Ep 292 NAR 9 Religious Renovation, Legal Upheaval, and Media Makeovers

EP 292 of RevolutionZ Professions React, Part Two, continues the Next American Revolution Sequence with the host Michael Albert conveying the words of various oral history interviewees' accounts of religious renovations, legal upheavals, and media makeovers that they helped undertake in the early years of the emerging Revolutionary Participatory Society. The interviewees, channeled by Albert, discuss with Miguel Guevara their getting started, their movement methods, confusions, controversies, goals, failures and successes.  Reverend Stephen Du Bois first takes us from his early years as a seminary student though his encounters with religious fundamentalism, to significant milestones victories in church renovation by way of his personal hunger strike and much wider sustained  militant activism to overcome religious and societal controversy and opposition. Then famed lawyer Robin Kunstler does the same for the legal realm by recounting  the disillusionment that shifted his path from a conventional lawyer to a justice advocate. His stories highlight the systemic failures of earlier criminal justice systems including policing, incarceration, and court procedures and the urgent need for and means of transformation, but also acknowledge the vexing still open questions of exactly what structures to enact so as to do much better. Finally, Leslie Zinn sheds light on mainstream media’s role within society and  regarding RPS, emphasizing the importance of alternative media structures and practices including jobs balanced for empowerment, and recounting how activist RPS efforts led to changes in  media practices. From media profit seeking finance and political subservience to movement media improvements including cooperative planning efforts that reshaped the alternative media landscape, Zinn, like Du Bois and Kuntsler, offers a comprehensive look at RPS’s early multifaceted approach to creating a more just society regarding various professional domains. How relevant are their accounts of their future experiences to our current choices? You decide.

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