YouDoit

By Ilana Panich-Linsman

Time Magazine named You the person of 2006. With the already enormous and ever-growing popularity of user-created content sites like YouTube, MySpace, Wikipedia, etc., we are entering into a more democratic state of media -- with infinite possibilities.

With these modern tools of communication come certain responsibilities. There is no longer an excuse to ignore racism, sexism, homophobia, and ignorance in main-stream culture. YOU have the power to write about it, respond to it and do something about it at your fingertips.

Take a look at how Beau Sia, a poet in New York, has used the power of YouTube to get his response to a racist event in the media heard. This is the 18th most viewed video this week:



Mr. Sia clearly explains that it is not simply the racist comment that was offensive to so many of us, but mostly Rosie's ignorant and defensive response to her critics.
Beau Sia has taken it upon himself to start a dialogue with the YouTube community, (who is, let's face it, a lot of us: Beau's video currently has 332,892 views and about 4,500 comments), and with the popularity of the video, elicited this response from Rosie:

2 day i found
beau sia
poet
on you tube

with great delivery
wonderful editing
set in a school room
he spoke

an open letter to all the rosie o’donnells

“ching chong ching chong
is not an accent
it is a racist interpretation of a language
often associated with
being buried alive in a mine shaft”

“i would never make fun of who u r
and then make u feel wrong
for just trying to inform u
of y i shouldn’t say
whatever it is i am about to say
about plus sized lesbians”

“so listen 2 me
because i dont think ur evil
i dont care if ur mean”

“learn from this rosie
apologize darling
tap into the humanity
i know that u posses”

2 beau
an open response
to ur informative creative
and quite beautiful video

i apologize
for any and all pain
caused to any and all
by my comments
ignorance
lack of compassion - empathy
understanding

u r right
i didnt get it

i know
my intent
was not to harm
yet obviously i did

there ya have it

and beau
before u refrain from all observations
comments or comedy
in any context or capacity
about the queer community
in all it variations

arttst 2 artist beau
say whatever it is u need
i trust
after seeing u 4 all of 3 minutes -
ur soul is in the right place
ur aim is 2 enlighten
not debase
as is mine

peace out
rosie o’donnell - plus sized lesbian

And while Rosie could have taken a little more time to say, compose a more thoughtful letter or use a spellchecker, she obviously understood the gravity of her racist remark and defensive response to that remark, and apologized for it.

So, can we, as individuals that comprise this online community, take it upon ourselves to make it our RESPONSIBILITY and our priority to use the tools of modern communication be critical, analytical and to challenge the main-stream norm? Let's see to it that we all employ the resources available to us, as Beau Sia has done, in order to earn our Person of the Year title.

Bad Guy and the Good ‘Ol Boys Who Love to Hate Them

Check out Bad Guy and the Good ‘Ol Boys Who Love to Hate Them In Memory of Molly Ivins in the Berkeley Daily Planet by (our very own) Sarah Werthan Buttenwieser.

Honoring Molly

By Sarah Werthan Buttenwieser

If someone asked me when I was a little girl what I wanted to be when I grew up, I wouldn’t have answered “kick-ass op-ed writer.” In fact, I wanted to teach deaf people, and my grandmother, Helen Buttenwieser, herself a pioneering lawyer, told me I was too young to know what I wanted to do. Given that she’d done something outrageous in terms of career, you’d think she’d have wanted to encourage her granddaughters (in fact, although liberal, she didn’t consider herself a feminist). I
must have been about eight at the time. I’d read all about Helen Keller, and darn it, I knew. It turned out that a couple of years later I learned sign language and that I spent much of middle school and high school volunteering at the Pennsylvania School for the Deaf. I think I actually did what I set out to do.

A couple of years back, a flurry of media frenzy over the paucity of female op-ed writers kicked up. By then, I’d begun to write some opinion pieces of my own, and I took those columns—and the numbers themselves, which were in the first two months of 2005, 19.5 percent of op-ed pieces at the Los Angeles Times written by women, 16.9 percent at the New York Times and 10.4 percent at The Washington Post—as a
challenge, a call to pen-mightier-than-sword arms. That, I thought to myself, is what I want to do; I want to do my part to raise the number of women op-ed writers, at least by one.

I came to this goal honestly. Besides wanting to teach the deaf, as a child I loved to make up stories and to read stories. Writer flitted in and out of favor as potential work. And political activism was in my blood. I organized from forever: shows with the cousins, children’s rights initiatives in elementary school, everything from protests to a support group for children of divorce to blood drives in high school, reproductive rights work in college and throughout my twenties, and on... The writer and the organizer/activist come together into one when writing opinion pieces.

The opinionated women writers I most admire are those who bring themselves into their work, melding belief and voice and life experience, including Anna Quindlen, Ellen Goodman, Katha Pollitt, and of course Molly Ivins.

Losing Molly Ivins is to hear only silence where once was a booming voice, one that championed women and peace and justice and common sense and salty wisdom and never ignored the power of humor to help call it like you see it. The world’s just not as good without her. But she inspired many of us, and with our unique voices—mine’s less salty—I believe that she encouraged us to assert our strong female voices. I certainly feel additional urgency to use mine.