Imus-shamed

Word of the Post
Today's word is: your
pronoun, possessive
The second personal pronoun, in the singular number, denoting the person addressed; thyself. Your person, you. The term denoting ownership of a thing by the second person, as in "This is your ball".
This term is often misused by people in print form, intending to say the contraction "you're", meaning you are.
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With the Freedom of Speech comes Responsibility. In these great United States of America, we are granted the right to say whatever we think. We can do this in voice, in print, in action. We are not warned oft enough that the implications of our speech may be far-reaching, and the consequences painful.

In recent weeks, a radio show host named Don Imus has been fired, for exercising his rights. I don't really care too much for sports, that is DH's thing. I don't even listen to sports or opinion shows unless they are on my local talk radio. This issue has been the newest issue in a long line of junk mail from the television to me. The man called a women's basketball team by a nasty turn of phrase. The words were not vulgar in nature, nor were they intended to be hateful. They were critical of the appearance of the players, and intended as a joke.

The part that most people are missing, I think, is that racism is usually spread through jokes and stereotypes. The sad part, to me, is that if Don King had been the one to say it instead, nobody would have noticed, beyond the players themselves. The reaction to the words, not the words themselves, was racially hateful. The fact that a white man said the words makes it bad, when the black "artists" of rap say the same thing, using worse terms, every day, and nobody seems to get mad at them.

The hatred that comes out of a person starts in the heart of their opinions. If a person is hateful, we expect hateful things from them. Imus was not hateful, but trying to be provocative. He was doing exactly what he has been doing for the past 30 years, much longer than the college players have been alive. Nobody called him out before, for far more offensive comments. Nobody calls out the rappers who invented the word "ho" as a shortened version of "whore". The women who were called by this name have every right to be angry, because it was a slur on their character. They have the right to demand an apology, which they did, and received. The matter should have been over at that meeting. Like Anna Nicole, it will just not die. The press is making a spectacle of Imus, and his staged persona.

I think that the network was wrong to fire him. They have been paying him millions of dollars to be provocative, and when he finally achieves it, they punish him. Not fair. Life is hard, and is rarely fair.