The Elephant in the Bush

A book and class on Hurricane Katrina wouldn't be complete without at least a mention of the Elephant in Bush as it became known in my house. Like I said in my earlier post, that time of my life comes in waves and flashes and the moment Kanye West shocked us all with his declaration, is a moment that will be forever frozen and repeated in my family for generations to come.
The really funny thing, at least to me, is that my family and I never watch telethons. I think once as a child, we watched the Jerry Louis telethon but that about sums up my telethon watching experience. My parents are of the belief that if they are going to give money then it will be to someone standing in front of them, someone whose hand my father can shake and whose eyes my mother can see. A lot of people I know feel this way, that is why my church always takes up a donation for the red cross after every natural disaster. "No matter what you can trust the red cross," my mother has always said.
So, for us to all be in the living room watching this telethon, was some cosmic coincidence. The second it happened my father looked over at my mother and said, "Did I just hear him right?" My then nine year old sister, now fifteen, proceeded to inform my father that he did in fact hear the man on the TV say that the President of the United States hated an entire race of Americans. My father and mother just shook their heads and went back to listening to the next celebrity read off the teleprompter.
However, the next day my mother, the assistant manager of electronics at our local WalMart, was informed that all of Kanye West cd's needed to be removed from the store shelves. My mother, father, and I were shocked, one comment and there goes record sales. What happened to freedom of speech I wondered.
 Dyson in chapter 2 tells us that Kanye wasn't critiquing the actual George Bush as a person, but instead he was speaking of the President's administration. Now at twenty-three, I can understand what Dyson and maybe even Kanye meant, but at seventeen sitting in my parents living room I thought he meant the actual George Bush that I had seen give a speech days earlier. Yeah my family may ignore telethons but they love presidential speeches. I think it's hard to critique anything that has a figure head without implicating that the figure head, as a person in his private life must feel that way as well. Maybe if Kanye had said the administration hated African Americans then he wouldn't have been removed from the shelves of one of the biggest box stores in America.I guess how I feel after reading this chapter is that Kanye had the right to state his opinion whichever way he felt made it the most clear. However, he needed to understand that not everyone was going to understand what he meant and that he was going to lose record sales.