The world is suffering from information overload — a constant barrage of distraction, seduction, and ultimately fear and despair that makes it harder to see the big picture, plan long-term, or just breathe the air and live your life. The constant speed up and centralization of data, money and power favors authoritarian power-grabs and makes home-grown do-it-yourself alternatives seem invisible and impossible. The system loves it when everyone feels scared, hopeless and resigned, because that means the system can do whatever it pleases with no opposition, no resistance, no disorder. The system wants us to think that our only options are the bad choices that it offers. We need to struggle for other options: neither fear-based violent authoritarianism nor hum drum economic servitude as a worker and consumer.
Being part of the resistance — creating alternatives to the top down dehumanizing system —isn’t a burden or a lot of work. It is the secret to happiness and being fully alive, awake and engaged with others and ourselves. Living within the system is boring — we demand a world filled with music, creativity, playfulness and spontaneity. In this world of hate, fear, violence, greed and arrogance, acting with love, generosity and tenderness is resistance.
When we focus on making life meaningful and taking care of others around us and the earth, the sense that the world is so totally out of control doesn’t go away, but it becomes contextualized with the reality that each of us is actually experiencing. Our lives aren’t all great all the time, but they aren’t apocalyptic, either. The looming sense that the world is ending is robbing us of our ability to see that we’re still here now and what we’re doing in this moment is what really matters.
It’s time to disconnect and slow down. The Organizer you hold in your hands is a tool to help you step away from the computerized rat race and reconnect with other people in a face-to-face, non-virtual, cooperative fashion. Writing stuff down with a real pen on real paper changes the quality of thought in ways that we’re only beginning to realize we miss and that we need. Try it! This is the 23rd 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, Angie, Bellamy, Casey, Courtney, Dane, Dov, Eggplant, Elaine, Ellie, Elke, Erica, Fil, Francesca, Hailey, Isabel, Jason, Jesse, Katie, Kermit, Korvin, Lew, Lindsay, Mel, Michael, Moira, Piper, Rachel, Rica, Rory, Solomon, Vanessa & 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 • slingshot@tao.ca • @slingshotnews
Printed in Berkeley, CA on recycled paper
Anti-copyright.
All volunteer collective – no bosses, no workers, no pay.