This year’s organizer is like a single mushroom sprouting from a vast, complex, subterranean counter-cultural mycelium. After silently and slowly feeding unnoticed off the decaying log of corporate America, it pushes suddenly and unexpectedly through a thick layer of leaves and debris out into the light. Its flesh is twisted, complex and colorful and it smells moist, funky and delicious. Around this mushroom — this tiny collective project — you can see other mushrooms blooming, too, all throughout the forest — each spreading spores far and wide. Each alternative project, each direct action campaign, each study-group the realization of autonomous social circles acting collectively to express our humanity and struggle for our liberation.
Making a day planner by hand like this is a throwback — a dumb paper book in a smart phone world. Worse than that, the organizer isn’t even all that organized — it’s chaotic, cluttered and messy. A lot of the art is drawn by amateurs, pasted together with wax in an overcrowded loft late into the night — scruffy people spilling coffee on the pages and negotiating for any available flat surface. The printed contents lack the depth, timeliness and clarity easily accessible with a Google search.
Which is perhaps the point. The meaningfulness of our lives is more complex, messy and difficult than straight, computerized lines. The counter-culture we’re a part of is raw, rowdy and on the margins, but it is heading in the right directions: towards a beautiful, pleasurable, sustainable world where people are free. Meanwhile, the mainstream corporate/industrial system is heading over a cliff. In such a contradictory world, it is humbling and an honor to be amongst freaks. We’re glad you’re part us.
This is our 18th Organizer. It raises funds to publish the quarterly, radical, independent Slingshot Newspaper which we try to distribute everywhere in the US. Let us know if you want to become a local distributor of the newspaper. Thanks to the people who created this organizer: Ali, Aminah, Anka, August, Babs, Bird, Crux, Claire, Danny, Dee, Dominique, Eggplant, enola d!, Evan, Fil, Gabriella, GATS, Heather, Hurricane, Jay, Jesse, Joey, Joshua, Julie, Karma, Kathryn, Kermit, Kerry, Kurt, Lew, Liane, Lvci, Melissa, Michele, Miranda, Moxy, Nuclear Winter, Rachel, Ramona, Rubicil, Samara, Sean, Sarahtops, Stephanie, Trouble, Umul, Zoe.
Slingshot Collective
Physical officer: 3124 Shattuck Avenue Berkeley, CA 94705
Mail: PO box 3051, Berkeley, CA 94703
510-540-0751 ex. 3 • http://slingshot.tao.ca • slingshot@tao.ca
anti-copyright. Borrow whatever you want.
Printed on recycled paper
All volunteer collective – no bosses, no workers, no pay.
Front Cover People include:
Sylvia Rae Rivera, Transgender activist, present inside the Inn during the Stonewall Riots b. 1952, US
Bell Hooks, Feminist and post-modern theorist on the intricate connections between race, class, and gender b. 1952, US
Angela Davis, prison abolitionist, scholar, political activist, former member of the Black Panther Party b. 1944, United States
Emma Goldman, anarchist, feminist, free love advocate, and founder of the anarchist journal Mother Earth b. 1869, Lithuania
Maria Lacerda de Moura, teacher, journalist, anarcha-feminist, and individualist anarchist b. 1887, Brazil
Graffiti in the Bus: from a tag by Mujeres Creado, a Bolivian anarcha-feminist group.