I signed up to be the Coffee Party organizer for Champaign Urbana Illinois on March 13th. Our first meeting was nine of us, the second about the same size, and the third was again just ten … but among those ten were David Gill, Democratic House candidate for Illinois District 15, and Coffee Party founder Annabel Park.
The Coffee Party pushed the idea of Coffee With Congress while our Representatives were home on break at the end of March, but this was the very first time that Annabel herself had sat down with someone either in or running for office.
As a testament to the value of the citizen journalist I was there, camera in hand, to capture this historic event. Let's examine how this all came about …
As a resident of Illinois House District 15 I reached out to David Gill a couple of months ago. He is an emergency room doctor with a busy schedule and no primary challenger so his campaign has not been so active thus far, but he did return my call right away and now he is starting to schedule more events and fill in the blanks in his volunteer map.
I've also talked to Republican Tim Johnson's staff on other issues and other members of our group knew that Congressman Johnson walked in a certain park each morning when he was in town. This all came out during our meeting on March 27th. We contacted each of them and found that our Saturday April 10th meeting didn't work for either – Gill would be available on the 8th, while Johnson could come to an event on the 12th.
One of the attendees to the very first meeting was a woman named Lynda Park. She seemed to know quite a bit about the Coffee Party national leadership and plans. I'm a little slow to the take; after most everyone had cleared out she leaned forward and in a conspiratorial whisper informed me that she was Annabel's sister. A few days later we learned Annabel was coming, first to have a talk with our rowdy Rockford, Illinois chapter, and then to meet with us. I thought this was going to be on Saturday, but then I got a note indicating it would be Thursday – the day David Gill was available. Connection made.
I went down early to spend some time talking with Annabel and Lynda before the actual event. We met at Lynda's house. I receive many kisses during the course of our conversation from my new friend Loki.
It was a nice, crisp spring day and we got a parking spot in front of Espresso Royale. Annabel is quite tolerant of my amateur camera wrangling – it only took three shots to get a keeper.
David Gill was late, partly due to his schedule, and partly due to my confusion about addresses in Champaign Urbana. We'd been talking for a bit when he finally found our upstairs hideaway. He had cards for each of us, then he sat down and spent some time listening to catch up on what the group was discussing.
We were talking about the guiding principles behind the Coffee Party and what we thought had to be done next. There was a lot of talk about finance and banking reform, but when David arrived, being a doctor, it wasn't too long before we turned our attention back to health care.
David really shined on Progressive views – basically what I got from him was “Stop messing around, do single payer. It's good for the people, it's good for the economy. Everyone else does health care this way and it works just fine for them.”
Four of the ten of us dominated the conversation. Annabel is an excellent public speaker, a mass media communications professor who's name I didn't catch was at the opposite end of the table from me, David Gill carries himself quite well, and I was the fourth. Annabel relentlessly scans the crowd, keeping an eye for someone who has something they want to add. She notes their interest, non-verbally communicates “You'll get an opening in a minute”, finishes her thought, and then hands off. Being a midly autistic adult I am a bit face blind and I have trouble tracking these things, but Annabel was very clear to me.
The mass media prof, Annabel, and I really got going on media issues. There were 500 Tea Party people at the Capitol for the health care vote and they got the coverage while 200,000 immigration reform marchers were ignored. That's not journalism when CNN does that, it's a right wing corporatist infomercial. And the hiring of Erick Erickson from Redstate? We determined that CNN really has jumped the shark.
So, I have a nice photo of this historic event, and any ol' blogger can drop me a line and make use of it, so long as I get a link to the story so I can cross post the really good ones. Our rotted, inattentive mainstream media on the other hand? They can go continue fluffing, legitimizing, and inciting the Tea Party and other divisive foolishness. This photo is copyright and it's not going to appear in print until the journalism textbook authors get around to writing a chapter about the transition of news gathering to social media.
Corporate journalism, and I use the word loosely, is dead. Long live the humble blogger – an embedded journalist in the life and times of 21st century America.