29 May, 2011

The film crews for Lifetime will be knocking down Roger's door any minute

... Because there is clearly nothing more tragic than Roger Taylor having hearing loss! Oh noes!

Being d/Deaf isn't a problem. And Roger has access to the best hearing aides money can buy, he can still write and perform music, so I'm not seeing how this qualifies as a "dark secret" or suffering. A dark secret would be if Roger had eaten babies and kept the inedible parts in a storage facility. To be disabled (feel free to substitute that word for whatever works for you) in any way is not suffering. I can imagine that it's a bit of an adjustment on his part, but he isn't writhing in pain or crying himself to sleep every night so... the fuck?

Able-bodied privilege breaks my heart. Roger's "suffering" from being d/Deaf, people in wheelchairs are "confined" to them, and there are billions of other conditions that would take the rest of my life to list, and in Western society we are taught to pity and fear people who cannot do certain things, or have to do them differently, or whatever. And yeah, some people really do see whatever they've got going on as this Horrible Thing, but I just can't. The guy's been playing ridiculously loud drums at ridiculously loud concerts for most of his life, this cannot be filed under "I just don't know how this could have happened!"

I won't lie, I have days where I pretty much say "fuck cerebral palsy! This fucking sucks!" But I'm really just blowing off steam. It's fucking exhausting being treated a little less than just because I use forearm crutches (which, by the way, I've tried to see if I could use one of them as a Freddie mic, but it just doesn't work). At the end of the day, it's never really my CP that makes me angry, it's how I'm treated by everyone else as a result of having CP.

So Rog, congrats on making your deafness public. And wow! I had no idea how different American Sign Language and British Sign Language alphabets are!

No comments:

Post a Comment