Month: March 2024

Contact us by April 20 if you want to draw art for the 2025 Slingshot Organizer — you do not have to live in California to draw. 50 artists from all over contribute to each edition. 

Please send additions and corrections for the Radical Contact List by May 25. We’re especially looking for contacts in under-represented areas, states and countries: cities that are NOT college towns, particularly in the South and Midwest — anywhere in Alabama, Hawaii, Mississippi, Oklahoma, South Carolina, West Virginia and Wyoming, Africa & the Middle East.

If you want to work on editing and adding to the radical history dates, reach out between now – April 20. We want to add protests or notable events from 2023 / 2024, older stuff we’re missing, especially marginalized issues and movements, and we need help proofreading to try to locate and correct errors. 

If you are in the Bay Area, join Slingshot for two art party weekends to put the organizer together by hand May 25/26 (times TBA) and June 1-2 (24/7, baby!) at Long Haul 3124 Shattuck Avenue, Berkeley. “It is like an all-night art rave — but geeky and free.” Drop by for an hour or stay all day and all night. 

Selling the organizer enables Slingshot to print and distribute this newspaper for free. The 2024 organizer is still available through August. If you know of a store in your area that could sell the organizer, let us know. 

There’s a few extra copies of the 2024 organizer — contact us if you can distribute a dozen or more copies for free to youth who don’t have access in conservative areas of the Midwest, South, or other areas outside the bubble: slingshotcollective@protonmail.com. We’ve already sent boxes of free organizers to youth in Alabama, Arizona, Connecticut, Florida, Guam, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Kansas Kentucky, Louisiana, New Mexico, Maine, Maryland, Michigan, Missouri, North Carolina, New York, North Dakota, Ohio, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Vermont and Washington…

If you still want to buy the 2024 organizer, there is a list of bookstores and distributors at slingshotcollective.org. 

Slingshot is an independent radical newspaper published in Berkeley since 1988. 

A lot of shit is going down. Some of us are trying to heal, others just keep our heads above water. The billionaires are trying to compel us to go to war. Many of us are still grieving those lost amidst a pandemic and a system set up to squeeze all the meaning out of life. How to keep your soul alive under such conditions?

We created this zine under the shadow of what some are calling the “East Berkeley Wall.” In case you missed it, People’s Park was violently seized on Jan. 4^th, 2024 and been surrounded by a shipping container fortress guarded by round-the-clock private security since. If you’re wondering what happened to Slingshot Number 139, we made a Special People’s Park edition in a fit of frenzy and grief that was only hand-delivered in the Bay Area.

Making this zine is not a linear or particularly rational process. The collection of articles and art we print is random — determined by the whims, fancies and personalities of whoever shows up for the meetings. At the first meeting for this issue, we started to doom spiral. We fretted that we didn’t have enough articles or motivation to pull off an issue. Why does it even matter? Then some of the new volunteers started talking about how important this shit is, and we started hyping each other up, and wait a minute — our judgment felt impaired — this is fun — being with people and working on something together is just fun. So why the fuck not? Why not make an issue? If anything, it gave us a reason to hang out together, listen to good music, and enjoy our loft at the Long Haul … while we still have it. Now the landlord says our building won’t be demolished until 2025… This weekend Long Haul was flooded with volunteer artists, a direct action training for Gaza, sunshine and creative energy — we gotta fight harder against this fucking eviction! 

Fun is revolutionary — let’s make ourselves a threat to those in power with our solidarity, unity and love to overpower their isolation, greed and emptiness. And while we’re at it, let’s make the revolution more fun, colorful, diverse, inclusive and welcoming — a place we can be vulnerable, open and comfortable that isn’t consumed by internal conflict and factionalism… 

Joining up with the freaks who aren’t doing what they’re supposed to be doing and putting your life-force into making your own do-it-yourself adventures can change your mood – from powerlessness, resignation and floating to determined creative activity and a feeling of possibility. The Berkeley Mardi Gras Parade, not the internet. A squat or artists’ warehouse, not a condo or shopping mall. 

It’s time to jump free of systems that don’t serve us and over which we have no control. Let’s disconnect from corporate-controlled mediums in favor of raw, first-hand experiences that connect us with other people, genuine community and nature. We gotta silence the cop in our head, the CEO in our head, the politicians in our head — and trust our own vision for a better world organized around cooperation, sharing, beauty, equality, freedom, sustainability and love. The total is greater than the sum of the parts. Being around other people is magic. We are more together than we are alone. Somehow, the Slingshot miracle has happened again. 

Slingshot is always looking for new writers, artists, editors, photographers and distributors.  Even if you feel you are not an essayist, illustrator or whistleblower you may know someone who is.  If you send an article, please be open to its editing. We are a collective, but not all the articles reflect the opinions of all collective members. We welcome debate and constructive criticism.

Thanks to the people who made this: Ani, Antonio, Cathy, eggplant, Elke, Feral, Fern, Finn, Frankie, Harlin/Hayley, Henry, Jack, Jesse, Kaley, Kendrick, Korvin, Lola, Lucie, Lucy, Luis, Matteo, Matt, Olive, Robin, San, Sean, Sirkka, Tracey, Trinity, Yosha & all the authors and artists! 

Slingshot Article Submission Info

We’re not going to set a deadline for the next issue. We encourage you to submit articles for the next Slingshot anytime you want. We’ll make another issue when we feel like we’re ready. Please check the Slingshot website, IndyBay, instagram and facebook for deadline info. We also have an internal email list that will announce the next deadline so please contact us if you want to be added to the list. 

Volume 1, Number 140, Circulation 24,000

Printed March 23, 2024

Slingshot Newspaper

A publication of Long Haul

Office: 3124 Shattuck Avenue, Berkeley CA 94705*

Mailing: PO Box 3051, Berkeley, CA 94703

510-540-0751 slingshotcollective@protonmail.com 

slingshotcollective.org • twitter @slingshotnews

instagram/ facebook @slingshotcollective

* Our office may be torn down in 2025 so check before you visit or you may just find a pile of rubble

Circulation information

Subscriptions to Slingshot are free to prisoners, low income folks, or anyone in the USA with a Slingshot Organizer, or are $1 per issue donation. International $3 per issue. Outside the Bay Area we’ll mail you a free stack of copies if you give them out for free. Say how many copies and how long you’ll be at your address. In the Bay Area pick up copies at Long Haul and Bound Together books, SF.

Slingshot free stuff

We’ll send you a random assortment of back issues for the cost of postage. Send $4 for 2 lbs. Free if you’re an infoshop or library. slingshotcollective.org

By Jesse D. Palmer

Berkeley’s Leap Day Action Night was a glorious, absurd success!! Leap day offers an extra day and invites us to shake off our routine, so wingnuts in Berkeley planned a roving street party for life not death, freedom and joy not oppression and misery with the theme “Medieval peasants storm the castle — Tear down the walls from Palestine to the US/Mexico Border to Berkeley.”

A bunch of people came despite the rain. People brought medieval costumes, signs and snacks. There was a marching band and Guinevere gave a rousing speech: “We are seedlings leaping between the concrete cracks, reaching towards the sun, where all energy comes from. Like tender shoots pushing through the cold cement, we rise up, wherever we can, however we can, in any tiny break of pavement. … 

“We never chose to grow between the cracks of asphalt poured down on the ground, but we found a way, with the same prehension of all life. We never wanted to live always 3 bad months away from being homeless, but never 3 good months away from being a millionaire. We never agreed to breathe in poisoned air, to drink polluted water, to fill the land with plastic, to bring entire ecosystems to the brink of extinction, we never agreed to any of this being done, but we can all agree that this shit is fucked up!” …

Then we walked across the street for a speech in front of Chase Bank which continues to invest in suicidal fossil fuel infrastructure 30+ years after the science of climate change has been clear. We scattered ashes to represent wildfires caused by climate change. We also visited Bank of America which helped fund Cop City in Atlanta — so we dumped compost in their entryway. May the cop-capitalism alliance decompose.

Then the march headed down Telegraph Avenue and on up Durant to Taco Bell, which had the nerve to locate right next to an existing mom-and-pop burrito shop. We decried Taco Bell’s parent company Yum Foods’ 2021 investment in an Israeli tech company despite a boycott against trade with Israel. Then we circled People’s Park — now surrounded by a University of California 17 foot tall steel wall made of double-stacked shipping container and defended by round-the-clock security. As soon as we turned the corner holding a ladder, the security guards freaked out… even though the ladder was only 10 feet long and the wall is 17 feet tall.

When we got to Dwight Way, out came a 3-person slingshot and most people in the crowd took a turn hurling seed balls containing 20 plant species over the wall to bring healing and regrowth to the scarred and imprisoned Park. Despite a bunch of security guards and UC police in helmets, no one stopped us. After we ran out of seed balls, a dance party began on the closed street and portions of the wall were decorated with spray-painted slogans. 

Since 2000, Slingshot has declared a universal general strike, jamboree, street party and be-in each Leap Day everywhere. In 2024, other events we’re aware of happened in Louisville, KY, Blacksburg, VA & New York City — perhaps there were others, too. 

Leap Day Action Night isn’t a traditional protest nor is it another frivolous distraction while the world goes to hell around us. A lot of people are wallowing in doom, denial or resignation — which only decreases our chances for survival. But the capitalist system, its technology and its distractions are fragile and unsustainable — they’re disintegrating around us as the environment teeters on the brink of collapse. Alternatives based on cooperation, sharing, living in harmony with the earth and loving each other exist. We refuse to be reduced to consumers, viewers and objects to be managed. Let’s build a world that’s awake and engaged — that shifts the focus from things and entertainment to firsthand experience and life. 

By 1234567

From 2017-2021 I had an Instagram account that I posted to with tweaked-out vigor. At the time, I was living the socially isolating double-life of a functioning addict and had anorexia and bulimia. I had surface-level friends from whom I kept enough distance so no one knew what was really going on with me. When I made an Instagram account I did so in anonymity, with the intention of burrowing out a place in the world where I could form an identity without risking vulnerability. Gradually, often begrudgingly, I allowed people from my “real life” to follow me, experimented with connection and being seen. It felt safe to do so from the buffer zone of Instagram, armed with the capacity to edit, omit, and delete parts of myself, my burgeoning self-image corroborated by metrics of “engagement”.

The sense of validation that I got from “likes”, “comments”, and “views” on Instagram paralleled my reliance on other smartphone-enabled measurement tools: step tracker, calorie counter, sleep tracker, period tracker, etc. These came to override my body’s natural mechanisms for knowing if I was hungry or full, lonely or content, in need of rest or exercise.

Coming to rely on metrics to tell me about my reality, my qualitative awareness and vocabulary withered. So too did my capacity for self-determination. I ceded these to technocratic control as quantitative data handed down to me by apps curtailed engagement with those highly political / personal / ethical questions: What do I sense happening? What do I feel? How am I compelled to respond? 

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From 2021 – 2023 I worked as a stripper. Earning money in a strip club concretizes the commodification of the body that most of us experience in some way as consumers and producers under capitalism. And this concretization clarified for me what I already acted upon: if our bodies are commodities, and a more ‘beautiful’ (i.e. thin — according to our cultural beauty standards) body can accrue more capital, then an eating disorder can be a means of value production. 

The idea that we should starve / exhaust / mutilate / deny ourselves to create value is both untrue and totally sick; however, it gains credence from the puritanical work ethic, which teaches us we are inherently bad / shameful and have to work to achieve goodness. We are encouraged to transcend our physicality (our innate ‘badness’), to out-smart and out-maneuver our own bodies en route to maximum productivity. 

We rally and decry abuse when we hear of factory workers who are forced to forgo proper ventilation and bathroom breaks in situations where the denial of physical needs is enforced by a despotic boss. We see how tragically dehumanizing this is. But when the market’s invisible hand is internalized as “willpower” that supports the creation of value according to a puritanical work ethic of self-denial, it’s not so obvious. I wonder if workaholism and eating disorders are often undiagnosed — even celebrated as heroic — because they create value under capitalism; a system which valorizes and rewards those willing to dominate, regulate, control, and seek to mechanize our bodies. 

It would be overly simplistic to say people develop eating disorders because of societal beauty standards. We’ve all heard enough about how media impacts young people and all that. But it’s been meaningful for me to think about my recovery, in part, as a refusal to give in to “the man” by reclaiming and recommitting to my humanity. My eating disorder sapped my energy and made me feel insecure and incompetent. I devoted a lot of time and thought to diet and exercise. I can only imagine this effect multiplied across entire generations of people preoccupied with how we look. Think about all the power that could be re-directed towards emancipatory struggle if everyone surrendered their appetites and weight to nature and considered whatever body sh ape they got as a result to be a good one for existing / loving / playing / dismantling imperialist white supremacist capitalist patriarchy.

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In 2022, I got into recovery; got off of social media; deleted the step tracker and calorie counter from my phone. I no longer weigh myself and curb my compulsion to check the weather app on my phone when I can easily step out and see how it feels. Hundreds of times each day, as I try and resist the pull of metrics, what I’m really resisting is my fear of being wrong or uncertain. I’m also fighting coercion by capitalistic tech companies to habitually try and “optimize” and “predict” my life’s circumstances. I’m letting myself be a human who is sometimes uncomfortable, sometimes uncertain, sometimes wrong.

Recovery is not easy. I had an eating disorder for over a decade, so I’ve had to re-learn fundamental things like how to eat, walk, and exercise without harming myself; how to sense my feelings and bodily cues and how to honor them. I’ve also had to surrender control of my body’s shape and weight. The process has been scary and totally “nonproductive” in capitalistic terms, but I’m freer for it.

I’ll share some suggestions I have for nourishing a new relationship with body / food if this is something you struggle with:

– Cook with others! If there’s a Food Not Bombs group in your area, try joining and if not, consider starting one. Preparing and eating food in community (especially when it’s been donated / freely given by caring neighbors) can be a beautiful way of re-contextualizing food prep and eating experiences.

– Find others in recovery! While some addicts are becoming better understood and supported through the harm reduction movement, eating disorders can still be a shameful, difficult thing to open up about. People in your life probably won’t understand what you’re experiencing or how to support you. But there are others who will and who have recovered from whatever sort of eating disorder you’re experiencing. Try visiting 4eda.org or neda.org to learn about recovery resources and community.

– Remember, people don’t do what they do because they want to, but because they have to. We usually develop eating disorders and addictions because we want to feel safe, stable, or insulated from reality. We can’t enter recovery a second before we’re ready or a second too late. It’s been helpful for me to acknowledge that at one time I really did need my eating disorder and addiction, while also being encouraged that at this stage of my life I feel ready to practice other ways of being and don’t have to use those behaviors any longer.

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When we hold space for an abusive boss inside our own psyches, we split into two selves: the self that senses, yearns, and hungers vs. the self that represses, restricts, edits, and seeks to control. For some of us, the latter shows up as that voice telling us we need to be skinny, that we’d be ruined if we gained weight, that we’re not really hungry, that we haven’t exercised enough this week etc. I’m sending love and power your way. Kill the boss inside your head!

By Antonio

The genocide of Gazans has for months already been soul crushing to watch from afar (of course, nothing compared to experiencing it). For months I have spent nearly every day learning of some new atrocities, every day looking at my own child and imagining the horrors facing so many Palestinian parents and children. The seeming unstoppability of Israel’s aggression and our country’s elites’ willingness to support it only adds to regular feelings of dread, horror, and impotence.

And then came Aaron Bushnell’s self-immolation on February 25, 2024.

Aaron was an enlisted member of the US Air Force, but had developed a radical anti-imperial politics through his time serving, and was active in mutual aid projects and online anarchist spaces. Setting himself on fire in front of the Israeli embassy, he made clear his call for a Free Palestine, shouted as he took his last breaths. 

Aaron was a comrade, no longer willing to be complicit. He was caught in a situation of having signed away his life to the US military industrial complex, which was about to assign his work and skills to support Israel in its genocide and ethnic cleansing of Gaza. There are solid arguments against killing oneself as a political act, and I am not suggesting self-sacrifice is the ‘right choice’ for action: if he had not chosen this way, perhaps Bushnell would have continued to struggle against the military and contributed his heart and soul to liberation movements over many decades. 

But we should recognize that historical change is not linear, we never know what the effects of our actions are, and we shouldn’t rush to judge another’s actions. People around the world are now celebrating Aaron as a representation that even US Americans can stand against empire, and that’s worth something. His action has also catalyzed much discussion and reflection domestically about what we all could do to stop US/Israeli impunity.

His words (posted online days before his act) strike my heart many times over:

“Many of us like to ask ourselves, ‘What would I do if I was alive during slavery? Or the Jim Crow South? Or apartheid? What would I do if my country was committing genocide?’ The answer is, you’re doing it. Right now.”

I am guessing many of you out there are struggling with this like I am: what could I possibly do to interfere with this genocide? How can I do something that wouldactually change the situation, since marches and petitions seem so inadequate to the task? I have gone to protests against Zionists, port shutdowns, and marches when I can; I write to awful Zionist politicians who I highly doubt will care about my postcards and emails (but I do it nonetheless).

We shouldn’t have to kill ourselves to make change (and I truly believe we are all more valuable to the world alive than dead), but Aaron’s example shows that sometimes, extreme situations call for extreme responses. And that extreme responses can catalyze discussion and action more than the socially-acceptable forms of “politics” we are encouraged to prioritize.

Why aren’t more people responding outside of those forms? Why am I not doing more radical acts of direct action, of sabotage, of afflicting those who are inflicting harm, of laying my body on the line? Like many, I have my excuses. We should not act from guilt, but neither should we expect change to come without being uncomfortable, or inconvenienced, or put at risk.

Ultimately, my own barriers to action seem mostly a matter of disconnection: I don’t want to act alone, and need to find my people and get organized.

I have begun to organize with a Palestine Liberation Collective at my workplace (which is a start, but I don’t think we’ll be occupying our boss’s office just yet). What I (and I think many people) really need is a like-minded group of people who want to do more. Mutual encouragement, a feeling of belonging, a dismantling – act by act – of our own alienation.

It’s time (as if it ever stopped being time) to form affinity groups and get creative, and get confrontational. Confront war profiteers at their fancy dinners. Confront our locally elected assholes like State Senator Scott Wiener and Berkeley Mayor Jesse Arreguín at their fundraising events. Confront military recruitment centers, Elbit Systems weapons producers, and the tech companies actively censoring pro-Palestine content on social media and elsewhere.

People are rightfully livid about this ongoing genocide, and I think they (we!) are ready for more intense and extreme ways to fight back. The radical right knows how to radicalize their base – why doesn’t the radical left?? But let’s radicalize with values of care, dignity and solidarity, and with a vision of a world without wars, prisons, politicians and settler colonies. Let’s remind people – as Aaron Bushnell has with one selfless act – that when another world exists in our hearts, the world outside us cannot stay as it is forever. 

We simply need to keep our hearts whole, keep our vision clear, keep our friends and communities close, and act fiercely and autonomously. You never know what may come of it. 

With deep mourning for the 30,000 Palestinian martyrs (and counting), R.I.P. Aaron, and all others who refuse to accept this awful world as it is.