Welcoming ‘Hezakya Newz & Films’

A new addition to the recommended Videos here on Progressives Chat is Hezakya Newz & Films.

I came across this YouTube video channel—which dates back nearly ten years—in January 2022. And, with this week ending February and beginning March, and with a planned blog topic coming soon (which will include this source), this is a good time to recommend it to readers here at Progressives Chat.

Much of Hezakya Newz & Films—described as “Music, Newz Parodies, Documentaries and Mash-Ups!!”—is like traveling through some history over the past few decades with news reports about issues which affected people politically and socially. (Fair warning: Numerous videos run more than one hour. But, there are plenty which are less than an hour—and some others run at a half-hour or less.)

It was not easy for me to select as examples just three videos. Due to not wanting to overwhelm this blog topic with excessive numbers of embedded videos, I chose to limit. I will summarize each one.

Published August 23, 2021: Part of the Family is a 1971 documentary broadcast on National Educational Television (NET), dissolved in 1970, but with some NET branding, replaced in 1969 by Public Broadcasting System (PBS). (Related article:  We Lost One, We Don’t Want to Lose Another [Digitalized Version].) It documents the surviving family members of three young adults who were killed under political circumstance: Carmine Macedonio (1950–1970), from Long Island, New York, a soldier killed in the Vietnam War on December 7, 1970; Allison Krause (1951–1970), one of the four students who was killed after having been shot by the Ohio Army National Guard at Kent State University, in Kent, Ohio, on May 4, 1970; and Phillip Gibbs (1948–1970), one of two students—a married man with one son and whose wife was pregnant with their second son—who was killed by police gunfire at Jackson State University, in Jackson, Mississippi, on May 15, 1970. (Duration: 1 hour 16 minutes.)

Published June 24, 2021: “1978 Special Report: George Carlin’s 7 Dirty Worlds” is an interview with the legendary comedian (1937–2008), regarding Free Speech, and the “[United States] Supreme Court decision in FCC v. Pacifica Foundation that helped define the extent to which the federal government could regulate speech on broadcast television and radio in the United States.” (Duration: 13 minutes.)

Published November 30, 2018: “Rare Early 1980’s–90s Special Report: ‘AIDS’” is one video I have not watched, as of this publication date, and it is five hours in duration. (The comments—“I’m 62 now. Gay, lived through the [AIDS] years. I remember it like it was yesterday. Extreme horror. Intense constant fear. Friends dropping like flies all around me.… No offense but, for me, COVID–19 is a cakewalk”—have me moved to make time, coming up, to watch this.) As noted by Hezakya Newz & Films, it dates back to “June 1981 when the Centers for Disease Control [CDC] reported that five gay men in Los Angeles all died from a similar rare set of disease symptoms. Within two months 100 more gay men had died, and there was public awareness from [a] medical publication that some new disease existed.”