Writing Downstream-Aaron Kelstone

What were you thinking Alex?  Your mother was deaf and you grew up with her your whole life. You saw how the experience of being deaf can be a terrible isolating one, especially as deaf people try to interact with a hearing world that does not understand in any way or form what it is like to be deaf, its’ joys and frustrations, the whole shebang.  Knowing all that how could you suggest that deaf people be kept apart from one another and not to socialize, marry, or have a culture?

What were you thinking Alex? You believed that when deaf people married deaf people it meant more deaf people are brought into the world. We know better know and if you knew would you have fallen in love with a deaf woman, married her, knowing you your marriage provided a higher probability that a deaf person would be born into your family?  Would you have married Mabel Hubbard Bell if you know what we know today?

What were you thinking Alex?  You taught deaf students yourself. You promoted the idea that speech needed to be a visual experience. You even invented a process called “Visual Speech.”  How did you let the oral movement get away with ignoring the basic concepts you understood through direct experience in the classroom?  Why didn’t you care enough to fight the good fight to get it right in the first place?

What were you thinking Alex?  You benefitted in so many ways from the invention of the phone, from your exposure to deaf people, from your use of sign language. You signed so fluently and used it in public to the point you embarrassed Mabel. Your wife asked you to stop signing in public for God’s sake.  What were you thinking to discourage the use of sign language?

What were you thinking Alex?  You received so much monetary blessings in life. You knew Edward Miner Gallaudet.  You meet deaf people from all over the place, but you never donated a penny to the National Association of the Deaf or accepted their invitation to come talk to us face-to-face in the traditional deaf way. You knew this very well. What were you afraid of Alex?

So many questions and we still don’t know you very well. You never gave us a chance to get to know you. You never gave yourself a chance to know us.  We had so many opportunities to sit down and talk this through.  Now you are demonized beyond recognition. There no longer remains any chance to be known, understood, or accepted.  We are all down to a Bushism, “Either you are with us or you are against us.” Where do we find the compassion to understand you Alex?