Posted by frappyjohn (Msg) on 2008-09-07 07:55:49:

The (very important) future of the Brick House

By John R. Hicks

This is a time of introspection and anticipation here at the Brick House.

We know that LEO, the local alternative weekly, is doing a story on us, and from the interviews that have been granted and the questions that have been asked, we know this is not going to be just a light fluff piece, but something in depth, probing our demons. Something that may not be terribly flattering.

I suspect the article's theme will be something like: Why does this handful of people keep putting themselves through hell, struggling from month to month, when they should be able to see they're not making any progress and the stress of the struggle is deflecting them from what they're supposed to be about in the first place?

(And the irony of an organization dedicated to self-reliance that itself can't quite seem to attain self-sufficiency is bound to come out somewhere).

So I suspect we all have been brooding, meditating, contemplating: Yeah, just why are we doing this?

Sure there are the base human psychological reasons: a need to belong, a refusal to admit we've been wrong, simple inertia. We are all human and these tendencies are present in all of us. But I think most of us are mature enough to acknowledge a hopeless situation sooner or later and quit. Yet we haven't. There must be something else that keeps us going.

That something is probably different for each of us, as it should be. We aim to enable people to each realize their unique individual potential, not to all subscribe to some grand unified ideology. The gal with greasy hands working in the bike workshop is motivated differently than the guy staffing the door at the concert or the gal instructing others on taking care, and control, of one's own body.

We don't stop often enough to appreciate the underlying philosophy behind it all. And we haven't been at all effective at communicating that philosophy to the public.

That's largely because we haven't really defined it. Perhaps we don't want to define it for fear we won't agree and will finally fly apart.

That may have worked in the past to get us to this point. But it's clear now that if we are to survive we must solicit the broad support of the public. And to do that we must stand for something that is important, clearly communicable, and valuable (something that is not already being done by other organizations).

We can do that. Big time. (I don't see any other organization effectively practicing or preaching the principles that I believe are at our essence, and I believe those principles are exactly what our country and much of the developed world need if we are to survive as a humane civilization.)

But simply knowing that we can pull it off won't save us. We still have to do it.

II. Our History

Our convoluted history makes defining ourselves difficult. It is largely an oral history, and due to volunteer turnover is being retold second or third hand at this point, but this is what I have gathered:

Much of our history was shepherded by the husband-wife team of Jamie Miller and Liz Palmer, both of whom are public schoolteachers. I have never met Liz. Jamie appeared to be phasing himself out when I arrived at the Brick House in 2005, apparently as a result of burnout and the financial drain the organization had taken on him.

Our intellectual roots are descended from BRAT Magazine, a very well-edited and quite serious review produced by the youth of Bardstown Road in the late 1990s. We were formally birthed in 1999 as the Bardstown Road Youth Cultural Center (BRYCC), designed to get the kids in off the street and give them something constructive to do. We soon found that concerts did that trick and we made our mark around the turn of the century as a hot DIY music venue.

We were renting our building on Bardstown Road (the old Airway Theater, today a Buffalo Wild Wings restaurant). The rent was several thousand dollars a month and going up. We decided it was prudent and proper to ditch the landlord and buy a building instead, with the help of a mortgage, and the friendly banker who came with it. We moved from Bardstown Road (in the East end) to Old Louisville (in the center of town), thus leaving the kids on the street behind.

Somewhere along the way we cast ourselves as a PAZ, a “permanent autonomous zone,” based on the anarchist teachings of Hakim Bey. At one point we hosted a national conference on the subject.

Apparently from these same influences we picked up what little structure and procedure we have: We are ostensibly a loose confederation of freely-formed, autonomous “collectives” who periodically send representatives to a central “assembly” to take care of mundane housekeeping matters (like, say, making the $770 a month mortgage payment).

It's my impression that this structure has never actually functioned as planned, at least not since we moved to the current building. The story goes that it took us a year of DIY effort to get the building up to “Code” so we could open. I imagine that this period of stress and togetherness took its toll on interpersonal relations not to mention on volunteers' pocketbooks.

I arrived on the scene in 2005 when I started attending meetings of the radio collective, which had obtained an FCC permit to operate a low-power FM radio station and was in the process of raising money to erect an antenna and build a studio. At that time, the only activity in the Brick House building was a weekly meeting of the bicycle workshop collective. We had no idea how the mortgage was being paid. We soon became concerned that the money we were raising for radio might be at risk if the Brick House itself went under.

And so, in the summer of 2006 as the annual election for the Brick House board of directors approached, the radio collective wrote a letter to the directors offering to take their places on the board. When the annual meeting occurred, two directors showed up with enough proxies to accept our offer with the sole condition that we include one additional person, Kristin Shelor, on our slate. (Kristin had been the one most visible person at the Brick House during this period, showing up check the mail and phone messages and do enumerable other chores.) This change of the board, although it was voluntary, is usually referred to as the “radio takeover.”

Mark McKinley and I were elected to serve that year as co-chairs. After a few months, Mark resigned and I finished the year as sole chair. (In the summer of 2007, Kristin Shelor and Meg Stern were elected co-chairs. We have not yet had our 2008 elections.)

We new board members soon found that Brick House expenses were about $1200 per month. There was no income. Radio had about $5000 in the bank. To safeguard that money for radio, our treasurer, John Wilborn, obtained a grant from a private foundation to carry the Brick House expenses for about six months while it worked to build a source of income. As those six months came to a close, Brent Tinnell, who was then a mere junior in high school, took the initiative to start producing concerts once again and soon was generating several hundred dollars a month in new income. We recognized his efforts by electing him to the board of directors.

By the end of the six months, the board had developed into two factions: One wanted to sell the building and focus the organization's efforts on getting the radio station on the air. The other, heartened by the success of the concerts, opposed the sale and favored continuing the efforts to build a full-fledged confederation of collectives.

Although I was initially a “radio person” and had little conception of what the larger Brick House organization was supposed to be about, little by little I got won over to the larger idea. It started when Jamie Miller mentioned the idea of a PAZ to me at one of our radio meetings. I came home and googled it and became fascinated with the idea of people actually trying to put their political ideas into practice in a voluntary manner. On the other side I kept hearing Kristin describe the Brick House as a “Do It Yourself” center. At first this just conjured up visions of hobby shops and sewing centers, but at some point Jamie's description of a PAZ and Kristin's description of a DIY center finally made their way to the same synapse of my brain and I had that “aha” moment:

The Brick House is a PAZ, I realized, a free space where people can come and find the resources to become self-reliant! Somehow this triggered multiple other synapses and I have not come down off the high since.

Initially I had favored selling the building and buying or renting something more modest so we could continue with the confederation concept. But I soon felt that the board was not committed to finding a replacement location should it sell, so I withdrew my support for the sale.

Although a bare majority of the board still favored selling the building, they did not want to force the matter and soon relented. But within months, seeing that the autonomy of the radio collective was in jeopardy, the remaining four members of the radio faction resigned from the board. This included treasurer John Wilborn, and with him we lost access to additional funds from the private foundation. Once again we were on our own financially.

Since then we have struggled each month to make the mortgage. But along the way we have managed to suckle and wean several viable collectives.

• The bicycle workshop collective is now quite active.
• The music concert collective has gone through several iterations but has managed to continue to develop our reputation as a DIY venue.
• The radio collective has also gone through several iterations but is now on a firm track toward developing a true local-community based station (in Fern Creek, where the antenna is) and has plans to make it a platform for an exciting venture in citizen journalism.
• A woman's health collective studies how woman can be in charge of their bodies.
• A library collective maintains an impressive collection of books on political and social topics, and it has spawned a nascent poetry collective with bimonthly poetry readings.
• We have a just-sprouted garden collective, with blooms in the flower beds and oh-so-much potential to expand into a true DIY food collective.
• One of the most impressive collectives is the L.I.N.E. Free School. Although we had talked of forming a free school, this collective sprang up independently of the Brick House but works in cooperation with us. They have taught us a lot about how to practice the principles of decentralization and voluntary cooperation.

These collectives have struggled and stumbled but have persisted because they are run by people who are truly determined to take control of their lives in one way or another. This is why we exist. And this is worthwhile.

III. Anarchist ideals and today's world

Anarchism was an obscure chapter in my political theory text in college forty years ago. It now appears that anarchist ideas have a particular appeal to the idealism of today's youth: a rejection of authority and oppression, a belief in individualism and self-reliance, a call for voluntary cooperation, all combined with a rejection of today's dehumanizing corporate commercial consumer ethic and a call for a return to simplicity, localism, and nature.

These are radical ideas. And most are ideas that have been at the core of Western Civilization ... at least until recently. Judaism's Torah consistently condemns oppression and teaches that actions have consequences. Jesus taught the equal worth of all individuals, and early Christians practiced voluntary communalism. Martin Luther rejected mortal authority. John Calvin extolled self-reliance. The Anabaptists put the individual in charge of his own salvation. The Enlightenment brought all of these ideas together and gave birth to our own country, the first in history to reject central authority and extol the prime importance of each person (although “person” was still an evolving word) and to put an elaborate structure in place to control authority and preserve individual freedom.

But things have gradually gone awry. Along the way the corporation was invented and declared to be a person also -- an immortal person with the ability to grow without limit. A hundred years ago broadcast technology made possible mass communication for the first time and spawned a cancer in the advertising industry. Gradually mankind began to be faced with a new type of oppression, from giant soulless “persons” determined to control our thoughts and desires. Adam Smith's ideal of a free market of free individuals interacting freely has been replaced by a lopsided market of giant suppliers and powerless consumers. The concentration of wealth has not just continued unabated but is accelerating. We dare not plot the curve. And this wealth has harnessed government to do its bidding and made a sham of our democracy.

After millennia of the development of a civilization based on the worth of individual human beings, in our own time we have seen a new anti-civilization emerge.

It is any wonder that our youth are attracted to the idea of a return to self-reliance, localism, and simplicity and a rejection of oppression by government and corporations alike? When will we wake up and follow them?

IV. Self Reliance and the Brick House

Despite our anarchist influences in the past, the Brick House doesn't purport to be an anarchist organization. There are a variety of political philosophies represented among us, including a number of self-professed anarchists. But we largely don't talk politics, or political philosophy.

To me this is a pity since I find these ideas exciting, and I particularly enjoy discussing politics and political philosophy. So I must content myself to merely write about it.

But to be fair to the anarchists among us, I must acknowledge that they emphasize practice over theorizing. They each work to be self-reliant and to teach others to be self-reliant. When the day comes that we are all self-reliant (and somehow along the way learn how to get along with each other) there will be no need for governmental authority. No head: an-archos: Thomas Jefferson's (and Thomas Paine's) best government: the one that has no need to govern at all.

(Young anarchists take this quite seriously. But even old Jeffersonians find it's good to have an ideal to strive for even if it's not attainable.)

Still, although we are not an anarchist organization, the ideas of self-reliance, opposition to oppresive authority, localism, etc. are still with us, are very relevant to today's world, and I believe have a broad appeal to the public.

V. Conclusions: How we can clearly communicate our mission?

So we are about a lot of ideas. But we must focus on one or two simple ideas -- and effectively communicate them to the public -- if we are to survive.

Clearly the one idea that has seemed to be at the center this discussion is: Self Reliance.

This is good news, because it is an idea that is easy to communicate, has broad appeal, and is not something that other organizations are focused on.

So I propose that we focus primarily on being an organization that promotes, encourages, and enables self reliance.

Do-It-Yourself or DIY is a popular term for the same idea and can be used provided we make it clear that DIY is all about self reliance.

I further propose a slogan that goes like this: "Taking charge of our lives."

This helps makes the abstract idea of self reliance a little more real in people's minds.

As a first derivative of our primary principle I propose that we declare that self reliance requires that individuals be free from oppressive power by either government or corporate entities. This should include a firm stand in favor of free speech and an open government that does not spy on its citizens. And we should oppose oppressive corporate power by opposing manipulative or deceptive marketing and by expecting more openness the larger the corporate entity.

We should not as an organization take a position of advocating either the abolition of government or of corporations. But we should allow the discussion and debate of such subjects and allow either or both ideas to be suggested as an ideal to be striven for.

As a second derivative of our primary principle I propose that we recognize that self reliance is abetted by the ideas of simplicity (including rejecting manufactured desires), localism (and the importance of community, neighborhood, and extended family), and a respect for nature. And that the idea of sustainability is derived from self reliance combined with a respect for nature.

I invite discussion and debate on these proposals. But remember, there are a lot of good ideas in this world. We must focus on a few of them that are important, easily to communicate, and philosophically consistent. I believe that by starting with the central idea of self reliance and elaborating in the way I have suggested, we cover some important ground that needs to be defended, and we can appeal for support from a broad range of the public without compromising our integrity.

What do you think?