A colleague emailed me today. She had heard my radio commentary Monday re: the Coffee Party and thought I might be interested in this related article from the current edition of Newsweek.
The article recounts an experience that Annabel Park, the C-Party’s founder, had with some of the people her movement attracted to a gathering at a D.C. venue.
… from the moment folks in the crowd stood up to speak their minds, Park knew these people had not come to sip cappuccinos and set an example of civility for an overheated nation. They were angry. They hated the Tea Party, and the Republican Party. They wanted to get even. One audience member said America was under the thumb of oligarchs and denounced “moneyed interests.” A few people hissed when Sarah Palin’s name was mentioned …
Park, a 42-year-old Korean-American with a smile that can only be described as “kind,” regularly tried to steer the talk back to the group’s more centrist principles. But when someone asked how many people in the room were Republicans, all 80 hands remained down. “I like the civility idea, but I hate the Tea Party people,” said attendee Karen Anderson. By the end of the event, some in the crowd had decided the movement, barely two months old at the time, needed a new leader … Park seemed a little rattled after the meeting.
I imagine she was.
Of course, the tension Park encountered at that D.C.-area meeting is damn close to what I feared would happen.
The unfortunate nature of modern American politics is that, the farther we move away from feel-good platitudes and the closer we get to actual policies, the more difficult it becomes to stop ourselves from shouting down our opponents.
Clearly, I thought it would take a bit longer before anger became the over-riding emotion — that the tendency to anger would be more easily constrained in the formative stages of the movement; more difficult to quash later on.
And that might still be true in portions of the Midwest. Park seems to think so, too.
She’s planning a Coffee Party convention this August, somewhere in the Midwest (people are nicer there).
Then again, to suggest we’re more civil in Missouri than our fellow citizens in the District … well, that’s as sweeping a generalization as the Tea Partiers who claim they represent the “real America,” or the anti-Tea-Partiers who suggest their counterparts are nothing more than a bunch of racists.
Civil is definitely hard to do. Equally hard: Keeping the faith that our better angels might some day prevail in this political climate.
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