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EDITORIAL 

Here in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, gearing up for this weekend's "Battle of the Conferences," a drama is playing out on the scale of a Greek epic. Perhaps some day in the distant future some gifted writer will pen the next great epic, written on the scale of the whole of human history, and will include passages in that epic describing the rise and fall of the Oralist Movement, including merciless references to the great antagonist and arch-villain of the story, Alexander Graham Bell.

Unfortunately, the story is not fiction, it is very real, having left thousands of destroyed lives in its wake, having stolen the unrealized potential of those thousands, as well as measures of damage done to untold more numbers, pieces of whose individual lives were taken away by the insidious method of preemptive strike.

Preemptive strikes on the social level are invisible, yet very much real, since the drama of the mind has consequences for the physical world. One, put Deaf kids in day schools in order to keep the class size down as a way of inhibiting their social interaction with each other. Two, force them to try to communicate by vocalizing sounds they cannot hear, in a medium in which they have no real access, all while being prevented from developing the mental tools necessary to even begin to be able to achieve such super-human feats in the first place. Three, find some imposters and have them pretend to be successful outcomes of the pseudo-method in question. Four, take the money raised by such deceptive promotional schemes and then continue the cycle again.

The whole Bellian-Oralist scheme should have been considered a non-starter from the get-go, and should have ended up as a still-born plan of the type of mad scientist better relegated to a Mary Shelley novel. Yet here we are, over a hundred years later, the general public having been fooled by that silver-haired, silver-tongued embezzler of the mind, whose mental hijinks lay dormant, as revealed by descriptions scribbled on stray pieces of paper, or written in passages in obscure books. Or they could even be found as telling admissions buried in mountains of court trial transcripts, being hidden in plain sight, until the gambit was exposed for all to see.

Yet those perpetrators are due for a wake-up call, accompanied by the discovery that their dreams will go unrealized, and they will have to face the rude reality of the present...

Read Our Lips: Deaf children have the right to sign!

And the saga continues....

---Brian Riley, DBC conference blogger

Written: Thursday, June 26, 2008, 11:00pm CDT  

Posted (pre-conference): Friday, June 27, 2008, 11:25am CDT