This past year, Lincolnton has experienced both growing pains and joy. These events not only shape the community, but they themselves are symbols of how we express our values. These events give us insight into not only our greatest desires, but also our greatest fears, and finally our own human shortcomings.
The event that stands out most in my mind is the closing of Witches Brew Cafe on Lincolnton’s Court Square.
The Witches Brew Cafe’s tumultuous opening and its subsequent 18-month struggle revealed our community’s disturbing lack of self-examination.
The Lincolnton community’s indifference to the conflict between the cafe and a minority group of Downtown businessmen, landlords, and Law Enforcement was extremely disappointing.
A Community Asset:
The issue that was curiously lacking, throughout the Witches Brew Cafe controversy, was the positive notion that such a place provided a haven for Lincolnton’s youth and teenagers.
While several other Lincolnton shops genuinely welcome our youth, the Witches Brew Cafe was unique in many respects. It had a certain appeal to Lincoln County’s youth, and the community at large.
Rather than sitting home parked in front of a television, many teens could be found at The Brew doing homework, socializing, writing music and poetry, reading books, publicly expressing themselves through their clothing and dress, and just plain people watching.
It became a reliable place away from the structured, yet sporadic events catered to youth at area churches, schools, youth centers, and athletic organizations (most of these structured events are organized by adults).
These “youth organizations” may be scaled for hundreds of kids. But conversations don’t happen among hundreds, just as learning doesn’t naturally occur in classrooms of 25 or more.
In contrast, the Witches Brew was a cozy, casual place, decorated and inspired by our youth who made it their home away from home. They themselves influenced the environment, the procession, and the interaction within its walls and onto the Court Square.
Inclusive Community:
Unlike the insular mega-institutions that manipulate their attention on a daily basis through textbooks and teachers, places like the Witches Brew Cafe provided a direct and vital connection with Lincolnton’s community and business life.
Here, they were encouraged to interact with the cafe and surrounding business owners, adults, entrepreneurs and business people going about their daily lives. This interaction was casual and unstructured. Furthermore, they were encouraged to pursue the things they were passionate about, whether it was music, art, and many other forms of personal expression. This was done publicly, for the community to share and interact without barriers.
Most importantly, the Witches Brew Cafe was there whenever they needed a place to go where they were not judged, shamed, ridiculed, or worse. It provided respite from the orderly ennui of their structured daily routine. It filled a void. It provided a comfortable place for people to be themselves.
It was not surprising our region’s youth were drawn to these qualities. Wouldn’t you be?
Commitment and Responsibility:
The Witches Brew Cafe’s community impact and evolution was unplanned and organic. It was not the result of a strategy or series of formulaic action items. It was not just a business.
Unlike its detractors, it did not exist solely to make money or abuse power.
The Cafe became a symbol of our youth’s struggle to find comfort. The Cafe’s owners unintentionally became stewards of a set of principles based on the belief that everyone in our community deserves such comfort. These ideals, rather than pragmatism, informed the cafe’s community to fight for what they had created.
Never before has our youth’s enthusiasm for being in Lincolnton’s Downtown been so prevalent and unwavering. Rather than the cruising and posturing mentality of yesteryear, today’s youth thrive on interaction, connectivity, communication, and truth.
They need a meaningful connection to their community.
Just because we live in a national and global economy where mobility is considered inevitable, it does not mean our immediate place lacks deep and lasting importance.
As our youth continue to be segregated and pushed out of the picture, they will lose the desire to make connections that will only be broken apart. They will lose the capacity to sustain relationships, to look for joy and endure hardship. All of their choices will become provisional and temporary. Finally, they will only look towards the time when they leave Lincolnton in search of a less oppressive existence.
Nobody Won:
Had these business interests had the acumen and capacity to acknowledge these apparent truths, perhaps their response to the Witches Brew Cafe would not have been so shortsighted and misguided.
Had the local newspaper’s atrocious coverage of selected events surrounding the Cafe’s struggle been more balanced and less sensational, perhaps the greater community at large would have a truer sense of the cafe’s value and what it was up against.
Rather than resolve conflicts in favor of the person or group with fewer resources to buffer any ill effects, conflicts are decided in favor of those who have the resources to prevail.
In this town, the accepted belief seems to be might makes right.
The alternative approach would be for a publicly examined issue to be resolved in favor of people who are most at risk environmentally. Thus the needs of our youth, and the places they choose to go, should take precedence over the needs of the employed businessman or landlord, whose needs are already reasonably accommodated.
The Witches Brew Cafe’s owners grew to understand this and fought with what little they had. The cafe’s young community remained courteous and respectful in the face of ignorance, hatred, intimidation, and scorn.
Today’s youth are remarkably generous, as long as they know they can also get what they need.
They balk only when doing someone else’s will means they cannot do what they want at all: when, by ordering them to get off the sidewalk or parking lot, they are given no alternatives but to leave or break apart from their group; when, by telling them their music is too loud and ordering it turned off, they are given no acceptable level of volume to which they may continue to enjoy their music.
Why are we not as generous to teenagers in return?
Why, when adults already have the economic and material resources kids lack, do we insist on making all the rules to our advantage as well?
It requires bravery to believe that helping others will not significantly harm us. It requires generosity to accept mild inconveniences so that another person will not suffer a crippling hindrance. It requires humility to know that we grow by helping others.
The Witches Brew Cafe exemplified many of these qualities.
In contrast to the passive receipt of facts in our school classrooms, Lincolnton’s downtown could serve as a place for personal growth, adult mentorship, and peer interaction.
The Witches Brew Cafe was beginning to serve as the conduit, the interface, between our youth and the community at large. Do we have the courage to embrace another like it?
Now that we have had a taste of it, our desire to make that place once again is unquenchable.
