Are we there yet?

[CV]

Thinking about our inaugural meeting and reading about other Coffee
Parties around the country, it seems to me that we were missing
something.
That is, many of the other gatherings had a facilitator that was
connected up with the national group. Just who that national group is
wasn't real clear.
While our initial meeting was usefull to get this started, it didn't
seem to have a particular focus.
If we are to function as a political unit, it is important to lay out
a goal, an end state, to make sure we're all marching the same
direction, if not exactly in step.
Several of the descriptions I've read have included "support for
Obama" and while I personally do support him on many issues, there are
enough people on the Leftward end of the spectrum (where I assume our
group will hail from) that are dissapointed in his performance that
having support for Obama as a group goal is probably not a good
recruiting tool.
So it would probably be better to enumerate the issues that we support
and the issues that we object to, independent of Obama's stand or of
Congress's.
This is one way of making it a trans-partisan group, since the only
way that you could support all of the Administrations' issues is if
you are simply supporting his party regardless. That's just as
mindlessly partisan as opposing everything the Dems do simply because
it's proposed by Dems. And that mindless gridlock is exactly what we
need to break out of.
How far do y'all want to go?
There are many levels of action available, from click-tivism to
canvassing to organizing street events to flashmobbing TeaBaggers.
I'm not at all clear on what the National level of this group is (or
even how to find it) but some guidance from there would be good, in
the vacuum, we can easily fall back to the routine Lefty Meetings in
which our diversity of concerns and an overabundance of democracy
ensure that little actually happens.
Anyone want to start a list of issues (and stands thereon)?
Remember that the TeaParty group united it's members with anger. And
that there's a lot of anger around. And that much of that anger is
justifyable, considering the wreckage all around us.
Most of the people that were at Saturday's klatch are long schooled in
positive imaging of their political interests, that is, we, long ago,
internalized the idea that a positive solution offered to
sociopolitical problems is preferable to a negative one, We want to
build up, not tear down.
So we tend to move our discussions away from anger and confrontation.
It's proper and displays our parent's good parenting, but it's rather
quaint in this Century. In these times that's not only boring, but
seems willfully blind. If you hadn't noticed, the world has gotten
much meaner over the past couple decades.
And the attention span, the ability to process complex ideas, to
absorb nuance have been atrophied by a lifetime of Tv. Even many
peoples' understanding of basic facts has eroded to the point where
reasoned arguments go nowhere.
The big chunk of fore-brain that Humans developed is being
circumvented by jabs at the lizard brain that tops our Spinal Cord,
Fear and Anger motivate people that could not be intelectually
convinced to get off the couch.
So in listing goals, I propose we also list gripes. It might be that
we can organize across political lines around those gripes where our
common ground on goals might be a bit shakier.