Reclaim the Streets! Reclaim your Heart!

RTS Billboard Liberation project at http://www.indybay.org/news/2004/02/1670110.php

SAN FRANCISCO -- On February 14th, Valentines Day, San Francisco revelers intend to take back their public spaces, starting with reclaiming the streets of the Haight.

Reclaim the Streets is a global decentralized direct action
movement which uses street parties to take back public space
from cars, corporations and the police state, and return it
to the public for socializing, bicycling, art, food, dancing,
music, dissent, dialogue, community and creativity.

Stepping off the sidewalks into the streets brings us together,
and allows us to challenge the dehumanization of our lives
and the sterile world that accompanies it. Street parties are
an opportunity to practice life as we'd prefer to live it --
full of color, community, pleasure, and mutual aid.

Flyers and cards circulated widely throughout the Bay Area
invite partiers to join RTS at noon on February 14th on the
corner of Haight and Stanyan for a march to an undisclosed
location for a renegade street party.

One day a year for love is not enough. What if our lives
were filled with love and passion all year long? What if,
we fell in love with life everyday? What if life was much
more than survival and acquiring things? Join us on
Valentine's Day to reclaim your heart.

Just imagine if the things that drove this world were stalled
for a day...No cars clogging the streets, no money changing
hands -- would that change the perspectives on what is really
important, even just for a moment?...You have the power to
effect that change, to step off of the sidewalks and into the
streets, to say no to greed, alienation and despair, and say
yes to love, to hope, to beauty and possibility... Will you
choose to claim your power, to claim your heart's desire? Join
us, reclaim your life, reclaim the streets!

Streets and sidewalks are more than just ways to get where you
are going, they are gathering points and destinations. Life
used to be lived in the streets, not just in cars, living rooms,
and cubicles. And car culture sucks. Cars are destroying our
lives and the planet. They generate traffic, congestion, and
pollution, they suck up our money, and they cause death and destruction
wherever they go.

We do not separate the struggle for car-free space from the
struggle against global capitalism: As London RTS has
written: "The streets are as full of capitalism as of cars
and the pollution of capitalism is much more insidious -- We
are about taking back public space from the enclosed private
arena. At its simplest this is an attack on cars as a
principal agent of enclosure. But we believe in this as a
broader principle, taking back those things which have
been enclosed within capitalist circulation and returning
them to collective use as a common."

Reclaim the Streets first started in England in 1991 to
protest the building of new roads through both urban and
rural areas. It was revived in 1995 and has since spread
to the U.S., Australia, Europe and South America.

For more info. See http://www.rts-sf.org.