Seven values for California Association of the Deaf (CAD) to exist with

The barriage of negative comments from a very small intimate group of deaf people who are displeased with the current California Association of the Deaf (CAD) leadership continue to fill my inbox.

Putting the negative mudslinging way aside for the moment, I want to share you the seven values CAD should exist with.

1 ) INTEGRITY - Firm adherence to a code of moral values. Complete honesty, integrity, is almost tangible. Whenever you encounter it in deaf leaders, you know you can trust them. This ability to inspire trust and confidence is often a factor in a deaf organization's success.

2 ) COURAGE - Strength to do what is right regardless of consequences. Successful organizations require courage. Moments may come when courage alone will stand between organizations and disaster. There will be times when when we need dogged courage to keep our community going in hard times. We become what we think so we better pay attention to what we think.

3 ) ENTHUSIASM - Passion for continuity. There is the basic answer to the problem of keeping enthusiasm. You can not outlive enthusiasm. You can not achieve anything without enthusiasm.

4 ) HAPPINESS - State of well being and contentment. It is a favorite objective for the deaf community to be happy. Deaf leaders who are energetic, decisive, flexible, creative, and sociable create happy deaf communities. They tolerate frustration well and are willing to help others be happy.

5 ) CONFIDENCE - Belief and trust in self. Nothing is impossible for confident deaf leaders. The secret is to think eccentric to get big results. Confidence is available to everyone regardless of who, what, and where they are.

6 ) HOPE - Expectation of success. Deaf organizations are always fraught with confusion. Difficulties will always descend upon our community and if we have hope, it will pass. Deaf organizations that continue on, are the ones that have hope.

7 ) DEVOTION - Selfless concern for everyone. Reducing disappointment among members will make a deaf leader victorious. Devoted deaf leaders see the best in everyone. They also stay away from character assassinations. And they do not show disappointment in people that do not demonstrate devotion.

The next few days will play out the true colors of CAD and we all hope for the best that we elect to continue the traditions that has kept CAD alive, thriving, and strong.

Richard Roehm

Regarding California Association of the Deaf (CAD) Leadership

This is a short note in response to an email I received yesterday regarding Richard Ray's leadership.

I want to make a short note responding to an email I received yesterday asking for comments on Richard Ray's leadership as California Association of the Deaf's president.

I want to say his leadership is wonderful and there has never been a CAD leader as inclusive (as Ray) before so I'm satisfied with Richard Ray's leadership of CAD.

What I'm seeing going on with the deaf community, we're transitioning from the old deaf to the new deaf community. CAD is like a bridge. And the CAD leaders are like bridge pilings. The first piling is Don Rosenkjar, then and now its Richard Ray the current president and we need one more person to complete the transition from the old deaf to the new deaf. That third person will be the next piling under the bridge. We need to vote on next person to be the third piling under the bridge to lead us and continue the transition.

Richard

P.S. If you expected me to attack someone in this message, I'm sorry I didn't meet your expectation.

Kappa Gamma Style Childishness Reigns Once Again

Click on the links to images below to see how far someone would go to discredit my last blog post.

http://www.deafadvocacy.org/img/screenshot-8.png

http://www.deafadvocacy.org/img/screenshot-9.png

http://www.deafadvocacy.org/img/screenshot-10.png

This is unquestionably pure Kappa Gamma childishness. The very childishness that we've seen and reported in published books is still alive and kicking.

It's real nice to see someone trying hard to scare people away from the

"Response to Carl Schroeder's Yesterday's Post on ASL"
located at
http://www.deafadvocacy.org/blog/2007/08/time-to-check-those-deaf-groups-for.html

post by stating there's a virus or spyware on it.

You can see this 'warning' on this post;

http://deafpundit.wordpress.com/2007/08/24/warning/

What I posted is the truth and too bad if the truth hurts.

If you really want to beautify ASL for a change, you're going to have to stop using it in the 4 methods I've described on that post.

Richard

Response to Carl Schroeder's Yesterday's Post on ASL

This is in response to our wonderful vlogger Carl Schroeder blog post yesterday on saving ASL (American Sign Language) by writing about it and funding for it.

It’s great you'd think you can try saving ASL by writing about it and get funding to support it.

Remember you're going to have to write beyond the following facts we've seen associated with ASL in the recent years.

1) ASL has been used as a measuring stick to determine a deaf person's deafworthiness and we saw a lot of that last year at Gallaudet University.

2) ASL has been used as a weapon against the hearing society through numerous lawsuits and against the oral deaf people through use of harassment, belittlement, and scourge and thats evidenced by numerous books, blogs and, vlogs.

3) Now ASL is being used as a discriminatory barrier to get into Gallaudet University as it blocks out those who do not use ASL from admission.

4) ASL has been used to terrorize and hijack university operations and we seen a lot of that at Gallaudet University.

Now with ASL widely used in abominable methods than as an effective communication method, Carl, I challenge you to write beyond that if you wish to see ASL preserved and funded.

Richard

Time To Check Those Deaf Groups For Charity Status

Lately I've been tipped to a number of large deaf groups that have lost their charity status 501(c)(3) status by the Internal Revenue Service. And as aggravating, they're still soliciting contributions and claiming theyre tax deductible.

It's high time we all started checking on the status of deaf non-profits.

Listed below are some tools you can use to check them out.

Internal Revenue Service
http://www.irs.gov/charities/index.html

California Attorney General's Charity Registration
http://www.ag.ca.gov/charities/

Guidestar
http://www.guidestar.org/

Better Business Bureau
http://www.bbb.org/

Network For Good
http://www.networkforgood.org/Default.aspx

California Business Portal
http://www.sos.ca.gov/business/business.htm

Check them out before you donate money to them.

Richard

Enough With The Social Justice Ranting. Time to Move On

Frankly I sit home in my finally completely redecorated bedroom very tiresome to see 'social justice' being ranted over and over in the email lists and deafie blogs like a Carpathian tombstone spiriting a ghost out every 5 minutes or so.

The whole thing is really about evolution not social justice. As the world advances, everything in it advances as well. That includes methods of communication used by deaf people are advancing as well.

We don't use the telegraph any more, thats because we advanced ourselves up to using the telephones and cellphones. Thats because the technology is there and theres no resistance.

Now with the advancement of mitigation of hearing loss has gone to the point it is going to be rendering manual communications obsolete in the near future, why cant we just let it roll on and let ourselves advance with the rest of the civilization.

What I'm seeing is......a lot of resistance, a lot of whining, a lot of bickering, a lot of energies going to preserving something that could be useless in like 3 years from now. And theres the scourge cast upon people who stand behind these advancements by people who are resistant to the evolution.

The resistance is are the ones who are keeping us as second class citizens. They do that by sending out confusing signals to the hearing society. They did that by booting Fernandes out only to end up another president with same kind of spots on him. And they did that again at the AG bell workshop conference recently, not to mention the the way the Deaf Bilingual Coalition is going, and they'll do it again and again in the near future.

The price of all this childishness are being paid very dearly by people who are already trying to advance toward first class citizenship.

You're all pulling them all down back to the bottom of the bucket.

Come on, lets all grow up and let us our communities advance toward first class citizenship by stop resisting the evolution of deaf society.

Richard

Proposal For Visual Music For The Deaf

Real music delivering an emotional, spiritual experience for people with hearing disabilities that is as powerful and uplifting as the experience hearing people enjoy when they listen to aural music.

We are on the threshold of major changes in the welfare of people with hearing disabilities. Affordable communication equipment is now available to help produce significant improvements in the employment, English literacy and communication capability of people with hearing disabilities. Manufacturers will produce even better and less expensive communication equipment than the usable equipment we have now. Not only will deaf welfare undergo remarkable change, but Deaf Culture itself will undergo change.

The terrible societal problems which have plagued the deaf community for so long can now be defeated in our time. But the future will be brighter for other reasons. The spiritual and artistic needs of people with hearing disabilities will be fulfilled by truly wondrous things which can happen, as follows:

People with hearing disabilities will be able to sit back and enjoy, but really enjoy, Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony or any of the musical works of Bartok, Mahler, Verdi, Saint Saëns or any musical work, including country music, spirituals and rock! This can happen. people with hearing disabilities can see music unfolding on a screen!

It is true that some people with severe hearing disabilities can’t hear music. But who says they can’t enjoy music? Here’s what’s up ahead after the problems of employment and literacy are solved by the use of advanced communication equipment.

We have the technology to reproduce music as a new, large, fulfilling artistic visual experience for people with hearing disabilities that will be unlike anything ever done. What we have in mind is a new artform that will emerge from the marriage of engineers, scientists, musicians and artists. These people, as a team, will produce new electronic equipment that will transform the sound of a lone violin or a lone trumpet or a full orchestra in a presto movement into colorful visual imagery in motion on a large home viewing screen.

People with hearing disabilities will be able to watch a Beethoven symphony and enjoy a new artistic, emotional, and spiritual experience. We have the technology and the talent to accomplish this right now. Such equipment could be called the “Music Interpreter.”

But after a “Music Interpreter” becomes available, then what?

What’s next?

A natural result flowing from this development will be “Music Appreciation Courses” for people with hearing disabilities. Such courses will teach people with hearing disabilities to identify the relationship between the trumpet, for example, and the image produced by the instrument as it appears on screen. A music appreciation course will teach people with hearing disabilities to pick out the first violin section while a symphony is in progress, or the male voices when watching Handel’s Messiah unfold on a screen.

There’s no reason in the world why people with hearing disabilities should not have music in their lives. It’s even conceivable that up ahead we’ll see deaf composers writing music for known, established instruments and seeing it played back on a screen and hearing people enjoying music composted by a deaf person on a stereo! This will be no lava lamp on a screen.

We see a future for people with hearing disabilities vastly different from what they’ve known. They may be robbed of the ability to hear, but people with hearing disabilities are sensitive and intelligent and can grow, and there’s no reason in the world why, in our day and age that is so abundant with new available technology addressing so many problems and creativeness, they shouldn’t be given every chance, every opportunity to enjoy new experiences as much as anyone else. We’ve got the tools and the talent to accomplish these things now.

Concerning the above discussion, music-to-visual encoders may well spring up and compete with each other by offering their own versions of a Beethoven Seventh or a Brahms Second Piano Concerto or the Star-Spangled Banner! People with hearing disabilities will then have a choice of music-to-visual recordings for home viewing and they’ll learn to discriminate as to which recording of a particular composition they like best!