How will you spend your Thanksgiving break?
In my expressive cultures film class last week, we had the opportunity to watch "Medium Cool," a movie directed by Haskell Wexler that documented Chicago in 1968 and the police riot that swallowed the Democratic National Convention demonstrations. As I watched clips of nightsticks and clubs in the name of peace and civil order ruthlessly beat protesters, I asked myself once again, where did the fiery passion go? What happened to the youthful New Left?
The similarities between the times have never been so prevalent. We have a Democratic president who is attempting to rebuild the American economy while waging an unpopular war in a foreign country. President Obama has the health care plan, his stimulus package and the Afghanistan/Iraq double-whammy on his hands. Lyndon B. Johnson had the Great Society and the bloody war in Vietnam. In both situations, the fringe right formed a grassroots movement to stop the faux-liberal takeover. In the 1960s, there was the John Birch Society and now, we are unfortunately stuck with the Tea Party. But one of the significant political differences between 2010 and 1968 is the anger.
My mind wandered through the generations as I flipped through The New York Times' Week in Review section in Washington Square Park on Sunday afternoon. Two things that specifically caught my attention were an advertisement that covered an entire page and an article entitled "Democrats Need a Rally Monkey" by Kate Zernike. The ad was from the American Civil Liberties Union, the lawyer-led vanguard of constitutional liberties, and had a picture of President Obama slowly transforming into Dubya. It pleaded the president to stop his unconstitutional ways on the issues of terrorism and justice. Kate Zernike's article explored the inefficacy of the left in relation to the anti-establishment charged grassroots movement that I have written oh-so passionately about in the past, the Tea Party.
"For months the right has had the momentum. Is the left too 'snakebit' to snatch it back?" she writes.
Both the ACLU and Zernike's works share a similar political stench: Something is seriously wrong with the Democrats.
Enter the Coffee Party. Led by the far-left supporters who supported President Obama's candidacy but are angered by his actual reign, the Coffee Party is the political antithesis of the Tea Party. I am not sure if the movement gets its name from the stereotypical bourgeoisie Starbucks latté-drinking liberal or just because coffee is not tea. The number of members on Facebook of the group jumped from 27,000 to a little more then 50,000 in five days.
Just the inclusion of the word Facebook is enough to show the youth presence in the movement. It is the modern-day version of the Students for a Democratic Society during the 1960s. The Coffee Party's arrival on the political scene came out around the same time President Obama announced he would support Republican ideas that run contrary to everything he stood for in the upcoming health care bill, if you can even call it that anymore. The timing couldn't be more perfect.
If the Coffee Party is to have any influence on changing anything in Washington, they must realize their potential. After watching Scott Brown win the Senate race in Massachusetts, the dystopian side of me is thinking the Tea Party is on their way to becoming the swing factor in the 2010 midterm elections.
"Another revolution," as the brilliant Sarah Barracuda once said.
Those in the Coffee Party are the people who put an African-American one-term Senator nobody from Illinois into the White House. Their ambitions can drastically shape American politics as we know it. The liberals and Democrats who are angry with their commander-in-chief must follow their 1968 predecessors and heed the prominent slogan of the Coffee Party: Wake up and stand up.
