Debate #1: Deaf Culture and Cochlear Implants.

So in my ASL class, we just watched a movie named Sound and Fury and typed up a 2 paged paper last night about our opinions. In the movie there are two families with deaf children. 1 family is completely deaf, the other the parents are hearing. Family #1 has conflicts with making the decision to give their 4 year old daughter a Cochlear Implant, whilst the other family is giving their 2 year old the surgery.

Doctors and officials say that giving the surgery at a young age is best and showed statistics of the success rates, wavelength comparisons (old age vs younger age,) etc. Knowing that family #1 decides to move to Maryland, one of the biggest Deaf communities in the world, and avoid surgery because they are proud to be deaf. Family #2 is criticized and judged upon their family members that Cochlear Implants will kill Deaf Culture completely and the deaf community will go extinct.

So the question is: Is it practical, socially acceptable, and justifiable to give a Deaf kid a Cochlear Implant? Will it improve the Deaf community and help them succeed? Or is preserving culture more important to your identity than to giving your children the best alternatives you can give them?

This is one of the touchy subjects that I am kinda harsh with. Yes I do understand that people with hearing disabilities etc. have their own culture, but in no way does that imply that it is a good thing to lack one of your senses or to have actual, practical and factual disadvantages compared to other people, because no matter how much you sugarcoat it and how many nice things you find to say about it, it doesn't make up for lacking one of your senses, for lacking one of the only 5 ways you have to come in contact and understand the world around you.

An adult that loses his hearing may willingly chose to not get it back for whatever weird reason, however someone who was born deaf cannot tell what it is like to not be able to hear just like you and me cannot tell what it's like to use telepathy, we never had it, we don't miss it, and therefore may think that it's not worth it. His lack of knowledge however does not mean he is better off never listening to the voices of his loved ones, never listening to music, endagering his own life because he can't hear the guy telling him to watch out, he can't hear the horn of the car coming fast from behind him, he can't hear that fire alarm going off etc. essentially leaving all his survival instincts to eyesight and sense of pain. As such such a person's parents do not have the right for whatever culture to take those away from their children because no matter how many sweet words you give me and how many cultural differences that I seemingly cannot object to you present, whether I tell you or not I find no difference in a parent taking away his child's hearing from a father cutting off his son's leg because he finds his titanium alloy leg and the pains he gets in the rainy season to be cool or the father that grabbed his 2 screaming kids and jumped off with them from the roof to "protect" them because he lost his job.

A culture that only hurts the well-being of humans is a culture I will always be up for losing, it is culture that had human sacrifices, it is culture that made the crusades and throughout the ages, even today, preserving your cultural identity is something that can give birth to tragedies. I am not of course claiming that preservation of a cutlural identity is something bad in itself, but that it is in no way a sufficient arguement, the valid reason for which you wish to retain your cutlural identity is. I'm one of the cynical people who will say "bullshit" immidiatelly in such situations.