Sunday, March 14, 2010

Tea or Coffee?

Sorry, can't come up with anything more clever than that for the moment. I'll work on it...

As I'm sure you have all heard, the Coffee Party is gaining momentum as the "answer" to the extremist conservative Tea Party Movement. The Coffee Party had their official kickoff yesterday, which was apparently a great success, with between 350-400 meetups held across the country, aptly held at coffee houses.

Now, I have to say that I was rather skeptical of this group at the beginning, being that they started purely as a response to an extremist movement. I was waiting for a polar opposite, an exact pull in the opposite direction.
However, according to their description, they are not aligned with any party and the founder refers to the two party system as out of date.
The meetings were awash with people from all age groups and races, conservative and liberals alike.
Annabel Park, the groups founder, said "Just like in the American Revolution, we are looking for real representation right now. We don't feel represented by our government right now, and we don't really feel represented well by the media either...it's a simple call to action for people to wake up and take control over their future and demand representation. And it requires people standing up and speaking up."
That sounds a lot like the Tea Party and I'm not gonna lie, sounds a lot like me too. However, I don't cite the Revolution or Constitution as much as these two groups do.

I feel that the return to certain ideals on which this country was founded on is very important, but we still need to move forward. This is not the 1700s. Our past brought us to our future but we can not re-live that past. We must continue to build upon it. I sometimes feel that groups such as these have good intentions but fail to differentiate between our country's past, present and future. The return to the good ole days mentality isn't what we need. We need a strong step forward with a clear cut, solid plan for our future.

I'm interested to see where the Coffee Party heads next. But for now, I'll wait before I jump on their bandwagon. How bout you?

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Well put. If they can maintain a cohesive message over time, maybe I'll look into them more, but the Tea Party used similar rhetoric and they got real weird real fast.

I also like the point you made about remembering that we're in the year two thousand and ten here. Everyone wants to go back to the good old days, but no one seems to remember that there WERE no good old days. If you went back to the good old days, do you know what people would be complaining about? Wanting to go back to the good old days.