Deaf Firefighter’s Blog

I’ve made no secret of the fact that I love music and my iPod. One of the interesting trends I’ve noticed for myself recently, is how I usually hate a song at first but after hearing it a few times on the iPod’s shuffle feature, I really start to like it.

One of these songs is U2’s “Stuck In A Moment You Can’t Get Out of” from their album “All That You Can’t Leave Behind”. When I first heard it, it was really incomprehensible. After playing it a few times on my ipod, looking up the lyrics and then looking up the history of the song, it really came together for me.

Originally, the song was written after the suicide of Bono’s friend Michael Hutchence of INXS fame and it was characterized as an argument between friends. Click here for more on the genesis of the song and its meaning for Bono.

(For some reason, I can’t embed the captioned video I made.. help is appreciated)  Click here for the link: http://www.bubbleply.com/player.aspx?pid=3c098c84-c788-4e86-af1d-1556f3c77552

But one of the great things about really good songwriting is that you can apply it to practically any situation. When I was driving to DC for a recent conference and this song came on, I had been thinking about deafread and the deaf community in general.

It occured to me that we often think of deaf history as “moments” spread out through history.  Examples of these can include:

• Laurent Clerc’s arrival in America in 1816
• Gallaudet (or rather, Columbia Institution’s) charter by Congress - 1857
• Milan Conference - 1880
• George Veditz’s movies and efforts to preserve ASL - 1903
• Passage of PL 94-142 (now called IDEA act) - 1975
• Gallaudet DPN protest - 1988
• Passage of ADA - 1990
• Jordan/Fernandes/Davila brouhaha - 2007

And like the song says, a lot of people get stuck in moments that they can’t get out of.  Many moments are positive, but folks seem to get hung up on the negative moments and, again, like the song says their way “falters.”

It doesn’t have to me major moments like those listed above.  Perhaps it might be treatment received at the hands of smug ASL-ists / oralists?  Perhaps it might be an act of discrimination at a job or restaurant?  Maybe someone looked at your ASL and decided you were less of a person for having used it?

For me, it’s been seeing other firefighters that don’t know me calling my abilities, my sanity (and that of my department) into question. Being called a “liability” sometimes bugs me to no end.

Do those moments serve to dehumanize you?  You wouldn’t be human if you didn’t feel put down.  What matters is how we respond to these moments, both individually and collectively.  I’ve talked about some bloggers that seem to get stuck fairly often.

I’ve been reading, with utter fascination, the advocacy efforts that stem out of comments made by Jack O’Connell, the State’s Superintendent for Public Instruction, on a radio program regarding The Governator’s budget for education in California.   More to the point, I’m thrilled to see what seems to be a fairly comprehensive advocacy approach being brought to bear against short-sighted government cuts and seeing that detailed at the “Deaf Children Are Precious” blog.

It would have been easy to do any number of things to protest this decision but the advocates haven’t allowed themselves to get “stuck in the moment” and have kept moving forward, changing the targets of their action as the situation has changed.  It’s a fascinating process to watch from 3k miles away.