Happy New Year.
This is going to be a very powerful series of articles about community and nation, about cultures and characters, about realities and values. We are simply going to be looking for a balance and closure. We want to learn about ourselves and be better persons.
In every community- disabled or non-disabled, rich or poor, elites or the regulars, each has certain ideas and notions that are often identified with them. Although not often fair and true, we usually see a fair amount of truth in many of these assertions, about certain a community or group.
At least, for example, we know and obviously believe that people with blindness often have superior intelligence. Well, thankfully, that’s an admirable popular opinion. However, can we admit that truly people who are originally from Ijebu are very stingy with money, and are often annoyingly frugal with possessions and properties?
Well, these are common stereotypes, and we can never know for sure whether they are true or not. But one thing is that if we are told something enough times, we are sure to begin believing them.
Typically called misconceptions by the society- misconstructions are popular, critical assertions which many people believe to be true, but which upon closer inspection, reveal that commonly-held assumptions such as “Deaf people are very aggressive and easily aroused to anger” are, in fact, not quite as true as they seem.
For the deaf community, it sure has an astonishing number of misconceptions that are often leveled against it. But in fact, the deaf, among all disability clusters, tend to have the most “profound” of all of the misconceptions that are had against the community of the disabled- among all. The deaf people are quite extraordinary.
We want to look at these misconceptions that the society has about the deaf. But we just won’t mention them, we are going to look at the truths in these public declarations about the deaf community and see if we can agree with the world and accept our realities and hopefully consider challenging these stereotypes.
Nonetheless, every one of us always wants to be a better person. But even more realistic is our desire to be a better version of ourselves as deaf individuals- in the spirit of this season.
In our next article, we look at the top 10 common misconceptions about the deaf and have them resolved.
We wish you a healthy and happy year 2018.