[Barrington Collective] LEAP DAY!!!!

[Anders]

So leap day is soon and Barringotn and the co-ops are planning a pre-uprising 
parade. A group of us hope to leave CZ around 2:30 and slowly make our way 
through the co-ops collecting more and more people, eventually ending up at 
chateau at a little before 4. 4pm is out gathering time at chateau if you 
can't be collected show up at chateau at 4. 4 4 4  4444. the magic number 
(BRING COSTUMES< INSTRUMENTS< NOISE, FLOATS, LARGE THINGS, NUMBER FOURS AND 
LETTER Q's, PILLOWS FOR PILLOW FIGHTS, PLANTS< ANYTHING). From chateau we will 
head down telegraph and then down bancroft (taking our time) having a blast. 
At which pont we will meet up with the long haul crowd...those who don't want 
to be involved with that can go home from there (or go to the concrete air 
band noise event in west oakland).

 SO LEAP AT 4PM CHATEAU LEAP PARADE LEAP DAY


(we're also having a foam brick/rock/bottle making party at saturday noon at 
CZ, along with a barrington t-shirt making session)

the foam stuff is for the uprising, to throw and throw and laugh a lot.

~anders


>From Jesse at the long haul:

Dear folks:

Sorry for the duplicate postings.

I want to invite all of you to what looks like will be another
successful and amazing Leap Day Action Night protest this coming
Sunday at 6 p.m. at the Berkeley BART station.

Some of you may remember the last leap day action night 4 years ago in
which we roved throughout downtown Berkeley for 2 hours using finger
puppets to re-enact the Seattle WTO protest in front of the numerous
chain stores and banks, etc. that are ruining Berkeley. What started
out as something of a gag action (sponsored by Crafts and Insurrection
Convergence) turned out to be VERY successful at disrupting business
as usual. Starbucks had their doors yarned at two separate locations.
The puppet shows forced chainstores to close their doors over and over
that night. It moved way beyond ritualistic single issue protest.
Being out in the streets to go after what's wrong in our own community
should happen more often. Therefore, I hope you'll join leap day this
coming Sunday.

"How can I make Leap Day Action Night more successful?" you may ask.
Well, tell your friends, housemates, etc. and spread the word. The
larger our numbers, the more we can run amok. There are also a number
of crafts projects going on this week to create signs, flyers, and
props for the action -- contact me if you want to plug in.

"What should I bring?" According to an email I just received: "The
organizers are requesting that folks bring pillows, potted plants,
masks, running shoes, and the realization that nothing is impossible."

If you are a student, the Barrington Collective is doing a feeder
march through the campus area that will end up at the BART station at
6.

I look forward to seeing you Sunday. By the way, the 6 p.m. time is
serious - the mob is likely to leave the BART area soon after 6 p.m.

take care, jesse

P.S.: Following is various material about leap day:

Universal Uprising - Leap Day 2004

Crafts and Insurrection Convergence (and various independent
troublemakers) are calling for a spontaneous universal uprising on
Leap Day - February 29, 2004. Leap day is an extra day a blank
slate waiting to be transformed into a spontaneous, inspirational
rebellion against dreary business as usual. Every other day, the
wheels of global industrial capitalism spin around, running over our
freedom and the earth in the process. It's up to us to try to make
leap day a little different.

Leaping is an uplifting, explosive, hopeful action. Try it right
now. Do you feel better? I thought so. Leaping is how you get from
where you are stuck, across a wide creek in the forest, to the other
side and new possibilities. You leave the ground and fly free into the
unknown.

In the radical milieu, far too much of our energy goes into tired,
ritualistic protests. Usually, a protest is focused on being against
something. As such, many protests are inherently reactionary, not
proactive. They allow our rulers to set the agenda, and then we
predictably turn out to try and stop it. The best that can be achieved
in this model is the status quo, and the worst is that the protest is
a failure and the rulers get their way.

You can't build a successful movement to create change and build a new
society by just being against something, or everything. When do these
oppositional protests ever allow us to put out our vision for the
future? You know you're in trouble when conservatives -- whose
agenda is literally to turn back the clock -- accuse you of
supporting policies of the past because you're spending time
fighting to defend gains made in the 1930s or the 1960s.

Always protesting makes us come off as whiny and negative. People
don't always want to join the losing team or identify as the
underdogs or oppressed. In a lot of left circles, it feels like a
competition to see who is the most oppressed and fucked over -- you
win if you lose the most. This is not going to be a successful
strategy to organize a movement to win gains and change society --
it will be a self-fulfilling prophecy of failure and oppression.

Recently, Berkeley anarchists started a soccer club, and named it
Kronstadt, after an incident in post-revolutionary Russia in which the
Soviet Army defeated and massacred rebellious anarchist troops. This
is telling in terms of how we see ourselves -- we too often worship
failure, defeat, and even our own slaughter! You don't ever see our
rulers celebrating the time they got their ass kicked.

So Leap Day is an opportunity to have an action for something and not
against anything. Leap Day is a totally arbitrary day, and thus it
puts the onus on radicals to think about what we want, and figure out
how to communicate and promote our goals.

The proposal for a universal uprising on Leap Day is totally
open-ended in terms of tactics, goals and strategy. The idea is that
folks across the universe will get together and figure out how to use
their extra day for something exciting and new. This could range from
individual actions of sabotage, disruption, art, music, or enjoyment,
to more organized forms of rebellion or building and development.

The hope is that people will let their imagination run free and wild,
incorporating forms of expression never seen before. Why should every
protest have the same signs, the same puppets, the same chants? Maybe
there could be an action at rush hour of totally silent mimes or scary
clowns. What does our vision of the future look like, and can we
build a little piece of it right now to show around? How can we go
beyond involving the same young-ish, white-ish people as always?

Leap Day is about breaking down the separation between activism and
living our lives full of enjoyment and freedom. Living full joyful
lives must ultimately be the same as building a new world.

You don't need permission to celebrate Leap Day, and there is no
organization, no structure, no email list! There is no success or
failure. This is about taking matters into your own two hands and
seeing what might happen.

The first radical action specifically inspired by leap day (that I'm
aware of) happened on Feb. 29, 2000. There was only one meeting to
organize the action because we wanted it to be long on action,
inspiration and leaping into the future, and short on the typical
boring meetings. We decided that we would make puppets, but not the
huge kind you usually see at street protests. Too heavy to leap in.
Too bulky to run from the cops in. We decided to make finger puppets,
and then have puppet shows in front of all of the chain stores and
banks in downtown Berkeley.

We had a sound system on a bike and really cool finger puppets
representing all the factions present in Seattle when we shut down the
WTO: police, protesters, turtles, jeerleaders, even a John Zerzan
finger puppet to talk to the media. If you want to shut down a
business district, try doing finger puppet shows right in their front
doors with a bullhorn. What are they really going to do but shut down?
The cops were too confused to really do anything, and after smashing a
TV and VCR in front of the local corporate video rental place
Blockbuster, the mob dragged old mattresses out into the streets and
simulated sex acts in the road. Happy Leap Day Berkeley!

Leap Day is the only day of the year that hasn't been declared
"national carpet installer day" or whatever. In 2004, it's our
day to start building a new world. Use your extra day wisely and
joyfully. Maybe when you wake up on March 1, it will be different,
too.

A call for a spontaneous universal uprising on Leap day make a leap of
dreams 2004 is leap year -- a fantastic opportunity to leap into
something new. Are you gonna to use your extra day like you use up so
many other days -- slaving away at your job to make the bosses richer?
Using up more of the earth's resources while the forests, the oceans
and free communities wither and die? Watching it all go on around you
-- an "information consumer" -- feeling helpless to do anything to
resist it? Life is far too short to spend days, weeks, years just
getting by -- getting treated like an object. How much of your life
do you really get to control? How often are you really fully alive
and free? If you wish things were different and dream about a better
world, you're not alone. Vast numbers of people from all walks of
life realize that life as we know it isn't satisfying our real needs
and has to change. Lots of people have developed pretty concrete
ideas of how life could be transformed. We need to love each other,
take care of each other, share and cooperate, live with the earth
instead of destroying it, and embrace diversity, not hatred and
violence. Social structures that promote power and inequality need to
be dismantled, and arrangements that promote freedom and
sustainability constructed in their place. So if things are to
change, how can each of us be part of creating these changes? Most
people feel like they're too isolated as individuals to really do much
of anything effective against a massive, entrenched system. This
collective feeling of individual helplessness and inertia is a
self-fulfilling prophecy -- but it isn't necessarily real. Those in
charge encourage this feeling of isolation, helplessness and passivity
in a million ways. They want everyone to individually conclude that
nothing very big or important can change -- that the big things have
to be the way they are. They love cynicism, resignation and
isolation. They fear dreams, hope and community. Its easy to see
that if everyone oppressed by the current system would simply refuse
to go along with it all at once, the system would be crushed and
replaced by something else. The problem usually appears to be moving
from the isolated individual's actions to a coordinated revolt broad
enough to challenge the massive inertia of the way things are. But is
such pre-organization the only way? The most massive uprising is
really just a lot of individuals replacing fear and resignation with
hope and courage. The key is for each individual to make a leap of
inspiration -- from hopelessness to activity, disregarding whether
other individuals have simultaneously made the same leap at the same
time. Otherwise, everyone will always be waiting for everyone else to
rise up first, and life will go on like always. Each of us can only
be responsible for our own activity, or lack of activity -- our own
resistance to the system, or our own cooperation with the system. We
propose a universal day of action on our extra day in 2004, February
29. Imagine everyone who feels smothered living a mediocre life
within the current insane system taking individual responsibility to
resist in whatever way they can. Making a leap of action -- whether
they reasonably believe anyone will join them or not. Acting as a
free individual, not a sheep waiting to see which way the herd is
going to go. Take leap day off work and live life like it really
mattered. Spend the day as a free and whole being. Maybe that means
spending time alone, or maybe it means with friends, or with your
whole block, or even the whole city. Maybe it means tearing down the
forces that seek to force you back to work and back onto you knees on
March 1. Maybe living free for a day means spending the day creating
new structures, new ideas, new forms of cooperation and a whole new
reality which make you happier and freer. You don't have to wait for
tomorrow, and you don't have to ask anyone permission. Celebrate leap
day with a leap of participation and change.