We're all just unfortunate mutations, including the auditorily-disabled

 RIT professor Paul Taylor passed away last month.

He was a champion of the deaf community, and worked on various technologies right from the 60's to make life easier for them.

A great man, no doubt.

In their late sixties, Paul and his wife, who was also deaf, decided to get a cochlear implant and listen to the sounds of the world, and work towards producing them. It's a big freakin' deal. You've spent your entire life unaware of this world out there but you've learned to work around it, you've adapted. Deciding to get that sense is seen as treacherous in various communities with mutations leading to disability. They said, hey it's yet another thing you can do, I don't care much about the hearing itself but why not expand the set of senses I can feel the world using if I can afford to.

The story is documented in the touching documentary Hear and Now by his daughter Isabel, who several years later finds her four yearold losing his hearing.

Why am I writing this?

Because all our biological 'deficiencies' aren't really that, they're just mutations we couldn't do anything about. You can't complain about your mutations, you can't really cry about them, gotta' work the world with them. Which is why we need to make the world a better and more open place for people with a wide variety of mutations. Because we're all different, thanks to the way we're created. We have decided to favor a certain groups of mutations over other, but there's no fundamental why that should be the case. If we don't want to be on the losing side of history, we must fully work towards making the world accessible for as diverse a set of mutations as we can possibly, technologically and economically.

It's not just an ethical argument, it's also a logical one, from the point of view of meritocracy. You wouldn't reject somebody's college admission because they happen to be short, or happen to have a smaller-than-normal pinky-toe. You don't design the world around people's eye colors, or the length of their chin. It'd be a great freakin' loss if we were rejecting all the great geniuses and masters because of those minor imperfections. Same goes for our rejection of persons with the mutations that we are not inclusive towards.

I need to write this piece better. It's a work in progress. I intend to publish it somewhere.