Rosie O’Donnell's Keynote Speech at Historic Conference
By Gabrielle Kakoun on Jan 22, 2008

Actress, entrepreneur, raconteur and agent provocateur Rosie O’Donnell told an audience in the Kaye Playhouse for the “Freedom On Our Terms” National Women’s Conference that full and absolute freedom has yet to be achieved. “It’s a scary time in America, but you know that,” O’Donnell said.
“What’s happened to the news in this country, that’s my big question,” said O’Donnell. She talked about the iniquities of the Vietnam War but described how the press coverage helped mitigate the evils of that calamity. “I watched humans killing other humans on TV at dinner time. I watched Walter Cronkite look into the camera and say, ‘This war is wrong,’ and soon the war was over. There were journalists with backbones, there was a fourth estate that was respected and revered; there were people willing to die to tell the story.”
“Not anymore,” she told the audience.
“There are three, four, five corporations that own the access to all of the media and that is a frightening thing,” said O’Donnell who recalled an anecdote told to her by her old social studies teacher. She said one channel was a government-own channel and the other asked why the other channel wasn’t being watched.
O’Donnell was the guest speaker among a number of prominent speakers for the event celebrating the 30th anniversary of the first National Women’s Conference that was held in Houston, catapulting the women’s rights agenda forward into the twenty-first century. “Freedom On Our Terms” was held at Hunter November 10 and 11 to inspire women and girls for an all-out effort for full equal rights. The audience was very receptive. O’Donnell generated a barrage of applauses and cheers as the audience laughed at the punch lines and lamented the tragic points.
“Ten years old my mother died, two years later I met a teacher. A married 27-year-old math teacher named Pat Maravel a feminist,” O’Donnell recalled. She told how Maravel took her into her family and accompanied O’Donnell to a gynecologist for the first time and bought her the book, Our Bodies Ourselves. Another mother who lived across the street from O’Donnell took her to get her first training bra, O’Donnell joked.
The Brooks Army Medical Center, a privately funded institution, was also a topic in O’Donnell’s speech. She mentioned how a year after its opening, President Bush went there for a photo-op near the Veterans Day celebration instead of at a regular veteran’s hospital. She emphasized that Bush had to go there “because the Veterans Administration hospitals are unworthy of photographs.” “There is so much damage, cockroaches, neglect and death and death and death,” she said about the decrepit state of VA hospitals.
“I watched Saigon fall,” O’Donnell told the audience. She recalled how she had witness an elderly women being kicked in the face by a teenage boy as she tried to climb up stairs into an airplane when Saigon was falling. This prompted her to cry, and her father told her, ”’You’re not allowed to watch the news anymore.’ Kids know the truth; any way you cut it, war is not the answer.”
To emphasize what she regarded was the pitiful state of the four estate, O’Donnell spoke about Dog Chapman getting two hours of coverage on Larry King Live because he had was exposed using the word “nigger” in a discussion that he thought was off the record.
Most troops killed ever in Afghanistan last month (October), two days in a row of Dog Chapman,” she said before saying how the news media has become parrots for their parent companies. “When the role of journalists becomes to feed the machine, when the machine refuses to have anyone on that says anything other than what the parent company wants, we need the War Profiteering act to come in.”

“Thank god for the blogs, that’s all we have left,” O’Donnell said before talking about her MSNBC show that never came to fruition.
“The bad guys have infiltrated the top tier of government in our country, stand up now before it’s too late,” she said. She talked about how she hoped the next conference in 30 years would to have to be broadcast in every arena to satisfy all those who wanted to attend.
She closed by urging the audience to “ingest art.” “Art is the direct line from god,” she said before concluding with “Peace out women.”
Liz Abzug, founder and President of the Bella Abzug Leadership Institute, and Ms. Shabazz a producer, writer, diplomat, goodwill ambassador to Belize and daughter of Malcolm X both introduced O’Donnell. Ms. Shabazz recalled when O’Donnell called her after her mother, Betty Shabazz, was slain. “This is a person who, though we don’t get to see each other all the time, we know that the other one is there,” Shabazz said of her relationship with O’Donnell.
The consensus of interviews in the lobby outside in the Kaye Playhouse in Hunter North matched the enthusiasm expressed inside. Marina Stasenko, 22, wearing a layered blue T-shirt over a white long sleeved shirt and jeans, said, “I didn’t expect her to be as good as she was … she was more down to earth and more relevant.” Shannon Houghes, 22, wearing pink V-neck top and light washed jeans, said, “She’s a good speaker; she brought up a lot of good issues. The crowd was definitely with her.”
Mariya Yefremova, 19, a double major in English and political science and a Hunter Women’s Rights Coalition volunteer, praised O’Donnell. Yefremova, from Kew Gardens, wearing studded jeans a black cardigan and black shoes, said, “It was pretty cool that she did it without any notes. She just said what she thought.”
“She was pretty much the way I thought she would be,” said the student who hoped to graduate in 2010.