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Reporting from the studio. |
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When I had made the decision to broadcast updates of the war and the protest instead of playing music like I usually do, I had originally thought that I would be spending more time on the war. However, nothing new was coming out of Iraq. My fellow DJs (Exploding Bunny and DJ White Boy) and I had been scanning all the news outlets we could, in an attempt to shed some new light on the situation. All they were showing was footage of tanks rolling. This left me with ample room to "free form" broadcast. Something I'm not terribly good at. Early on in the night, before things developed down town, I solicited calls from listeners in an attempt to fill some of the void in our coverage. I received three calls total. One person was calling from Lincoln Square (sweet!) and just wanted us to know we were doing a good job. The second call I received was from a person in Roger's Park. He was glad to see that there was a new radio station in the neighborhood, but he didn't agree with what I was saying. I can respect that, but what I can't respect was the thick layer of ignorance this man was exhibiting. Here's a summary dialog of the good parts of the conversation: HIM: So can I ask you a somewhat serious question? ME: Yeah sure HIM: (shouting) How the fuck can you support Saddam Hussein after what he did to New York? ME: (paused slightly, shocked because I've never actually conversed with someone who honestly thinks Saddam plotted the 9/11 attacks) Wait... do you honestly think Saddam carried out those attacks? HIM: (shouting) He's an evil son of a bitch who's commited mass murder and genocide and you're sitting there supporting him! ME: Nobody would disagree with you when you say that. He is an evil man. An evil man who obtained his power using american weapons. HIM: (still shouting) You don't know anything. He was in power long before we gave him any weapons- ME: I know he was, but his true evil power wasn't realized until- HIM: (calmed a little, still loud) You're just like France was in 1938 when they said that they wouldn't attack Germany because there wasn't any proof of any wrong doings (his words not mine) ME: You do know that France lost 100,000 troops fighting off the Nazis. They stood no chance because the Nazis, like the US today, were one full military generation ahead of the rest of the world HIM: Well what about all those Jews they turned over? You don't know anything about genocide, you're not Jewish. I'm Jewish, I know what it's like. *NOTE* This man sounded like he was in his 30s. His only connections to true genocide are probably similar to mine, through documented history. It is very likely that he has family who had experienced that. And yes, I am painfully aware of genocide, as my ancestors were Cherokee indian. Forcibly marched from their native home in the Carolina region, to a place they were ill-equipped to live, North Dakota. Thousands of lives were lost along the way. I wouldn't be here if my ancestors hadn't hopped off the trail near Missourri. SKIP TO FIVE MINUTES LATER IN THE CONVERSATION (during that time I had tried unsuccesfully to convince him that my cause was not to support saddam hussein and keep him in power, but to oppose a US led invasion before diplomacy had run out. He refused to believe that the US and brittain sold Iraq chemical weapons, even though the Gulf War Veterans Association has video evidence of it.) HIM: You know what they ought to do? Bush needs to seize all those businesses from all those arabs that come over here with their money and get rid of 'em! ME: What, the businesses or the Arabs? HIM: The arabs! keep the businesses. Kind of sad, coming from the mouth of someone who is supposedly intimately connected to genocide. At this point I just thanked him for calling and ended the call. It was a lost cause to try and convince this man that he needed to do research before becoming so fanatic about something. That third call I mentioned earlier came when I was talking to this lunatic. They didn't leave a message. I stopped taking listener calls because I was a little freaked out. Probably good, because around this time I started getting calls from all the people down at the march. Every few minutes my damn phone was going off and I was hearing something new. The broadcast had changed gears at this point. We were no longer covering the war. We were covering the protest. Local media had failed on most counts to accurately report what I was hearing about. Tension was high in the studio, as we felt like something bad was going to happen. When the news stops covering things right as the cops appear to be gearing up, some shit is probably going to go down. We did our best to tell our friends to be careful, get ready for gas, and to call if they got arrested. All of us in the studio were actually rendered speechless. We were getting reports from our people, but not seeing anything on TV. I hope that our broadcast was able to provide some one out there with an alternative view point. -slacker |
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