ZeitNite to be held in downtown Hattiesburg

Hattiesburg will host an advocacy event dubbed “Mississippi ZeitNite” by its compatriots on Saturday at 7 p.m. at Downtown Grill & Grocery.

The event is being put on to raise awareness of the international and ever-growing Zeitgeist Movement.

The Zeitgeist Movement (TZM) is a “global sustainability activist group working to bring the world together for the common goal of species sustainability,” according to the TZM home page.

It’s main tag-line and wholly futurist goal is to achieve a “resource-based economy,” a term coined by Jacque Fresco, founder of The Venus Project – a similar and intertwined movement.

A resource-based economy is essentially a holistic socioeconomic system in which all goods and services are available without the use of money, credits, barter or any other system of debt or servitude.

ZeitNite is the namesake given to these events that are held internationally and aim to facilitate a unifying expression for all socially conscious organizations that “wish to use the power of art to effect change in the social zeitgeist,” said Hattiesburg chapter coordinator Stephen Carroll.

The event will play host to several musicians and speakers who advocate or work with The Zeitgeist Movement, including musicians James Moran of Austin, Texas; local musicians Chris Hartfield and Jaime Jimenez of the band “Barks at Dogs” and guest speakers Frank E. Kirkpatrick and Grady Gatlin.

TZM was established in 2008. While it has stretched to all corners of the globe, the movement is still weak, yet highly auspicious. It is growing at a rapid rate.

“It’s been four years, and we have over a thousand chapters across seventy countries,” Carroll said. “While we need more organization, that is something we are working on with these types of awareness events.”

Mississippi ZeitNite will be the first official TZM event held in Hattiesburg, essentially initiating the local chapter into the movement.

“Biloxi and Rankin County have the only other chapters in Mississippi, but neither are very active,” Carroll said. “We are working to change that.”

With awareness lacking, gaining momentum in that department is the main goal of this event. It is safe to say it looks to be working. The Facebook event alone suggests that an excess of 40 people plan on attending.

“That would be double to any of our other turnouts, but those meetings were just held at my home without really any attempt to bring people out,” Carroll said.

With the growing efforts of its members effectively gaining awareness, it seems a Hattiesburg chapter is here to stay.

“I’m so glad this is getting started up in Hattiesburg,” TZM advocate Cody Fricke of Bay St. Louis said. “I’d be afraid, considering the magnitude of what TZM is trying to accomplish, that if a chapter was started anywhere else in Mississippi it would be met with nothing but confrontation and misunderstanding.”