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PEACE CENTER ACCIDENT REPORT Here is a story of the Peace and Justice Center, a collective space that existed in Bloomington, Indiana from Spring of '91 until Fall of '92. It's mainly a story of problems, and I am writing it so that others, in Bloomington and elsewhere, can recognize and avoid them. Abstract The Peace and Justice Center was founded by people who wanted to continue a struggle they had adopted during the Gulf War. But activism based around issues rather than community led to misshapen priorities, and the deliberate avoidance of firm positions meant that nobody felt at home. These problems were compounded by financial insolvency and lack of a community-based location. In addition to the conceptual and strategic disadvantages, there were many tactical gaffes that helped wreck the place. 1. The Good Ole Days The Center was started in May of '91, just after the end of the Gulf War. Many people had great fun working and struggling together against the war and felt a continuing need for a visible activist presence in the town. The Center was in that sense founded on nostalgia for the prior community of struggle, in part a reincarnation of a tent city that had gone up on the local campus for the duration of the war, and which had existed in a more urgent environment than the Center itself. At that time, when Iraqis were getting blown away left and right, the antiwar coalition felt perfectly comfortable being a 'moral minority' and decrying the larger society for its complicity in the war. This attitude, that the community was there to be lectured to, carried over into the PJC and closed it off from its social surroundings, even after the situation had changed and the intensity had faded. No effort was made to characterize the needs of the community; the space existed in large part to serve the indignance of its operators. 2. Thinking Too Big One of the ideas about the founding of the PJC was that it would serve to "put Bloomington on the map" of the peace and justice community; it was conceived as more of a national node working on "broad social issues" than as a focus for the town itself. Some feel that a better policy would have been to use a broad social justice/anti-authoritarian vision to interpret and deal with local needs, instead of drumming up local action to suit the needs of a vision. 3. Trying to Please All The people involved in the antiwar coalition were a diverse mix (pacifists, Leninists, progressives, anarchists, liberal dissenters, etc.) that worked well together-- as long as the war was on. But the PJC had no such clear purpose that promoted unity. The result was that lots of energy went into making the space a neutral ground that could accomodate varying activist agendas and wound up advancing really none of them. The only way this could have ended was if one or more factions had managed to cook up a common agenda, and then found some way to get rid of the other factions. Or if some factions had just decided to strike out on their own; probably a better move. But nobody wanted to do this. The Center did not want to have to go to the people, the idea was that the people would come to it. Being agenda-less and welcoming every position was thought to be the best way to get "them" in "here." The deliberate neutrality was even considered selective and hypocritical by some; the people running the Center had come out strongly against the Gulf War, for example, but refused to take a position on prisoner support or abortion rights. With some positive agenda to pursue, the diversity there might have been a promising asset. But in the vacuum that actually existed, it just meant that nobody's needs were met. 4. We Had it Too Easy One of the professors at nearby Indiana University felt the PJC was a good enough idea that she would bankroll it until it could "get on its feet" and begin to support itself. This was a death sentence for people's attitudes; we got spoiled. One Center worker went so far as to state that Gandhi was only able to live the way he did because he had rich friends, so it was alright for us too. If we had forced ourselves to work out of a shoebox for a couple years until we got the place running properly, doing what activism we could, it would have recreated the climate of struggle against circumstances that leads to good problem-solving and sound policies. To make matters worse, many people lived in a state of denial about where the money was coming from. Budget statements were always in absolute terms of what was in the account, no detailing of where it came from. People became complacent about finances and the PJC died with a whimper not long after the benefactor became reconciled to the fact that the dollar-to-action ratio was pathetic. It is true that we had music benefits, and a coffee service that brought in about $100 a week. But the damage to attitudes had been done; management of the cash flow was erratic and on at least one occasion, corrupt. (Never let a man with nothing to lose take charge of your treasury.) 5. Location, Location, Location Related to this was the question of rent and location itself. The PJC was in a high-rent district-- $800 a month. There are some who feel that the high rent is what did the place in, but this doesn't explain a lot. True, the activity going on at the Center wasn't worth $800 a month, but it also wasn't worth $400 a month, or even $200 a month. One reason for choosing that site was its location near the center of town. Other desirable features were: large windows, large floor space, and a park close by across the street. This "central location" was more apparent than real. It was centered on the town of Bloomington only in a cheap geometric sense; in fact it had no central position in the minds of town residents, no embeddedness in a surrounding neighborhood or community. The nearest thing resembling a neighborhood was the student district three blocks away, and this really wasn't satisfactory; the student population is too transient. It doesn't have the social connection or staying power to commit to community-based activism. The PJC would have been better off to position itself in an area of town where the residents are more permanent and have more of a vested interest in improving the community; the West or Southwest-side neighborhoods, for example. The Center had more or less accepted a role as an enemy of commercial culture and it further isolated itself by setting up in a commercial district, truly unable and unwilling to ally with the concerns of its immediate neighbors. 6. Various Tactical Blunders => One of the regular drains on energy was the practice of having every decision made at a weekly general council instead of "subcontracting" various tasks to smaller, more directly involved groups. The general meetings were long, boring, often argumentative and produced little in the way of actual policy. Essentially the Center was run on the fly by people taking autonomous action, but it was sad that this decentralism wasn't a formal organizing principle. People by and large did not feel liberated to act without the consensus of the weekly mass meeting. => Another organizing problem was the so-called "structure debate." Some people wanted to have a written charter and guidelines, others wanted the space to be run entirely on the fly by oral tradition. Some wanted tasks to be defined and the group decide on persons to fill those tasks while others wanted tasking to be done as kind of a cult of personality, they "didn't want human beings to be replaceable" or something like that. This second position contributed to a clubhouse atmosphere which clashed with the inborn mandate of "neutral ground" mentioned before. This all could have been avoided by the presence of some positive agenda; the "structure debate" was in part a surrogate struggle because the Center had self-consciously avoided choosing a real struggle for itself. A common set of suppositions about what would constitute success and what would constitute failure for the project as a whole would have allowed individuals to compare various structures with collective needs and goals, and to agree on those most appropriate. => No firm policy was made on who could participate in decision-making. The Center operators were eager to erase demarcations between themselves and the outside world, and this meant that anybody who just walked in could conceivably make or break a decision. There was no necessary correspondence between an individual's commitment to the space and the individual's empowerment within the space. => There was a strong sentiment on the part of several persons that the PJC should not sell anything. At the establishment of the Center, a letter was circulated soliciting donations to cover expenses. The letter apologized for itself in part by saying that the Center operators did not want to engage in any "capitalistic endeavors" to support the project. People should not take themselves so seriously. All labor that went into the place was for the general benefit of the collective; this was taken for granted, and it would have been the same for labor that went to procure or produce items for sale. It seems likely that this abstinence from buying and selling came from some wish not to be dirtied by the touch of money. But the result of this wish is that one develops no intimate understanding of how economic life works, and certainly no understanding of how it could be made to work differently. So apart from the obvious effect on cash flow, this preference for funding by solicitation did nothing to sharpen the productive and facilitative skills of the Center operators. Instead it fostered dependency, as systems of transfer payment tend to do. 7. Business as Usual Bickering and collective indecision showed itself over a homeless man who had for all practical purposes set up house in the Center, despite the group's consensus that nobody was to sleep there. Opinions on how to handle the situation ranged from "accomodate him indefinitely" to "throw him out on his ear," complete with accusations of heartlessness and nervelessness. Both of these may have been true. With the virtue of hindsight, and the experience of a former Center worker who has since moved on to the Community Kitchen, it would have been easy enough to write a little grant and get a few thousand dollars to take care of the man. But problem solving at the PJC tended to be an infantile grasp for the known rather than for the unknown, a struggle between solutions rather than a struggle towards a solution. And so it went.