Some People Just Don't Get It

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And furthermore, they'll NEVER get it!

From: Russ Hicks
Date: 10/11/02
Time: 11:42:22 PM
Remote Name: 12.237.88.91

Comments

Hi Bob,

Chris Roach very excitedly told me about your paper the other night and I couldn't wait to get home to read it. And I must say it's everything that he said it was - and more. It's TERRRRRRIFIC!!! Probably THE paper of this entire super on-line conference. Actually I enjoyed reading the comments/questions almost as much as I enjoyed your formal paper! Man...! This is dynamite stuff!!!

My mind has at least 75 simultaneous thoughts on this, but let me see if I can select a few and make some sense out of them...

1. If Mr. Fluency was offended by YOUR stuttering, you really need to introduce him to me some time. I think all of us would really enjoy that spectacle. Then I would like to take my two shelves of Toastmaster contest trophies, including my Southwest US Regional Championship trophy, and place them in an appropriate place. Then I would like to challenge him to a public speaking contest and see who wins, someone who is fluent and insults people or someone who stutters and has a great time communicating in front of an audience. Go ahead, make my day...! (I'm sorry, I'm not normally that way, but this just too good an opportunity to pass up. Ha, ha, ha! )

2. Bob, I read the editorial page in the Dallas Morning News almost every day. And I used to get really steamed when they would publish a letter from an obvious moron. How could they DO that? Once we had a guy suggest we burn down the public schools here in Texas when we had some horrible school funding problems. (As Dave Barry would say, "I'm not making this up!") Then it finally dawned on me that we really need to hear from the lunatic fringe once in a while simply to get our bearings. Generally the far right and the far left are morons, but if we don't hear from them, it's hard to know where the spectrum starts and stops. So hearing from these lame brained idiots often DOES serve a good purpose in the overall scheme of things. Once I realized that, I almost like to read some of our Bubba letters to the editor just for a good laugh. It does no good to get angry, because they'll never "get it" anyway. As my son likes to say, "Dad, the world is FULL of morons!" Mr. Fluency is simply a moron. Laugh at him.

3. Afraid for your profession, Bob? Join the crowd. In the business world we have the CEOs of Enron and Worldcom. In the Catholic Church, they have the pedophile priests. In the computer world we have people who write viruses. In the police world they have killer cops. In medicine, they have butchers practicing without licenses. In the legal profession... don't get me started... The list goes on and on. Why should speech pathology be any different? It takes constant pressure and vigilance from the good guys to keep the unscrupulous morons from taking over. Our battle will never be over, we just have to keep fighting for what we KNOW is right. You're a good guy, Bob, and you know it. Just put on your battle gear and continue fighting the battle. Darkness will never extinguish a light.

4. In some defense of the Bubba logic (an oxymoron by definition), a lot of what we know now about stuttering is turning out to be counter-intuitive. We stutter, so why shouldn't our objective be fluency? Why should we accept such an obvious flaw? Why should we encourage covert stutterers to stutter MORE as part of their therapy? If your tongue gets tense when you block, why shouldn't we cut the tongue membrane? If your father or older brother stutters, why doesn't it make sense that you could "catch it" from them? If it looks like a habit, and sounds like a habit, why isn't stuttering a simple habit that can be broken like any other habit? If you don't stutter when you sing, why shouldn't you sing everything? Read Moussa Dao's paper "Stuttering in Burkina Faso" in Africa. They have WITCH DOCTORS (called ATHs) that are ignorant of a lot of what we know now, but they're NOT stupid. Like your Mr. Fluency, they believe a lot in what they simply observe. The stuttering iceberg analogy is a totally foreign concept to a LOT of people. If they can blow the top off the iceberg, why doesn't that fix the problem? We're NOT dealing with simple concepts here. If it was simple, they wouldn't need us. We just need to be patient and keep on teaching people what we know.

Bob, your paper is TERRRRRIFIC!!! What an amazing springboard for discussion. Thanks not only for writing it, but continuing the valuable dialog in the comments/questions section. You've made an extremely valuable contribution to your profession! I'm proud to know you and count you as my friend!

See ya in Nashville, if not before!

Russ

email: RussHicks@mail.com


Last changed: September 12, 2005