Not Your Usual Friday Night

Again, many apologies for the lack of posting.

As many of you know I’ve recently started a new job and I thought it best to lay off the internet usage in the first few days until I find my feet.

I’ve mentioned it before, but when you spend as much time in the pub (either as staff or customers) as many of us do, it’s rare that anything truly different or new happens, but on Friday we did get something slightly different, because on Friday there was quite a large group of deaf people in the pub.

[And so what you might say. In fact that’s exactly what you should be saying. So what if there were some deaf lads in the pub. Is that supposed to be unusual or weird or shocking in and of itself?

Well of course bloody not. I should hope that you know me better than that]

What I found interesting is what it told me about myself and my own prejudices.

Because, patronising and condescending though I know it is, I think that I’ve always had this view of disabled people as just being stoic and brave and determined, and well…just thoroughly decent and good, cheerfully facing adversity and overcoming challenges which would humble the rest of us, which I suppose is just another way of saying that I see them as being defined entirely by their disability, rather than as people and individuals first and foremost.

And until Friday it just hadn’t really occurred to me that you could get bad deaf people (yes I absolutely realise how stupid that makes me sound), just as you can get every single sort of every other type of person on the planet.

And that makes me an idiot. Well it doesn’t make me an idiot, it just shows you what an idiot I always am. Just because you’re positively stereotyping it doesn’t make it any less blinkered or prejudiced.

But anyway, these guys were just bad. Pure down low wrong ‘uns from start to finish, and if they hadn’t been deaf I would have called it within five minutes, but because they were, it took me hours to eventually do so.

Prejudice is defined as any preconceived notion or opinion, usually unfavourable, but not necessarily restricted to that, regarding any particular minority group.

It’s the same patronising prejudice which effects a lot of people on the political and social liberal left – which is where I would place myself. The same reverse discrimination that sees the world viewed through the prism of the ‘noble and spiritual savage of the third world’ and the ‘morally bankrupt imperialist of the western world.’

It’s identity politics.

This idea that no matter what atrocities an, for example, Afghan might commit, they shouldn’t – even if this is only an unconscious thought – be held to the same standards of culpability, as, for example, an American soldier. Rather than judging people individually purely on their merits as people.

And that, my friends, is the Taps. A place where your entire view of yourself as a human being can be changed in the span of one Friday evening after work drink.