Mookie said:
Give me a break. don't you take a statistics course?
Yes, I did, during my Gally days.
I don't see any error of Deafscuba's assurance. It is approx. 30-40 million population of D/HH in United States.
I agree with DeafScuba's figures. They obviously factor in the vast majority of people who have hearing loss later in life.
However, that wasn't the point of the whole exercise.
The idea is, 'Why did God Pick People to be Deaf?' The basic premise, which is--God has a plan for all of us, when we're born into this world, and have our whole lives ahead of us all. Obviously, some people who acquire hearing loss, very early in the process, at birth or at young ages, will 'question' God's plan as it applies to their own individual situations.
This is the crux of the question posed in this thread; We have our lives ahead of us, and we are already living with our hearing losses in varying degrees. Our Deafness defines us from the early get-go.
This doesn't necessarily hold true for people who have acquired hearing losses later in life. That's just a part of growing old.
Maybe some people will assert it's God's plan, irregardless of age. Regardless, people who grow old, and have hearing losses, don't allow such losses define them; They have already had full lives, having careers, families, community ties, etc.
So, I'm sticking with the historical incidence figure of 1:1000 in coming up with a reasonably accurate number of DHH people in the U.S. Generally speaking, I'm thinking of all sorts of people from birth to age 50, who have acquired Deafness, in terms of the question posed by this thread. There are not a lot of us, and the fact that we're Deaf, makes us all pretty
unique, don'tcha think?