Today we’d like to introduce you to Rameses Setekh.
Hi rameses, thanks for joining us today. We’d love for you to start by introducing yourself.
Free Thought Revolution began as a response to the murder of George Floyd and the reactions from all the different people and cultures. We saw folks acknowledge Black Lives Matter and also disparage the meme and wanted to address. So, we sat down and began having the hard, conversations that needed to & still need to be held. We wanted to ensure that when the conversations were being held, they were based in humanity, empathy, and building bridges for unity to dissolve the misnomer of divided difference. We have held conversations with local SD politicians, professors, doctorates, mothers, fathers, police, psychiatrists, a half dozen AAPI ambassadors, trans sols, musicians, artists, and every other bit piece of humanity we could find to help them hold a mic, step up on a soap box, and use their greatest tool to create cultural understanding.
We were blessed and truly appreciate all of their voices.
Those voices led us to feel obligated to do more than sit behind a microphone and engage in more civic action. We did a number of community charities and events and realized the biggest failure that we had as a collective community; we didn’t have a place of our own. Without a place of security, safety, bravery, and respect we will continue to struggle as a people. Our biggest community engagement and action is creating a that safe and secure space. One that is built upon true empathetic community engagement and allows for individuals to regain their center, by sharing in nature and the peace it brings, putting hands into the soil bringing new life, and building a new understanding of relationships through the chickens, pigs, goats, ducks… and small community of loving sols.
We are currently caretaking the foundation of that dream, M.E.S.S., on a small parcel of forest in the sometimes snowy mountains of San Diego.
I’m sure it wasn’t obstacle-free, but would you say the journey has been fairly smooth so far?
This has been the most difficult road that I could have imagined. Simply creating a non-profit is a task, but one that is successful is herculean; by whatever metrics of success, you use. Before that I am a father and at the beginning of this journey we had two infants with one on the way, and another one came right after. Going through the transition of being a stay-at-home father and caretaker, with three infants, while “trying to storm the world with revolution” is a bit daunting. We then got the biggest shock of our lives and the bumps that came along with it; housing insecurity – AKA HOMELESS.
Our family became victims of the COVID housing crunch in that our owner wouldn’t renew to us, and we were left with trying to find a home we could afford with two dogs, fours kids, and one income. While still managing to do the non-profit? We paused the non-profit after we produced and directed The Bus Ride Home at the Oceanside Brooks Theater, because it a like us had no home! We found the most economic option was to purchase a 5th wheel with the help of the older generation, buy a big ‘ol diesel truck and hit the road with faith, hope, family, and love.
We struggled through housing insecurity for three years and this one story summarizes the struggle for me: I was coaching t-ball to build memories with my youngsters and engage them in sports. I was really using it as a distraction from the fact that i didn’t have a secure home for my kids/family, every other week, we had to pack up our 5th wheel, and move it to a dirt parking lot, primitive camp site, a county park camp site… all while my mother was dying in the hospital. My mother dies, and we return from the funeral through the night and ion the morning there was a snowstorm that makes towing a 42ft fifth wheel up dangerous. The park ranger asks me how we didn’t know about the storm it has been in the news for the past week, and I tell him. I just buried my mother, I’ve been too busy trying to grieve to pay attention to the outside world.
He tells us, ‘Welp, ya ain’t got to go home, but ya gotta get the hell outta here.’. My children have been experienced police cursing at us to “move your ####### somewhere, I don’t care where”, etc…. They have seen the worst of humanity; and it has only reinforced how badly we as a community of people need a place of security and safety.
Today, we sit and wake with the peace of knowing one domino is down, and we’re starting on the next. Faith, Hope, family, and love, ingredients for dreams in the making.
Thanks – so what else should our readers know about your work and what you’re currently focused on?
I. AM. ART. I specialize in the performative expression of art as a whole body and pieced of work. Words are where I tend to have the most fun, and are definitely where I have my most fun, but I truly enjoy doing performative orations where I can bring the words to lyfe on stage. I have done performative orations for Kiwanis of Oceanside, Palomar Women’s Her-Story Month & Palomar’s Black Faculty & Staff Black History Month, Cultura de La Raza. Blessed do host/MC Afro-Futurism & Afro-Con, PRIDE by the Beach, and a number of others. “The Bus Ride Home”, which lacked in the concrete writing, but was powerful in message and delivery importantly led me to further opportunities to grow and hone my craft. We then were asked to help co-write two culturally rooted plays, and direct co-direct one. i.e. Black Rootedness & Lake Walking River Talking. The Latter one play opened the San Francisco Arts Festival, a month or so after my mother died. The play and the timing of it helped me process the death of my mother and begin to grieve properly.
Having lost so much in a small chunk of years father, home, mother, we went into a emotional isolation and used it to drive one projects, based in three artistic forms. A play, “Mirrors of A Black Card”, an album, Cobblestone Pathways, and an accompany art book, “Black Portraits of America”. These three projects are different mediums to relay various storylines within the black community, all seeds small seeds we can use to rise up into our whole self. I have been working on this project for since our journey into housing insecurity and look forward to it’s completion and release next year.
Risk taking is a topic that people have widely differing views on – we’d love to hear your thoughts.
Risk-taking is a necessary part of lyfe and one we partake in everyday in almost every manner of existence. We risk our mortality with sleep the cousin of death, with driving to work, with going to school or public venues where mass shooters can exact their high score. The truth is wagering what the risk is worth and most importantly to ensure to be death-Defying. The risk in living life is having nothing to look back on and remember how significant a point it was in your lyfe to go for it, when the probability may not have been in your favor.
As a partnership we risked our housing security and livelihood when our partner, Bree, stayed home from work to help push the non-profit. It did lead to housing insecurity, however; San Diego Office of Justice & Racial Equity saw us and the dream we had, and it provided the non-profit with a grant that has changed our lives, and the ability for us to provide nature access. We felt we intelligently challenged our fortunes for the better and succeeded.
I am not a risk taker; I am a defier of death!
Contact Info:
- Website: https://freethoughtrevolution.com
- Instagram: @freethoughtrevolution
- Facebook: @freethoughtrevolution
- Youtube: @freethoughtrevolution
