[stylist] question

Thu Mar 26 18:40:29 UTC 2009

Barbara:

There were two interesting studies that may answer your question.  

One study was about the amount of contact people had with each other.  The
writers came up with a nickname for a big psychological term, I forget the
academic term, but the nickname for it was Vitmain T, T short for Tribe.
The less contact you have--the less time, the fewer interactions, etc.--the
less vitamin T you have and it has a negative impact on your well-being.
But the more vitamin T, the healthier your life is.  Family is important,
but also friends, community stuff like churches or clubs, and so on.

Well, the researchers found that many people were in serious decline in this
department.  Working all day in their tiny cubiles.  Family is smaller, if
you even have one.  Not much else, certainly not on a daily or even weekly
basis.

The other article was about minorities and how people cope with
relationships and major events.  Its basic thesis was that those in
close-knit minority communities tended to have healthier relationships and
tended to cope with events better, like death in the family.  Less likely to
divorce, lower rates of suicide, etc.

Neither mentioned the Deaf community, but I would thinki that both apply
very well.  I'll admit that I don't know hearing and sighted people well,
what they're really like in mainstream life, and so I can't justly compare.
But if what I glean from memoirs, novels, and the movies I saw from when I
could still watch movies, if hearing and sighted people are anything like
that, then I'll take banding together.  

I remember a panel of grown hearing children of Deaf parents.  They said
that though they entered into mainstream society, they always found
themselves coming back to the Deaf community.  They said it wasn't just
because Deaf culture is their native culture before they learned to be like
hearing people, but it also had to do with very basic things that their
hearing families, spouses,s friends just could not provide.  For example,
one woman's husband's mother died, and since she was close to her, she was
just as grieved, but nobody would talk about it, everyone was so buttoned up
and keeping stuff inside.  She was bothered by this and finally could not
stand it any longer and got in her car and drove for two days to her Deaf
parents.  Her old Deaf friends came over there, and it was only then she
could talk about her grief and start with the process.

Maybe it was just that she didn't know how to grieve with the hearing side
of her family and they did have a perfectly good and healthy way to do it
and it was just that she didn't know what it was.  I dunno.  But there were
many other stories from that interesting panel that leads me to suspect that
life in mainstream society is NOT all that great and maybe is even very,
very sick.

Again, I don't know both sides firsthand.  I only know the signing community
intimately.  All of my hearing and sighted friends are signers, people who
have adopted the signing community as their own, so they're not really like
most hearing and sighted people.  Many of them say they find our community
to be fulfilling in ways that mainstream culture could not.  They feel more
alive, more fully human among us.  

Maybe you have some experience of some minority communities.  What do you
think?

John

-----Original Message-----
From: stylist-bounces at nfbnet.org [mailto:stylist-bounces at nfbnet.org] On
Behalf Of Barbara Hammel
Sent: Wednesday, March 25, 2009 9:01 PM
To: NFBnet Writer's Division Mailing List
Subject: Re: [stylist] question

As much as she may be disliked, Helen Keller did say once that to be blind 
was to be cut off from things but to be deaf was to be cut off from people. 
As  blind folks, we are only cut off from the things that the sighted world 
find exceedingly important.  As a deaf person, one is in the world alone 
unless he wants to read lips or communicate via written word.  The deaf 
really have no choice but to band together.  Who else can speak their 
"language"?  I wish everyone were required to at least learn to finger spell

in school.  There is no reason why, in the advanced culture that we live, 
that deaf folks should have to feel the need to band together.
Barbara

If wisdom's ways you wisely seek, five things observe with care:  of whom 
you speak, to whom you speak, and how and when and where.

--------------------------------------------------
From: "John Lee Clark" <johnlee at clarktouch.com>
Sent: Wednesday, March 25, 2009 12:18 AM
To: "'NFBnet Writer's Division Mailing List'" <stylist at nfbnet.org>
Subject: Re: [stylist] question

> Jim:
>
> What you wrote made me wonder about something.  In academic circles, for
> rehab of the blind, education of the blind, blind studies, and so on, are
> there many blind researchers and professors?
>
> I am very fearful that the answer may be no.
>
> The only thing I know is that I was truly shocked to learn that the
> Minnesota school for the blind has only one fully blind teacher.  One!
> Compare this to the school for the deaf, where eighty percent of the staff
> is deaf, all the way from administration down to houseparents.
>
> The academic journals on deafness, ASL, Deaf education, and so on, all are
> edited by Deaf scholars and the great majority of contributors, the
> professors and such, are Deaf.
>
> True, mainstreaming is prevalent, but this is most often a problem with
> school districts wanting to keep Deaf students because they're cash cows.
> They promise they'll provide all the resources blah blah.  But it's crap.
>
> Still, Deaf schools are going strong and there are many large Deaf 
> programs
> within public schools, so there's a good social critical mass and also 
> Deaf
> teachers there.  All the accredition programs, the teacher training 
> programs
> for Deaf education, etc. all are run by Deaf people.
>
> I hope that blind people run everything, too.  If that's not the case, 
> that
> needs to change--or am I wrong to think that would be a good thing?
>
> John
>
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