One of the events I worked on at our annual conference in Santa Fe was Saturday Morning Cartoons. I came up with the idea when we were planning the conference back in the spring of 2005. We were trying to get a lot of students and young people to attend and I thought that what is more perfect for Saturday morning than cartoons. Of course, we were going to show politically/activist oriented shorts. People really liked the idea and it was added to the program.

Over the summer and fall, I was working on transitioning to government relations, so others worked on the cartoons. About 2 weeks before the conference, I was asked to help run the session, along with a coworker. I gladly accepted. I liked most of the shorts that were picked for the lineup, but I changed a few. Mostly, I added some of our more edgy flash contest pieces that might not be on an issue we deal with or speak in our messaging frame, but they were cool. They definitely fit into our theme of getting young people engaged on the local level about national and international issues.

To this mix, I wanted to show the trailer for Slingshot Hip Hop , a film about the rise of hip-hop culture and rapping among Palestinian communities in Palestine and in Israel. It was a five-minute trailer that included young men & women rapping about the occupation and identity in Gaza, the West Bank, and inside Israel. It looks to be a fabulous film that should be completed and released in 2006. Showing this might be controversial since my org doesn’t work the Israel/Palestine issue, and this issue has caused problems with the organization in the past. But, I thought this would be a great venue to show something that worked on connecting the global with the local, our conference theme. I decided to show it after the other cartoon pieces ran.

Prior to showing it, I spoke briefly about how what we were about to show had an edgy theme. I noted that it wasn’t an issue that we work on nor is it something that speaks in the message framework we use. However, it is about young people taking an active role in speaking about important issues in their local communities that are intertwined in global concerns and in need of global solutions.

After showing the trailer, there was total silence. I was feeling a bit scared, but then a few people clapped, then a few more. Afterwards, some people thanked us for showing it. A few others said they liked it but next time they would also like to see a short about Israeli youth reaction to the current situation in the region. That was a great response and overall, I’m extremely glad we did it. If you don’t talk about a situation, you can never find common ground and you’ll never be able to move forward to a solution.