Month: September 2018

We’re not interested in publishing a calendar for the apocalypse. Rather, what you hold in your hands is for those determined to survive and thrive as the system collapses around us. Those in power maintain their control only when the vast majority of people are confused, distracted, and divided against each other. More than ever, we’re at risk of being constantly spun by the latest outrage, which prevents us from seeing the big picture and formulating our own agenda and plans. The system wants to trap us in it’s internal logic — focusing on our fear, our sadness and our alienation. These feelings reflect the system’s simplistic structures: hierarchy, consumerism, individual economic survival.

But the world is infinitely complex. Nature and human beings depend on vast symbiotic webs of connection and cooperation. Our best defense against the system is to hold the complexity of our feelings and thoughts simultaneously and resist the impulse to dive down a particular rabbit hole or simply look away. We need to struggle to avoid dehumanizing other people either as heroes or villains.

No matter what, we’re still living it — gardening, squatting, raising kids and doing shit with our friends. Our response to the system’s cubicles and strip mines is likewise complex. It’s not just a riot or a strike, but also absurdity, playfulness, sexiness and laughing in its grim smug face. We embrace tenderness and intimacy to displace superficiality. Making wild, communal art and music recharges our joy so we can contribute back to the struggle, so we don’t get burned out or completely buried in sadness.

There is still abundant beauty and joy in the world. Let’s enjoy it as best we can, even while we acknowledge and experience the suffering, injustice and ecological collapse that is also around us. Holding both of these in our hearts deepens us and humbles us.

Our predicament is not new. The historical events in the organizer are useful for perspective, because people before us have faced long odds too, yet they fought and even won sometimes! Let’s take care of each other, feel our rage, and build community together. Community, friendship and family, mutual aid, solidarity….these are the antidote and only we can create them.

This is the 24th time we’ve amused ourselves by publishing the Slingshot organizer. Its sale raises funds to publish the quarterly, radical, independent Slingshot Newspaper. We distribute the newspaper for free everywhere in the US, often at the places listed in the Radical Contact List. Let us know if you can be a local newspaper distributor in your area. Consider sending us content for the paper. Thanks to the volunteers who created this year’s organizer: Amy, Bernard, Carah, Carmen, Christy, Cleo, Dov, Dyno, Eggplant, Elke, Fern, Fil, Francesca, Gabi, GoGo, Isabel, Jenna, Jesse, Joey, Jonathon, Julia, Karen, Katie, Kermit, Korvin, Laura, Lew, Lindsey, Michi, Nadja, Patrick, Rachel, Rip, Rooney, Sabine, Sara, Shahani, Talia, Taylor, Terilyn & those we forgot.

Slingshot Collective

A Project of Long Haul

Physical office: 3124 Shattuck Avenue Berkeley, CA 94705

Mail: PO box 3051, Berkeley, CA 94703

510-540-0751 • http://slingshot.tao.ca or slingshotcollective.org

slingshot@tao.ca or slingshotcollective@protonmail.com • @slingshotnews

 

Printed in Berkeley, CA on recycled paper

 

Anti-copyright.

 

The #MeToo movement has been a game changer, empowering many people affected by sexual harassment and assault to step forward with their stories, raising the social consciousness of how utterly pervasive rape and sexual assault are in our culture. But coming forward with stories of abuse is only the first step. Next, it is important for community organizations to respond effectively. Here are some tips that may help organizations you are involved in support the victims of sexual misconduct:

• Decide on a community process to address sexual misconduct in advance. This will give organizations an opportunity to begin larger conversations about misogynist culture with an eye for prevention as well as response after the fact.

• One practice is to have designated consent counselors in your organization: several people who are generally trusted and are willing to listen to people who have experiences or concerns they want to share.

• Believe victims. Our society is deeply misogynist and tends to discount narratives that attack men. The fact that accusers have often become the subjects of scrutiny and attack themselves also makes coming forward a very difficult thing to do. For this reason it is very important to treat any accusation seriously.

• Avoid punishment-based language. Threats of violence in defense of accusers is not necessarily helpful or desired and can actually perpetuate a kind of sexist paternalism.

• Once someone has stepped forward with accusations, its important to take steps to make sure that they continue to feel safe in community spaces. This may mean banning someone for a time or removing someone from a position of power while the accusations are addressed.

• Having a process for addressing accusations that respects the accuser and echoes the values of the organization is crucial. There are several models for Restorative Justice processes that are available online. Talk about the pro’s and cons of different systems and decide ahead of time what works for your specific community/organization.

• When there is no process to handle sexual misconduct, women are often the ones who get hurt–cis and trans alike–so having a great community process in place is the best way to help your community be safer and more inviting to people of all genders!

• Consent culture is the solution to leaving behind the capitalist rape culture that harms so many victims–women, people of color, the poor, and the ecology. Compost capitalism and may consent culture bloom!

One of the joys of life is a good conversation; one where ideas flow and you really feel like you understand and are understood by another person. When we fail to have good conversations, we often end up feeling isolated and misunderstood. When we think about communicating better, we typically focus on saying things better but the reality is that really good conversations are had by people who know how to listen.

10 Tips for having better conversations

1. Don’t multitask. If you are listening to someone, give them your full attention. If you are distracted by worries, to do lists or your phone, you won’t be fully present.
2. Don’t pontificate. If you want to talk about an idea without being challenged or interrupted, write a blog, or a letter, or a slingshot article. A lecture can be interesting in the right context, but it’s not a conversation.
3. Try not to repeat yourself. We tend to say things over and over again, especially when we think they are important or feel they aren’t being understood. It’s not a useful way to engage another person.
4. Don’t equate your experience with the experience of others. They are not the same. Relating to someone else’s story is important but if you are always turning the focus back onto yourself, you aren’t demonstrating that you understand their experience.
5. Don’t get lost in the weeds. A lot of extra details when you are telling a story can be confusing and, in the end, the people you are talking to rarely care about the details nearly as much as how an experience has affected you or is relevant to the conversation at hand.

6. Do use open ended questions. Questions like “What was that like?” often yield far more diverse and interesting responses than questions like “Did you have a good time?”
7. Do say so if you don’t know something. Be honest with yourself and clear with others about the limits of your knowledge and the line between certainty, opinion and educated guesswork.
8. Be as brief as you can be while still getting your point across. Often, the more we talk, the less people hear what we say.
9. Go with the flow. Many thoughts come to us when we are listening to another person talk. Let them come and go. If they are important they will come back, but if you try to hold onto them, you can be distracted from the conversation at hand.
10. Listen to the person you are talking to. It sounds simple but can be very hard, especially if you disagree with them about something. Pay attention and be present so that you can go where the wave of the conversation takes you, rather than be trying to pull it back to shore.

(adapted from Celeste Headlee)

Making radical spaces and communities as inclusive as possible is an on-going project that can take many forms. Here are some tips on making it easier for people who become parents to stay involved, or to at least stay in touch with their non-parent friends:

1. If you want to see your parent friend, offer to meet them at a playground, not at a cafe. Make some coffee and bring it to the playground. Parents spend endless hours at playgrounds with their kids — mostly alone or with other parents. You might think your new parent friend is too busy to see you, but they have plenty of time so long as you meet them half-way.

2. You can start your dinner or party at 6 pm not 8 pm. Parents hear an 8 pm start time as “I’m not invited” because many have to do kid-bedtime around then.

3. You can offer to go to a parent’s house rather than making them come to you. You may have less stuff to pack up and less transportation issues. Just because you visit a parent at their house doesn’t mean they are expecting you to take care of their kids. Parents like having adult interactions even when it is harder to get out.

4. If you’re serving food, make sure there’s something the kids can eat. It’s best to ask the parents what the kiddo is eating that week (it tends to change often).

5. You can make the extra effort to provide reliable childcare at bookfairs, meetings and events. The key is making it reliable so parents can trust the childcare — it starts on-time, the kids don’t escape. Childcare is skilled hard work not an after-thought so it helps if you have toys, art supplies, games and a safe and clean space.

6. Protests can have a parent / kids block to make it more fun and inclusive. If there isn’t one, parents may find it easier to go to a march if non-parent friends come along.

7. It is okay to be more interested in hanging out with your parent friend than their kid. It is okay if you would prefer to talk about something other than diapers, naps and birthday parties. It might even help the quality of conversation to say so right up front. Your parent friend is unlikely to be offended if you don’t relate to kids, don’t want to have a kid yourself, or find kids and parenting boring. The parent knows better than you that sometimes kids and parenting are fucking boring.

8. On the other hand, kids and parenting have something to teach us about the human condition. If you’re not going to be a parent, you can still hang out with friends’ kids from time to time. Kids needs lots of adults in their lives to inspire and love them, not just biological or adoptive parents. Kids also have the same needs for respectful attention as big people.

 

Non-fiction

How To Change Your Mind – Michael Pollan

Confessions Of A Recovering Environmentalist – Paul Kingsnorth

Braiding Sweetgrass – Robin Wall Kimmerer

Becoming Animal – David Abram

The Manifesto of the Happily Unemployed – Guillaume Paolo & The Collective

Corrosive Consciousness – Bellamy Fitzpatrick

Walking on Lava – a Dark Mountain Project Anthology

Robinson Jeffers Poet & Prophet – James Karmen

Worshipping Power: An Anarchist View of Early State Formation – Peter Gelderloos

Revolution of the Ordinary – Toril Moi

Compañeras: Zapatista Women’s Stories – Hilary Klein

Black Against Empire – Joshua Bloom and Waldo E. Martin Jr.

Making Kin Not Population – Clarke & Haraway eds.

Desert – anonymous

Against History, Against Leviathan – Fredy Perlman

Against the Grain – James C. Scott

The Drone Eats With Me – Ateh Abu Saif

Fiction

There But For The – Ali Smith

NW – Zadie Smith

Indecision – Benjamin Kunkel

The Road From Damascus – Robin Yassin-Kassab

Southern Reach Trilogy – Jeff VanderMeer

Directed By Desire – June Jordan

Their Eyes Were Watching God – Zora Neale Hurston

Homuncula – John Henri Nolette

New York 2140 – Kim Stanley Robinson

Stone Junction – Jim Dodge

Letters Of Insurgents – Nachalo & Vochek (Fredy Perlman)

Parable Of The Sower – Octavia E. Butler

Stars In My Pocket Like Grains Of Sand – Samuel R. Delany

The Word For World Is Forest – Ursula K. Le Guin

lots ‘o free anarchist zines & books – theanarchistslibrary.org

Zines

KerBloom

Black Seed

The Broken Teapot

Collectively publishing a hand-drawn organizer in these dark days is a leap of faith — but it is not an act of foolishness. We have to step back to appreciate that what may seem like a moment of imminent doom may open a window for revolutionary change that we can’t see coming yet until it arrives.

Such moments call for courage, luck and inspiration. The decaying corporate/capitalist institutions rule through division, isolation, fear, violence and hierarchy. But humans don’t want to be divided from each other, from our emotions, or from the earth — we powerfully want to unite, to live in freedom and to survive.

This organizer is one of many scattered islands of counter-culture that exist not to resist, but to re-create. Settling for resistance means we are weak — it lets out oppressors pick the issues and timing so we can walk into their traps and fight on their terms. When we hatch new values focused on cooperation, kindness and love and establish do-it-yourself projects that bring us pleasure, joy, excitement and wonder, then the system has to resist us and our ideas, not the other way around.

It’s time to stop wasting time serving a system that is finished and instead do our own thing. We’re growing our power; staying with the trouble and taking care of our community in our own ways and on our own terms. It’s time to get off our knees and let go of our fear of collapse, chaos and the unknown. We hope you and your friends can use the organizer to help fight a battle for tenderness and solidarity against hate and fear. Together we are fierce.

This is the 25th time we’ve published the Slingshot organizer. Its sale raises funds to print the quarterly, radical, independent Slingshot Newspaper. We distribute the newspaper for free everywhere in the US, often at the places listed in the Radical Contact List. Let us know if you can be a local newspaper distributor in your area. Also please send us content for the paper. Thanks to the volunteers who created this year’s organizer: Abby, Amanda, Amy, Bernard, Carah, Carolita, Cleo, Dov, Eggplant, Elke, Fern, Fil, Francesca, Georgia, Hannah, Jenna, Jesse, Joey, Jonathon, Julia, Jutta, Karen, Katie, Kermit, Korvin, Lew, Melanie, Nina, Rachel, Sara, Taylor, Terilyn, Wyrm & those we forgot.

Slingshot Collective

A project of Long Haul

Physical office: 3124 Shattuck Avenue Berkeley, CA 94705

Mail: PO box 3051, Berkeley, CA 94703

510-540-0751 • slingshotcollective.org

slingshotcollective@protonmail.com • @slingshotnews

Please download our new free Slingshot Organizer smartphone app

 

Printed in Berkeley, CA on recycled paper

 

Anti-copyright.

 

All volunteer collective – no bosses, no workers, no pay.