Early this morning I left home and went to the coffee shop where I sat, drank tea and wrote. I left several hours later. It’s a late summer Vancouver day, sunny, breezy and noisy.

I came out of the coffee shop where they were playing pop, past another coffee shop where they tend to play jazz and blues, around the corner and up the road (somebody’s car was piping Eminem as it went by); I came here for lunch – where the staff is into Ugly Duckling and Ravi Shankar. Walking in Vancouver is like swimming in sound, or more accurately, sound which is really the smoking breath of human worlds slapping up against each other along the street.
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I’ve been reading A Journey into the Deaf-World and although I find it interesting, useful and informative, it also pisses me off. By the time I got half-way into chapter 3 the text had already done it twice. I’ve chosen one part of one sentence to explicate my anger.

Here is the sentence:

“ASL has struggled for survival and evolved into its present form, despite hearing efforts to eradicate it”
(A Journey into the Deaf-World 43).

I am not arguing the facts. Some hearing people tried to stop some deaf people from using sign language. I am going to argue against the subtext of the sentence.

Look again at my sentence: “Some hearing people tried to stop some deaf people from using sign language.” I used “deaf,” not “Deaf.”

I did it on purpose. What the sub-text of this sentence argues is that what those (hearing) people tried to do is stop some deaf individuals from using sign language. It further suggests (because of my choice of capitalization) that those persons were not really trying to stop deaf individuals from becoming Deaf individuals (that is, from becoming part of a distinct cultural entity instead of just an individual with a different sensory skill set). It is highly unlikely, in their zeal, that these anti-signers had the Machiavellian wherewithal to see the larger, cultural implications of their actions. They just weren’t that far-thinking; not that smart. It takes a particular kind of arrogant, self-obsessed genius to plan and carry out genocide (whether cultural or biological), and most of us, despite being self-obsessed are simply not coherent enough to carry out big (if socially evil) plans like genocide.

Quite a bit is known about genocide since, as humans, we continue to practice it frequently. You can read about it if you like, but I don’t really want to talk genocide. What I am arguing is that it takes a specific combination of human traits to master-mind such an attempt. Most of us—those who placidly go along with our respective governments’ (or other body of authority, i.e. religious leaders’ or educational leaders’) “normalization” of the unwanted group—are willing to look the other way and (often under intense social pressure) wield the club. But those few who sit down and write various “White Papers” about how the “end the Indian problem” (or any other social policy whose intent is the eradication of a particular human group) are (luckily) few and far between.

What the required traits are for the pursuit of others with the intention of eradication is a study for your spare time. The only trait I will mention here is a fairly out-sized fear response to the unknown. Most people when they meet the unknown feel fear, but then when bad things don’t follow (as their bodies suspect might happen), then the fear diminishes and slowly the unknown becomes the familiar. That doesn’t happen with a few humans. They don’t listen to the facts of life; they follow their fear instead.

Who are those people? Well, there are some that are hearing. There are some that are white. There are some that are Turkish. There are some that are male. Some of them are Muslim. But, of course, there are others who are deaf, brown, Armenian, female and Christian. Every group—every group—has some.

So back to – “despite hearing efforts to eradicate it”

Actually it wasn’t because they were hearing. It was because they were either of the Machiavellian few or because they had the traits of the authority-followers who form the vast majority of populations that periodically try to wipe out “difference.”

Another example:

I could say: Children have struggled to survive and evolve into their present form despite adult attempts to eradicate them.

However misleading, the sentence is true. You are probably an adult if you are reading this—Do you take offense at my example? I wrote it, and I did.

The subtext in my example says (amongst other things) that being adult is enough to make a person dangerous.If I wanted to begin to subvert the subtext of the sentence and put it more accurately I could say—Children have struggled to survive and have evolved into their present form despite pedophiles’ (as an example) attempts to destroy them and the general society’s unwillingness to take children’s rights and conditions seriously.It is not the fact that a pedophile is an adult that makes him/her dangerous, it is that peculiarly awful sexual desire for the prepubescent and his or her willingness to act on that desire that makes him/her dangerous.

The corollary: It is not the fact that a person is hearing that makes him/her dangerous.

What I find particularly interesting about subtext is its power. Most people don’t actually like to think. They prefer to take the word of some “authority.” These are the same people who, despite not being the architect of x-specific attempt at genocide, were in fact the reason that so many fell to the few Machiavellian-types who had the particular traits necessary to begin yet another attempt to eradicate difference. In other words: cannons alone can’t make a devastation. Us cannon-fodder and cannon-balls are also necessary.

Living with the misleading subtext, not thinking it through, that is dangerous. It is what convinces us “cannon balls” to stuff ourselves into the policies of our authority-types who have decided we need a good stiff conflict. For example: When certain officials made “Jews caused the downfall of our great nation” the party line, they offered the authority-followers a way to put their pain and fear onto another. It wasn’t particularly well thought out. It certainly wasn’t even remotely true to the facts of the world. And of course it did not turn out well for either the “great nation” or the “Jews” in question.

Putting pain and fear onto another group without clarity of thought and care with expression always ends up badly for all involved. Of course this lesson of history, that war really doesn’t make peace, and that trying to make us all the same (or blame others) never actually works to make us happier, or healthier, or more the same, doesn’t actually seem to impinge on our capacity for reason. But cannon-fodder and cannon balls are not known for their capacity to think things through, and cannons are not known for caring about the fate of either their balls or their fodder.

So I do object as an adult to being lumped in with pedophiles. I also object to being lumped in with those who have lived life according to their fear, regardless of whether the “lumper” is doing it because I am white, hearing, female or just because I am alive. But, bottom line, what I object to the most is those who write/speak/sign such egregious sentences without first thinking about what they actually say. The stupid arrogance of it continues to astound.

Lane, Harlan, Robert Hoffmeister and Ben Bahan, A Journey into the Deaf-World. San Diego, CA: Dawn Sign Press, 1996.