After hastily making my sign, I got to the King Soopers in Brighton just a little bit early. There were already a number of people in line to meet with Ed, and another handful standing in the islands between parking lanes. As the crowd slowly grew from about 12:30 to 1pm or so the group took up most of the space in front of the store while still keeping the entrace open. I'm sure people who were just going to get groceries were wondering what the heck was going on.
My sign had two sides. On one it said, "Jesus is my single payer." On the other, "No socialized medicine. Get rid of the VA and Medicare." I wanted to see what kind of reaction I would get. It was mostly as I expected. A few weren't sure about me and asked. I explained it was to point out that those who say the first part don't seem to have a problem with the other part. I was just trying to point that out.
At first the people not in line seemed to be separated by an imaginary line. On one side were those wanting health care reform. On the other the opposed, tea baggers, some minutemen, etc. When I would stand on the side with the latter, I would comments like, "Right on", You're on the right side", and "You got it." When I was with the supporters, people would either laugh, or ask me about the sign because they weren't sure how to take it. So, just like conservatives who like to watch Steven Colbert, many of the tea baggers there today weren't smart enough to know I was making fun of them.
Somewhere around 1pm Ed got there and spoke. This was my other experiment. I jailbroke my iphone and installed qik which lets me live stream video. I think this turned out pretty well for a camera that was never even designed to do video. Sorry about the shakiness and the butt shots.
I thought this was all about health care, but to this guy it seems to be opposition to Obama along with the typical Bill O'Reilly and Glen Beck agenda of communism.
I should have asked this woman about Medicare, Medicaid, the VA, and the health care the Pentagon provides for serving military.
A yes, the plan is going to kill seniors. At one point I actually had a conversation with two women who were concerned about this. I asked if they've read the bill. One's reply was that that section starts on page 425. I again asked if she'd read the bill. She had not. I explained I had read that section, and it clearly states decisions about end of life care are between the person and their doctor, or physician's assistant. To that, she asked, "But, who controls the doctors?" I shook my head and walked away. There was no point.< br/> This was funny. This guy was arguing with another for a while. From health care it went to something about Bush never serving and going AWOL. This guy didn't like that and started to get in the others face. The Police and several others pulled them apart from each other. This guy got a talking to.
The other interesting thing about the day was that as time went on the conservatives seemed to be leaving at a faster rate than progressives. By 2 or 2:30 (I left at 2:30) most of the pro health care reform signs seemed to be around, while only a few of the tea baggers stuck it out. If we can keep them to doing nothing more than some chanting things like, "read the bill" (which none of them have done), and showcasing their crazies, I think we stand a good chance of keeping the messaging positive around the town halls. Let's just hope we don't have any more fights and car vandalism.
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