Not This Too, SCOTUS

It’s been 32 years since the Americans With Disabilities Act was passed.  When I was growing up, there was no such thing as accommodations for people with disabilities, like my Deaf parents.  Their education was limited by restrictive language practices at most of the schools for the Deaf.  Hearing professionals had decided that Deaf people needed to assimilate into the hearing world and, therefore, they were forbidden to use sign language.  My mom went to Lexington School for the Deaf where she was brain washed into thinking that signing was shameful and animalistic.  Luckily for my dad, his school allowed the use of sign language.

There was no close captioning when I was growing up.  My parents didn’t watch the news or most programs because they didn’t understand what was going on.  Mouths moved too fast to accurately lipread more than a word or two.  There were no interpreters in little bubbles signing what was going on.  In fact, there were no interpreters.  Deaf parents relied on their hearing children (called KODAs—Kids Of Deaf Adults) for phone calls, doctor appointments, and just about everything else.

Deaf people were limited in the types of jobs they could get.  My dad was a printer; my uncle was a machinist.  My mom was a keypunch operator.  Deaf people could work in factories and on assembly lines.  In the 1960s, Deaf people could not be lawyers, doctors, managers, or any other position that required easy communication.

Hearing people generally looked down on my parents, thinking them “deaf and dumb”.  There was this attitude that somehow my parents were lesser than hearing people.  They were dismissive at best and, at worst, patronizing and paternalistic.  It’s as though they believed that in addition to the ears not working, Deaf brains must not work either.  My parents chafed under this kind of treatment.  It angered them.

They didn’t hear everything hearing people said about them.  We KODAs did.  It was a hurt we carried within us.

Things began to change in the 1970s.  In 1973, the Vocational Rehabilitation Act passed.  Sections 503 and 504 protected people with disabilities from discrimination on the job and in education.  Wow!  Suddenly, there were rights and opportunities not only for my parents but for anyone with challenges whether it be visual, mobility or what have you. 

Yet, by 1976 regulations to arm the Act with teeth weren’t signed.  Wearied by the delay, a country wide protest and sit-in was organized.  I stayed overnight in HEW Secretary Califano’s office with a roomful of protestors who were Deaf, blind, in wheelchairs, other mobility challenged and a handful of able bodied.  That’s a whole other story I need to tell.  We got the regulations signed.

My parents were middle-aged in 1976.  They were thrilled to be able to receive captioned TV on Line 21.  Had they wanted, they would have been able to qualify for a wider variety of jobs and education.  Now they were entitled to sign language interpreters for doctor visits, court appearances, job trainings, conferences, and classrooms.  In 1978, I became a certified interpreter under the Registry of Interpreters for the Deaf (RID).

Following that came more laws to assist people with challenges.  Next was PL94-142, which provided for the least restrictive educational environment.  Deaf adults took up the study of law, medicine, management, science and just about any subject they desired.  Hearing parents of deaf children could choose to mainstream their kids in hearing schools.  The children were provided with interpreters who stayed with them during the school day.  For years, I worked in the schools as an educational interpreter.

And, finally, in 1990 the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) was passed.

My fear now is that SCOTUS could take all that away with another bad decision.  They seem to be on a track to undo all the fundamental rights protections passed in the last fifty odd years.  They’ve already undone Roe v. Wade.  They also decided that Native American reservations are not sovereign, breaking yet another treaty.  They seem to be targeting the right to contraception next, to be followed by gay marriage.

I don’t doubt they would gleefully return people with challenges to second- or third-class citizens.

I will fight it if I see even a hint of that type of thinking anywhere.

I remember what it was like for my parents.  I remember what it was like for me.  Not again, ever.

White "Christian" Nationalists

Yesterday I read an article by CNN called “An ‘Imposter Christianity Is Threatening American Democracy.” https://www.cnn.com/2022/07/24/us/white-christian-nationalism-blake-cec/index.html I was very upset by it because white “Christian” Nationalists are hijacking and abusing what it means to be a Christian.  To be Christian, it means one follows the teachings of Jesus Christ. 

These white “Christian” Nationalists do NOT follow his teachings.  They are more obsessed with the Old Testament and Revelation.  The Old Testament is important in that it gives us a history of the Jewish people, the Ten Commandments, and points in many verses to the coming of Jesus.  People who are not Christian believe that a Savior will come someday.  Christians believe that Jesus will come again. Faux Christian Nationalists think Jesus will return as a general leading their violent army,

Meanwhile, what are Jesus’ teachings that we’re supposed to live by if we are really Christian?  To love God foremost but to also love our neighbors as we love ourselves.  There are no ifs, ands or buts when it comes to the color of our skins, our sexual preferences or gender identities, our poverty or homelessness, or physical/mental challenges.  So: by loving one another, we have empathy toward each other.  We care for each other.  Translate that to universal health care, adequate housing, feeding hungry people, looking after the sick/elderly and so on.

But these white “Christian” nationalists don’t believe in those things and actively campaign against anything that would provide assistance to anyone in need – who isn’t a White Anglo Saxon Protestant (WASP).  There’s been a lot of admiration for one of the dictators they admire, Viktor Orban in Hungary that doesn’t want to “mix blood”.  These faux Christians in this country would like to get rid of anyone of color to make the US a white-only country.  After that, they’d probably work on getting rid of Catholics and Jewish people too.  The insurrectionists at the Capitol on January 6^th were made up of a large number of these fake Christians and they almost succeeded in their coup attempt.

They’re suffering from some major incorrect beliefs.  Chief among them is that they believe America is a Christian nation.  They think the Founding Fathers were evangelicals and that God intended a special role for America.  Where did they get that idea?  Some who wrote the Constitution were Christian, it’s true, but they weren’t evangelicals.  Many of the Founding Fathers were NOT Christian.  There’s no mention of the Bible or the Ten Commandments in the Constitution.  Maybe these white nationalists need to sit down and read it.  Better yet, they need some real history lessons about America.

The article says that the Jesus white Christian nationalists follow is from Revelation.  I am not as familiar with Revelation because I don’t like it.  It has a violent, warrior Jesus, much like the bloodthirsty insurrectionists we saw at the Capitol.  If we get to the point where we have an angry Jesus striking out against people, I’ll bet it will be against everyone who hurt children, allowed people to starve or die from lack of health care.  Here’s another point: they believe it’s okay for them to commit mayhem and violence but God forbid if another minority group did it.

Some of these people believe God handed us the 2^nd Amendment.  I swear, these people need to take history lessons.  God did not hand down the 2^nd Amendment.  That was just to preserve a militia in case of attack.  The 2^nd Amendment was written when guns were muskets.  Now these people think it covers AR-15s and other mass killing weapons.  If SCOTUS wants to follow the Constitution as it was originally written, they’d better reconsider their pro-mass killing weapons stances.

Faux Christians think a “Real American” is a WASP and no one is entitled to the same rights.  I am totally shaking my head in disgust and shame.  It’s 2022 and there are actual people who believe that shit, that it’s “us” and “them” (non-WASPs).  No wonder Jesus will be pissed when he returns.  What a perversion of his teaching.

What made me angriest was reading that ministers are becoming afraid to redirect their congregations and rethink what Jesus’ teachings actually mean.  Ministers are afraid to speak the truth?  They worry how their congregants might react?  In these days of people’s lives being threatened and reputations vilified by the right-wing extremists, politicians, faux Christians and other white supremacist terrorist, it’s no wonder a minister might be afraid.  But then why have a church or a minister if not to be saying and doing the right thing?

I am a Christian and I am white but I am not a faux “white Christian” nationalist.  I don’t believe in that shit.  The article mentioned a book I am going to check out to read:  Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation by Kristin Kobes Du Mez.  I would rather know what I’m dealing with than to have it sprung on me unawares.  Maybe everyone should read it.

Different Drummer

I am by nature an introvert.  I tend to be an observer and can relate to the feeling of being on the periphery of a group of friends or family.   Before I started school, I was surrounded by loving family and believed that all mommies and daddies were deaf inside the house and hearing outside.  The reason for that is sign language was still stigmatized when I was a child in the ‘50s-60s-70s.  My parents didn’t sign in public, only using their voices with my brother, family members and me.

When I was in first grade, we moved to a neighborhood about 10 miles from most other family members.  Our neighbors on either side had children and I wanted to be friends with them.  One morning, I woke to chanting out my bedroom window.  I went outside to see what was going on and found these “friends” dancing atop a mound of peat moss my parents had delivered to our back yard.  They were chanting, “Cassie’s mother is deaf and dumb.”  I wasn’t sure why they were calling my mom dumb because she wasn’t.  I was hurt and angry, charging up the mound to push them all off.

I ran inside and found Mom in the kitchen.  I mouthed and acted out what happened, and her eyes began flashing with anger.  I wanted to know what “deaf and dumb” was.  Mom said it was an insult because she couldn’t hear.  That was news to me.  For the first time, it crossed my mind that she couldn’t hear me speak.

“Can you hear me?” I asked, loudly, and she shook her head no.  Now I was really upset.  I shouted, “Can’t you hear me NOW?” She shook her head no over and over.  I was thunderstruck.  My parents weren’t like the neighbor kids’ parents at all.  Just as suddenly, I realized we were different.

I did eventually make friends with other kids in the neighborhood but I was more reserved than I ever had been.  I’d been burned and never played with those first friends again.  Sometimes the newer friends would invite me to their houses to play; I was reluctant to ask them to come to mine.  I didn’t want a repeat of those first new “friends”.

At 10, we moved to Baltimore.  People thought I was shy because I was very quiet.  My brother and I did play with kids in the neighborhood but we were always on tenterhooks because we were different.  Sometimes those kids would taunt us and say our parents were foreign spies because they “talked funny.”  It was a lonely feeling, not being a part of the group.

It wasn’t just my parents’ deafness that made me feel different.  It was as if being far from family removed my parents’ inhibitions.  They discovered a social club for the Deaf and that became their center.  The drinking and domestic violence began.  My brother and I didn’t want to have friends over.  I didn’t want anyone to learn the truth about what was happening in my family.  I already had co-dependent characteristics and they were aggravated and increased by the drinking and fighting.

As I maneuvered my way through school, I had a handful of friends.  We socialized by phone only after school.  I never fit in with a clique.  Fortunately, after a disastrous year in junior high, I managed to move up from the bullied loser caste level to a level where the mean kids just tolerated and left me alone.  I was just so relieved to be away from the cliques. 

I preferred to hang out in my bedroom with the door closed, reading or writing, and listening to Neil Diamond.  I enjoyed my privacy and definitely enjoyed being away from my battling parents.

As I got older, I learned about transcendentalism and was introduced, by a favorite English teacher, to writers like Emerson and Thoreau.  I found a quote that hit me where I lived and it became “mine”:

If a man does not
keep pace with
his companions,
perhaps it is
because he hears a
different drummer.
Let him step to
the music which
he hears, however
measured or
far away.  –Henry David Thoreau

This is me, I thought.  It was an early act of self-care that I took this quote and decided to wear it proudly as a shield against hurtful words and being left out. 

It wasn’t always easy to wear that shield, especially when it came to dealing with my parents and their issues.  All of my own were triggered often as I tried to be a “good girl” to control their drinking and stop them hitting each other.  Stress brought on panic attacks/depression and I would lose that shield I was wearing.  Sometimes I couldn’t find it again for long periods of time.  I told my parents I needed to see a psychiatrist, and they were horrified.  How embarrassing.

I got help once I got a full-time job with benefits.  Therapy was a little helpful in that I got medication to reduced my panic attacks and depression. It was 1974 and there wasn’t a lot of information about children growing up in dysfunctional homes.   It was in the early 1990s before I learned about 12 step meetings specifically about my experiences.  Later on, in the ‘90s, I found a therapist who had alcoholic parents.  I learned so much about why and how I felt such intense anger and anxiety.  Understanding why I felt as I did help me learn how to reshape my own responses to difficult situations.  It’s taken years but now I’m in a very comfortable place.

I know how to act like an extrovert and I can take that role if it’s necessary.  Most of the time, though, I am who I am and don’t feel a need to explain myself or feel left out of things or hurt.  I have a few good friends, my books, my music, my writing.  Most of all, I have a supportive and loving husband, and an awesome blended family, 3 of my own adult children, 2 of his, 8 grandchildren and 2 great grandchildren.  Life is good.  I am grateful.

I still march to that different beat.  I always will.