Deaf Firefighter’s Blog

I usually have to travel a fair bit for my work as Program Director for CEPIN. Usually, most of those travels deal with administrative things or find me attending/speaking at conferences.

Wednesday was no different. I was scheduled to attend a Summit on Emergency Preparedness and Special Needs Populations and then a gala reception later that evening for the American Association for People with Disabilities. Sounds nice, but usually my function is to show up, make a few salient points, and wonder why I didn’t just stay home.

Wednesday actually was different.

The conference was hosted by Booz Allen Hamilton, a well-known government consultancy. They put forth their concept of a “Megacommunity” as a way of resolving the problems that are too big for any one entity to solve. Years ago, we came to expect the government to solve all of our problems. After 9/11 and Katrina, we realized that this isn’t possible.

The Megacommunity concept basically says that the public sector (government), private sector (corporations), and civil sector (non-profits and other Non-Governmental Organizations) should band together to apply their resources to a fairly specific set of problems.

To use an example from their documents: After Hurricane Andrew practically flattened parts of South Florida, the state government at that time realized that they couldn’t possibly single-handedly prepare and recover the entire state on their own. What they did instead was bring all groups of stakeholders to the table and basically said, “We can do this together. What can you bring to the table? How can we keep this from happening again?”

Well, there hasn’t been a category 5 hurricane in that area since, they did have 5 hurricanes hitting the state in 2004. We did not see the same level of human suffering that we did in Andrew because building codes had been strengthened, awareness and preparedness efforts were improved, and nonprofits were ready to help their constituents. I won’t say everything was hunky-dory but when you compare that to Katrina, it certainly was a much better result.

While at the AAPD Leadership Gala, they recognized Eric Rosenthal of the Mental Disability Rights International (MDRI) for his work in exposing the horrible conditions that people with mental disabilities are exposed to in countries around the world and his work toward getting the United Nations to recognize basic human rights for people with disabilities worldwide.

An emaciated and dehydrated little girl, suffering from life-threatening diarrhea, tied into a crib at Kulina. Photo Marc Schneider 2007 (c - MDRI)

I’m sure deaf people worldwide are subjected to the exact same conditions and we don’t know about it. Or is it because we don’t care? We’re so caught up in the relatively petty squabbles about Pepsi ads, and deficit thinking that we’ve lost sight of some of the very real problems that exist out there in the world.

There are countries that lock up deaf people because they’re deaf.

There are countries that lack any type of telecommunications access for their deaf citizens.

There are countries that don’t provide hearing aids or other basic hearing services

There are countries that actively repress signed languages.

So what are you doing about it? For my part, I just made a donation to MDRI. But for the deaf community to actively attack this problem, we need to start working together with people we never thought we’d ever share the same room with. That means sitting at the table with NAD, AGBell, HLAA, the VRS companies, government agencies, etc. .

We need to start by identifying what the problem is. We need to start by saying “This is the problem that we all share.” Each entity at the table doesn’t need to “give up” or compromise on their core beliefs but they can say, “This is what we can do to help.”

We can apply this to whatever problem we have and achieve a long-standing resolution to the problems that face us rather than wasting our breath on insignificant, trivial issues.

So what will you do today?