same thing! At the age of—what are we in second grade? Seven?—there he was, humiliating me with a voice at least five years away from having even the barest hint of testosterone in it. It’s one thing for a teacher to do that to you. Not the right thing, mind you… just one thing. It’s another to have some kid who obviously doesn’t have the faintest idea of what he’s talking about mindlessly parroting what he heard from our teacher.
Don’t worry, I’ve long since emotionally processed the overall experience of K-12 hell and recovered from it. But that incident and countless others remain examples of a disturbing truth: People establish their sense of order, their beliefs in how things should be, based on perception, not fact. My teacher didn’t actually care how much I could or couldn’t clearly hear. If she did she would have asked. And neither did Tony. My teacher wanted me to have that hearing aid on, because that’s what other people wanted… from the audiologist to my mother to the principal. Something was supposed to be done about the problem of my deafness, you see, and if I had that hearing aid on, regardless of whether it worked or not, something was being done. That’s what mattered. If I didn’t have it on—regardless of the reason—the problem in their eyes was no longer my deafness, and it never was the failings of my hearing aids. It was me.
One more story. About five years ago I purchased a pair of Widex digital hearing aids, my first ones in probably thirty years. I had to see if the whole digital implant craze was everything it was being hyped up to be.
I was fitted for the molds and had them turned on at Gallaudet University’s audiology department. Oh, how I wish someone could have videotaped me! It was weird, man! After having been deaf for so long, the part of my psyche that is used to hearing sort of mentally ‘gives voices’ to people… even to deaf people who do nothing but sign. I suppose it’s the same kind of thing where you visualize, in brief flashes, the layout of your basement as you descend its darkened staircase. You can’t actually see anything, but your mind calms you down, telling you you’ve been here before… your son’s red rocking horse is there, his trampoline is there… you don’t need to turn the light on. You know where things are.
The problem is, what people sound like in my mind and what they actually sound like (at least through Widex hearing aids and nerve cords that, according to my audiology file, anyway, don’t do what they’re supposed to do) are two very different things. And this was a startling revelation. My first response to the audiologist speaking was to say “Whoa!” And then I suddenly felt a bit dizzy and sick.
But that faded. And then for the rest of that day and week there was a real enjoyment of a bizarre world all around me… one that I knew in theory was always there but had long since stopped thinking about. During the Metro ride home, I was completely perplexed by the static bursts of garbled gibberish that I later figured out must have been the operator announcing what stop it was. During a late night walk I had to stop and stare at a fence enclosing someone’s back yard trying to identify what song was playing on the radio in the person’s house. After a few minutes I figured out that it wasn’t a song… it was a dog barking at and eyeballing me through a crack in the fence.
I also wish that someone would have videotaped me during the moment when, a couple of weeks later, I left the hearing aids on my desk in my office. I didn’t really think much about it at the time. I just wanted a break. Nonetheless I think that scene would have been an important part in a documentary exploring exactly how, just like my hearing aids in the second grade, my Widexes ended up in a box in the back of my desk drawer, where they’ve been for the last few years.
That’s the YouTube video you don’t see. And I think people need to see it. An increasing number of deaf peoples’ reactions to their hearing aids or implants being switched on for the first time have made it to YouTube. It’s undeniably emotional. I can totally understand how the hearing world thinks it’s the greatest thing since sliced bread.
On the other hand, when I go to Gallaudet, for every implant-wearing student I see—and there are a lot of them… there have been growing numbers of them for years now, since even before our famous so-called “Not Deaf Enough” protest of 2006—I’ll see another one with an implant scar but no implant. I rarely ask people about this. The truth is I don’t care. But as I grew more curious about implants over the years, I did start asking students here and there why they didn’t choose to continue wearing them, or why they chose to continue wearing them. Fear not, I’m no Tony. I did this respectfully.
Some told me they hated their implant and that it didn’t work. Some told me they loved theirs and it worked very well! Some told me it worked well enough, but in a signing environment they didn’t need it and only wore it when they went home. Some told me it didn’t really work that well at all, but they wore it when they went home because it meant less hassle from Mom and Dad.
Whenever I see videos of reactions such as Sarah Churman’s, I have no choice but to keep in mind what these students have said, and what I myself have been through. Nonetheless, as I stated earlier, my reaction to such videos is sincere if tame. If it works for these people, great.
But I don’t know how long I’ll be able to maintain this sincerity, because there’s a growing trend out there that disturbs me… When I read the comments, I see people are being so taken in by these videos, these moments of joyous success, that no other reaction except my sincere happiness is acceptable. If I’m not happy (not only for the recipient, but about anything at all related to hearing aids and implants), I’m a bigoted Deaf Culture ASL militant. If I question what these videos aren’t showing, I’m really questioning the validity of that “success moment” itself, or worse, the validity of the recipient. In fact, this type of rancor has hit the point where I’m increasingly tempted to not say anything, because that’s safer.
Pretty soon it’s going to get to the point where I’m afraid to say anything.
But I don’t like being afraid. And I don’t like being pushed around. I don’t like being made out to be something I’m not simply because I question things. And I also resent the fact that an entire group of people—members of Deaf culture—is being made out to be demons. So I am going to say something.
Having hesitations about implants doesn’t make you a member of Deaf Culture, and being a member of Deaf Culture or the Deaf Community doesn’t necessarily mean you’re against implants for any particular reason, or at all. Anyone who implies otherwise is spreading and fostering hatred. This is exactly what blanket statements are designed to do. They’re about as fair as my skimming through the comments under these videos, picking out all the ones that have bad English, and claiming the English is bad because their writers are all former implant recipients whose implants failed them.
When there’s a viral video on YouTube exploring the stories of all the students at Gallaudet and elsewhere with implant scars but no implants, their real stories, not the ones some people would like to assign to them (they’re anti-technology, unemployable, illiterate, fanatical Deaf Culture Social Security moochers), and when MSNBC.com picks up on that video and shows it, maybe I’ll feel less hesitation. When there’s a viral video out there about parents who had every hope for their child’s implant but were disappointed, about parents who feel cheated because the medical professionals involved in the implanting and rehabilitation process told them not to sign or cue, I might feel there’s some balance out there. Something to temper that how-dare-you-dampen-this-deaf-person’s-beautiful-moment-of-hearing-for-the-first-time! hate fest in the internet comments.
Better yet, let’s film deaf people telling stories about looking for jobs. Implant recipients, hearing aid users, and deaf people with neither of these… all alike, side by side. Let’s see how many employers or would-be employers (hell of a thing if the latter group is bigger than the former, hey?) maintained that moment of joyous he can hear! celebration once it turned out that being able to hear something didn’t necessarily mean all that much. At least not for everybody.
Now if you would dismiss my arguments as jaded and bitter, that’s your right. Maybe human nature isn’t what I’m implying it is, and people really do care about deaf people no matter how much they can or can’t hear. Maybe people really are going to be there for deaf people, working to give them language access whether their implants/hearing aids work or not.
Please consider something, however. When I first watched Sarah Churman’s story on MSNBC.com, I saw a question immediately under the video. This question asked me what I thought of her story. And would I please share my views on Facebook?
But you see, I didn’t immediately know what her story was. At least so far as I could tell when I first watched it that night, MSNBC.com had not seen fit to caption it.
