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Thursday, March 18, 2010
Coffee Party Movement Offers Polite Discourse
By Hanna Van Arnim
Los Lunas resident
I took a chance on going to a Coffee Party movement meeting this weekend. I found caring citizens worried about fellow Americans and disgusted by the public discourse.
The name, Coffee Party, chastises the uncivility of the Tea Party folks: randy signs, loaded weapons, fear, and loose talk of violence.
Elected officials ape this trend, talk of secession and "getting guns ready," and win roaring approval for it. Senators mock the unemployed and the Tea Partiers applaud. Recent anti-government attacks like the shooter at the federal building and the pilot destroying an IRS building are touted as heroic by Tea Party blogs.
This is not an America that Coffee Party people can accept.
The Coffee group was peopled by many teachers, nurses and social workers who are on the front lines as tragedy unfolds for their clients. They want action, not games.
An emphysemic man, puffing on oxygen, struggled to talk about his experience during the McCarthy era. Retired folks spoke about the violent protests during Vietnam, observing that the war lasted longer because of anger at the violent protests. They spoke of the polite protests that Martin Luther King so carefully enforced that were effective.
There is a civil America, the Coffee Partiers emphasized, which believes in polite disagreement,truth, propriety and human dignity, and gets things done because "a handshake works better than a fist."
They reject anti-government rhetoric although they are angry at the lack of cooperation in government. Most seemed pretty disaffected from any party affiliation.
They firmly believe, however, that the government is not the enemy of the people, as the Tea Party trumpets, but rather a vehicle of our collective will which is sometimes more difficult to manage than others.
It is our job in a democracy to make it work. The current state of things makes this imperative.
We must not be derailed from by a destructive side-show that serves no purpose but to degrade society and paralyze us.
Fear will destroy us. We must work together. I think that is the Coffee Party message and the reason these people are organizing.
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