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Show 544/545: Raoul Martinez on “Creating Freedom”

Raoul Martinez on “Creating Freedom” (Two-Parter)

Oddly enough, on Equal Time for FREEthought, the term freedom doesn’t come up too often. Well, not in an affirmative fashion, at least. We’ve been around too long to believe in things like the free market, free elections, or free media (though on WBAI, we come the closest to this). But we do tend to advocate for free speech and, of course, free thought. But what does freedom mean? Are we free in modern Western societies and to what degree? Can freedom be created out of non-freedom? And what can our understanding of all this help us to build a healthier, more humanistic society?

Today we will talk with Raoul Martinez about these questions and more. Raoul is a writer, artist, and award-winning filmmaker. His documentary, ‘The Lottery of Birth‘, premiered in 2012 as episode one of a series entitled Creating Freedom. It was nominated for Best Documentary at London’s Raindance Film Festival and went on to win the Artivist Spirit 2012 Award at Hollywood’s Artivist Festival. Accompanying the series is Raoul’s first book, also called Creating Freedom, written over four years and informed by over a decade of research.

Audio for part-one can be found here!

Audio for part-two can be found here!

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Show 264: Reinventing Thanksgiving w/ Arnell Dowret and Barry Schwartz

Reinventing Thanksgiving- Counting Our Blessings- and Seeing Reality

Audio here!

Thanksgiving is a holiday rife with problems- historical revisionism, and denial, not to mention bizarre fetishistic overeating and gallinaceous debauchery.  In addition to nausea, the most common response to Thanksgiving among progressives is to both debunk and challenge the skewed narrative.

But because, Thanksgiving is not going away anytime soon, in addition to challenging the story line and presumptions attendant to Thanksgiving, an additional line of attack should involve a fundamental reinvention of the holiday- as a holiday that would actually diminish our arrogant jingoistic tendencies, and become a part of our efforts to create a culture which promotes progressive values and conveys naturalistic wisdom.

Building on the idea central to its name, Thanksgiving has potential to offer intrinsic humanistic value by reminding and inspiring us to practice what has in recent years been simply described as “gratitude.”  The evidence seems undeniable- engaging in activities which broaden our sense of gratitude has huge consequences for our emotional health and overall sense of happiness.

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