Someone asked about this a while back. His answer was something to the effect of if you've built your entire life around being deaf, built up your perceptions, your other senses, why would you want to alter it? Also, I think he said it would cause an awkwardness that he, and possibly many others, don't see as benefiting them.
Damn, Rebel, you're good, sir.
That's pretty much on the mark.
While I am whole-heartedly in favor of people who were born hearing, but developed deafness, having the condition corrected as much as possible, if one is naturally born that way, it's best to leave it alone.
Our instincts, our defenses, our survival skills, develop and evolve in the womb, long before we're even born. This is one of the wonders of nature, creating beings with their individual ability to adapt and use certain mechanisms to survive.
It's not only scientific, but Biblical too.
An infant developing without ears, or without hearing, is "evolving" certain instinctive skills and talents to best suit him in the world of which he is about to become a part.
Those skills and talents are not the same skills and talents developing in an infant growing with ears, or with hearing.
A deaf child coming into the world with the peculiar instincts and talents of the deaf, if suddenly able to hear, finds his natural instincts and talents worthless, and has not the means to develop ones more comparable to those with hearing.
There still haven't been enough cochlear implants done yet to provide more than a blurry picture, but as the picture sharpens, this seems to be coming into focus: (a) people who were born hearing who have the procedure done, do well, very well; and (b) people who were born deaf who have the procedure done, have an abysmally high rate of suicide.....even if the procedure was done on them as tiny infants.
There's two different worlds here; for those born deaf, even our perceptions of time, space, color, and light vary considerably from those born hearing.
For example, for me, if not busy, time flies. For hearing people, if not busy, time drags.
That sort of thing.
It's just a very different sort of world.
I get into arguments with the militant deaf about this all the time; I'm considered an Uncle Tom or Oreo cookie, among those who actually believe the "culture" of the deaf is superior to the common culture.....and into arguments with the hearing world, who seem to believe that the common culture is better than the deaf "culture."
I'm always been a rock and a hard place.
a fronte praecipitum, a tergo lupusOne time, I had a landlady curious about hearing, and I took her to an audiologist.
The audiologist put her into a dark room, made her "deaf," and for half an hour or so demonstrated to her what, and how, I "hear." She came out of there considerably shaken, and shook at random short times for months thereafter; she had no idea, and it was so different from what she imagined it to be, that she was terrified.
The same would happen to me, if I suddenly heard; I have no doubt I would be joining the subway cat in that big building with small rooms with soft walls.
