Pain is
represented as something we can perceive
in the sense in
which we perceive a matchbox.
Ludwig
Wittgenstein,
Philosophical
Investigation,
1953
First, Dylan Quick, 20, is deaf and has cochlear implants (CI). Secondly, Quick stabbed 14 students at TCC. Thirdly, the police reported that Quick had begun a wickedly inventive fabulist journey about stabbing as many people as possible at age 8.
I didn’t have to understand, I just knew. When I was young and impressionable then, I talked to my parents who are also Deaf, and they kind of looked at me as if “one doesn’t have this kind of experience, he's foolish.” That’s the kind of thing that we the Deaf (please notice that the uppercase D represents us collectively) say that we know that Quick’s being Deaf is quickly viewed as irrelevant. We don’t believe it, we know it.
One of my ASL students asked me about yesterday’s stabbing incident at Texas Community College so I needed to do a quick, in-class research by pulling up some online articles on Dylan Quick—how social media describes the incident. The police announced that Quick thought a lot about killing people since he was young.
The students were shocked and wondered why the parents didn’t notice his deviance. As the instructor, I tried very hard to account for it.
I told them that no children by the age of seven, who can hear, have a normal speech. They begin to learn to read and speak in school where their grammar teachers would remind them of how to “intone” a little for punctuations—period, comma, colon, semicolon, exclamation mark, question mark, quotation mark, and the like.
CI is manufactured to pick up only sounds, not these intonations. Deaf children with CI are unable to filter out local noises—cars running by, footsteps tapping down the hall, and even some body noises—to listen to these punctuations. Their speech becomes “funny” or “impaired” or “monotonous,” and this is quickly noticed by their hearing counterparts.
Now my cynicism says, “Well, now, you know, Deaf children with CI can ‘listen and speak.’” For me, CI is simple an annoyance of the deep reluctance. It doesn’t take away from the fact that deafness, whether total or only partial, implies a different channel—Sight—through which information, knowledge and communication are conveyed. For the Deaf, our eyes, not our ears, take in everything and then process it to our brain—a different way of thinking.
As for the parents of Quick, they are clearly the victims of a big, huge, enormous CI hoax to believe that Quick can hear. Every morning they might have checked whether Quick was on with CI. Yes, that was it! I know they were not communicating with Quick, they were training Quick "to listen and speak." Unbeknown to them, Quick remains essentially Deaf and has completely different needs. It’s sad that, in our society—our culture, we cannot accept being Deaf better than we can the CI hoax.
Quick must have started out open and spontaneous as a Deaf baby. Yes, but his parents very quickly learned that, due to his being Deaf, he was not to be so open. Fast forward to Quick’s enrollment in Texas Community College where he finally learned to be kind of pseudo-sophisticate and became a Wittgenstein matchbox that was open, and 14 of his college mates got stabbed. It could have been worst but Quick got arrested. Isn’t that painful?
Moral: Deaf children need to live their lives like a painting that is being painted without external interference. They are the painter and they are also the painting. Let them paint themselves.
CNS
:-)
