We began this story of rupture with Andrew LeCody... and his desire to control the narrative... independent of love, freedom, and coherent truth.

essays/fc001_StalinOfMakerspace/02_founding_spark.md

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+## **II. The Founding Spark: The Vision Before the Fall**
+
+🗎 **Filename**: `02_founding_spark.md`
+
+---
+
+They called it a makerspace.
+But for me, it was never just that.
+
+It was a **commons**.
+A sacred one.
+Not in a religious sense—but in the sense of what could be made sacred through intention, reciprocity, and shared authorship.
+
+Dallas Makerspace was not a collection of tools.
+It was a **living organism**, pulsing with potential.
+A place where the lines between teacher and student dissolved,
+where engineers cross-pollinated with artists,
+where welders, coders, and dreamers spoke a shared dialect of possibility.
+
+I founded it not as a company, not as a club—
+…but as a *container for creative sovereignty*.
+
+We believed that anyone—given time, tools, and trust—could become something more than the world allowed them to be.
+We believed that knowledge should not be hoarded, but handed forward.
+That systems should not be gatekeepers, but gateways.
+That hierarchy was a failure of imagination.
+
+I did not lead with charisma.
+I led with **infrastructure**—
+with bylaws, with bootstraps, with midnight debugging sessions.
+The dream was never about me.
+It was about **us**.
+
+And for a time, it worked.
+We built, we taught, we collaborated.
+We became something rare:
+**a self-organizing body of civic creation**.
+
+But seeds are vulnerable.
+And even the healthiest systems, if not protected,
+can be infiltrated—
+slowly, silently, until the dream no longer recognizes itself.
+
+That was the world before the fall.
+
+And this… is how the shadow took root.
+
+---