But there goes the peddler, drawing attention to himself. When I go to look for a job, and people know that I am deaf, the image of the peddler will be the salient deaf image in their minds. Mine plummeted the instant the peddler walked in and started to flash his trinkets around. Several employees at both local McDonald's commented to me about the letter. That is exactly the problem.
People see deaf people as all one lot.
If one is a peddler, all are peddlers. If one is an unfortunate, dependent innocent, then all are. These kinds of limits on expectations keep deaf people from aspiration, opportunity, and achievement. I've talked with many ALDAns who have said that their earliest and sometimes only memory of meeting a deaf person was a of a peddler, and this was a depressing recollection when later confronting their own deafness. For many years during my progressive hearing loss, I thought deafness was beneath me.