Weekend Música – Oppression
I CAN’T THINK of a more uplifting message than this: Put your time, energy, and heart into something and the energy will return. It will grow, it will propagate, it will continue. And this lesson can be found in events both small and large.
EVERY ONCE IN A WHILE I stop by the little video I slapped together in October of 2006 called Ben Harper’s Oppression, A Xicano Interpretation. It’s just a montage of images I edited over the fantastic song by the same name, and as I didn’t think of it really as an actual filmmaking effort (not even as much as something tiny like Luna Watches President-Elect Obama’s First Presser) I had no idea it would get the traffic it ended up getting. Nor did I know I’d end up with multiple schools writing me and wanting to use the video to approach or teach certain ideas to their classes. (I’ve always complied and for free, of course, as it’s not my song, and I love to help in these cases, anyway.) This dynamic of doing what you love, for no other gain, and watching unexpected fruit flower from it also played out with my blog (and I’m sure many blogs) as I wrote on the other day.
Because I made this video a few months after creating UMX, and right when it began to bloom, it has always felt emblematic of my first engaging the issues I do and in this nifty Web 2.0 way that we do out here in the blogarrio. I post it now as a sort of mini-celebration because I realized today the view counter broke the 50,000 mark! Whoa! How cool is that?
Tags: Activism, Ben Harper, Filmmaking, Videos, viral video, Web 2.0, Youtube
Posted in Blogs, Borders, Criminal Justice System, Cultura, Culture of Criminality, Filmmaking/Video, Hate Groups, Human Rights, ICE, Immigration, Indigenous, Internet, Latinos, Media, Mexico, Music, Native Americans/Indians, Peoples, Politics, Prison for Profit, Raza, The Long War on the Indigenous, United States Politics, White Supremacy
It’s gorgeous, Nez.
I think a lot of people would have worked on this for years trying to get the feel you made – if that came from not thinking about it, dude, don’t think. ; ) Seriously, the collection of images public and personal is perfect and moving.
thank you my friend. that means a lot.