I joined the Coffee Party Movement in March, as did thousands of other people. It's easy, really...you press a button on Facebook and, voilà, you're a member. How to translate that membership into something substantial is a lot more difficult, for a variety of reasons: 1) The mission is amorphous (how does one translate "good government" into action?); 2) Grassroots organizations require more effort from the bottom; and 3) The original head of the movement for Dallas became overwhelmed by the enormity of her commitment, dropped out without asking for help, and left everyone floundering and trying to pick up the pieces. As a result, after ten or twelve local meetings in March and April, there was just one in May. Instead of fifteen to forty in attendance at each of those meetings, there were just six of us - including my now-adult daughter - at lunch yesterday.
While at the meeting I realized if I wanted the Coffee Party Movement in Dallas to succeed, I'd actually need to get off my ass and do something. The Coffee Party is thriving throughout all of Texas...but not in Dallas. So I decided to use my skill set as a writer and Internet guru by creating a new blog and setting up a[nother] Twitter account, specifically to communicate with the hundreds of people who have clicked that Dallas Coffee Party Facebook button.
After leaving lunch yesterday, I was supposed to have come home and read a rush book to review for PW by Monday (it arrived at my house on Friday). I didn't. Instead, I set up the bones of the new blog - Dallas Coffee Party - and wrote the first post. Then I left for work, and in the ten minutes before starting my shift, I set up the new Twitter account - @dallascoffee. It quickly became confusing. I'd thought if I input my @laurie_gold user name and password for one of my Droid's Twitter apps, and my info for the @dallascoffee using another, I could just click whichever app I needed depending on which account I was going to tweet from...so far I've not been able to get that to work. Equally confusing regards actual content for each blog - and what to tweet to each of the Twitter accounts as well. I'll be working with various Coffee Party members to suss out what to post on the other blog, but does that mean I should stop posting anything political here? The Coffee Party strives to be political but not partisan, and because most of my political tweets are simply links to newspaper articles, they can be tweeted from one and retweeted to the other, but other than that, I'm feeling more than a little Sybil right now.
As I wrote in my initial post to the Dallas Coffee Party blog yesterday, it's going to be an experiment, and the experiment will spill over onto Toe in the Water. Please be patient as I muddle through.
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