REBELLIOUS TRUTHS PRESENTS SOUNDS OF TRUTH FESTIVAL
A Visionary Experiment in Empathy, Good times and Understanding.
Think it’s impossible that Occupiers, Tea Partiers, Republicans, Democrats, and Libertarians could ever sit down together in a civil conversation? Rebellious Truths doesn’t. The nonprofit Rebellious Truths (www.rebellioustruths.org) is making modern history by hosting the very first “Sounds of Truth Festival” on Saturday, July 7th, 2012 at Mason Regional Park in Irvine, California from 10 AM to 5 PM. This event will be part festival with music, art, dancing and food, and part visionary practice in empathy and unity. This practice, never before attempted, will consist of a series of dialogues between the supporters of Rebellious Truths and those who identify themselves as Independents, Occupy, Tea Party, Libertarians, Republicans, Democrats and all others who wish to attend. The dialogues will be facilitated by the internationally recognized World in Conversation Project that has facilitated dialogues for the United Nations, NATO, and Israel-Palestinian among other high-tension conflicts. Its founders Dr. Sam Richards (of TED Talk fame) and his wife Dr. Laurie Mulvey will be overseeing the conversations.
Through a series of professionally facilitated discussions, the polarized political and ideological groups can begin to understand one another and help put a human face on the superficial labels. The Sounds of Truth Festival is about bringing together these divided bands of Americans who are willing to set aside their judgments and stereotypes in the hopes of contributing to the vision of a more truthful, humane, and just America. This event will demonstrate that these groups can have a civil conversation and spend one day together trying to understand their fellow Americans. If they can, then so can the rest of our nation.
Since its launching in September 2011, Rebellious Truths videos have collectively garnered over two million views and a strong social media presence of 35,000 Facebook friends, and partnered with many respectable and diverse organizations from across the nation.
Join us on the journey Saturday, July 7th, 2012 at Mason Regional Park in Irvine, CA 92612. Check in begins at 9:45 AM for those in the dialogue groups. Activities begin at 10:00 AM and go until 5 PM. Music, food, dancing and art will continue throughout the day.
IF YOU WANT TO BE IN THE DIALOGUES PLEASE SEND REQUEST, YOUR NAME AND PHONE INFORMATION TO
DialogueSoundsOfTruth@RebelForTruth.org IF YOU WANT TO COME TO THE EVENT OR RECEIVE ADDITIONAL INFORMATION PLEASE SEND REQUEST TO
RsvpSoundsofTruth@RebelForTruth.org EVENT IS FREE. A SUGGESTED DONATION OF $20+ WOULD BE APPRECIATED TO OFFSET COSTS.
Need to figure out if it's bogus. It could be some kind of diverson to pull energy away from Occupy. The most suspicious thing is that effort to "transcend ideology". That's often a red flag that it's an apolitical, capitalist status-quo operation.
If you don't have ideology, what do you have? If you don't have an idea of what you want for the future, you're only going to replicate the present. All businesses and capitalist enterprises have ideologies, but they don't reveal or discuss them in public, because they're ideologies of control and domination.
The moderators are TED conference speakers. The cost of attending a TED conference is $7,000. That's ideology right there -- that the wealthy have ideas worth sharing and replicating, while the poor do not.
So, if someone can shed light on this operation, it would be appreciated.
A little perusal seems to indicate this project is a Libertarian Party operation.
That's hilarious that they are allegedly against ideology, when Libertarians operate entirely on ideology. They are the purist ideologues for market capitalism, and always have been. Their main thinktank is Cato Institute, which was funded by David Koch, from the pro-business wing of the Republican Party.
This site continues the trend of LP co-opting the style of 90s "grunge" rebellion and merging it with hyper-patriotic red-white-blue, and other mainstream elements.
The video interviews include explicitly Libertarian themes, providing few answers.
The theme of Sam Richards and Laurie Mulvey's work is that conversations are the basis of dealing with race relations. This is actually a form of ideology that goes entirely against the current of ideas about race relations today. Contemporary analysis of racism is based on understanding institutional or structural power.
Names to look up:
Chris Ponzi
Sam Richards (self described Libertarian)
Laurie Mulvey
A good example of pseudo-neutral ideology:
http://www.worldinconversation.org/about-us/ College students in conversation about race (but the video never discusses race - it discusses the discussion and promotes it). College is the top 50% of the US, and the top 25% of Black society within the United States. It's an elitist conversation to start with - and it ignores the fact that college is a tool to integrate all people of color into the power structure, which is still dominated by white society.
The videos from these two professors are the opposite of "rebellion". Rather, through conversation, they seek to create a new synthetic space in which there's no reason to rebel.
The tradition of radical thought is to deconstruct power and potentially find allies within the upper classes who are willing to be traitors to their power. These videos do not evince that at all.