Saturday morning’s protest: Coffee and crabbiness with Cleaver in Lee’s Summit

Lee’s Summit hadn’t seen this much excitement since the last Sarah Palin rally. By 8 a.m. Saturday, hundreds of people were gathered outside JP Coffee, spoiling for a health-care fight.

Everyone was taking pictures of everyone else — with cell phones, small digital cameras, big video setups. At least one “documentary filmmaker” roamed the crowd with his 14-year-old daughter.

Lots of people claimed they’d shown up for what they thought was supposed to be a town hall meeting, which was bullcrap, because congressmen don’t hold town hall meetings in coffee shops. Anyway, click on the photo below for a slideshow of what went down:
Most ridiculous thing anyone said — and more than one person said it: “I’d rather have no health insurance than government health insurance.”

Sometimes, people who’d been standing next to each other for a couple of hours actually tried to talk about their disagreements. This resulted in some strained attempts at civil dialogue — and a lot of fingers pointing at chests. At one point, attention turned toward a loud conversation between a fat black woman and a fat white guy. “You started out so far ahead of me that I will never be ahead of you,” the black woman said. The white guy was starting to reply, when another white guy, holding a “Patriotic Americans Arise” sign, chimed in that this (whatever it was) had nothing to do with race.

“I’m not talking to you!” the black woman yelled.

“I’m talking to you! I can talk to you as much as I want!” bellowed the interloper with the sign. People around told him to shut up, because the black woman and the original white guy were having a fine conversation and didn’t need interference from the “patriotic” bully. Soon, another white guy, carrying a flag, came over and waved it slowly and dramatically over the arguing black woman and white man. Maybe this flag man was endorsing their free speech, but it looked more like he was trying to bestow some stars-and-stripes blessing on the white guy.

When some elderly women walked past them with signs in favor of health-care reform, a couple of protesters mourned their naivete. “We have to get these old people to understand,” the man said, sounding genuinely worried that, under Obamacare, old people would be put to death. “They’re gonna be the first ones — someone’ll be looking them in the eye and saying, ‘You have no value.'”

Finally, here’s some video from about halfway through the morning. The woman with the red hair and sunglasses had been yelling some pretty choice things, but clammed up when I turned on my camera. The folks around me didn’t believe that I worked for The Pitch, but, note to the guy in the red ballcap and pink shirt: I’ve been called a lot worse than “low life.” At about 1:37, the crowd is cheering for the Obama-in-Joker-makeup sign moving through toward the back of the crowd. And the woman at the end — she’s the best.