So -if- you girls can stop arguing and May day is the day, have we come to a conclusion on the restaurant?
I'm of two minds for choosing a venue nationwide...
If we choose a single restaurant chain, that might make it difficult for people in remote or rural areas, as the big chains are not everywhere.
And if everyone who wants to participate goes to JUST one restaurant, the media may look at it as being some sort of move of solidarity with that venue, and brand that venue as being some sort of proto-revolutionary support structure, and you can only imagine what THAT might lead to for a corporation like Cracker Barrel or Panera--IRS audits, harassment by local LEAs and BATFE, negative publicity in the national media, all sorts of nastiness.
We need to remember that this needs to be a statement of unity for ALL OCers, CCers, and sympathetic noCers--but not necessarily a formal "movement"...
Also, we have the added difficulty of choosing a venue that:
1) everyone likes and
2) does NOT serve alcohol, because in some OC-friendly states, you STILL can't carry in establishments that serve alcohol.
That essentially leaves us with Cracker Barrel, Panera, and Starbucks, and the "fast food" chains, which isn't exactly a wide range of culinary diversity...
So my second thought is to let each person who is participating decide for themselves where they are going to go for dinner while carrying. This has SEVERAL advantages, from a PR and logistical POV:
1) it won't look to the media like thousands of OCers are converging on a single business on one day, thereby relieving the business of any stress, blame, or liability in the media, and hopefully avoiding any negative flak they might otherwise have hurled at them by the anti's and the media,
2) it lets us choose (and support, financially) LOCALLY-OWNED business, which wins us brownie points with the local business community, AND keeps the connection to OC spread around to a LOT of businesses nationally. This shows that we are just normal people, doing normal things, going about our daily business with our friends and families,
3) it allows us to eat where WE want--some little mom-and-pop BBQ shack, a hoity-toity Haute Cuisine establishment, or some national chain--whatever WE want as individuals. Again, this stresses the INDIVIDUAL CHOICE aspect of OC, and shows that we aren't just a bunch of blind sheeple rallying around some sort of centrally-coordinated "man behind the curtain" like so many other "activist groups",
4) it spreads our presence around in the community. Rather than having 15 or 20 OCers and their families all converging on every Cracker Barrel in the nation at 1pm on Sunday, we all go to our favorite joint at SOME POINT on the agreed-upon day and do what we would normally do on a Sunday afternoon (or evening) out with our friends and families. Again, stressing normal people, doing normal things,
5) Sure, this will dilute our presence somewhat. Sure it doesn't make for tidy headlines or clever talking heads blurbs on the 10 o'clock news. But it gives the PEOPLE something to talk about. It spreads the idea around that people who carry for self defense are normal, regular people like everyone else--they are polite, law-abiding, family-oriented, and they SPEND MONEY in all sorts of venues.
6) It will make police harassment more difficult, because our presence will be spread out, and there won't be large groups who are easily rounded up for "anti" photo ops. No matter how much your local LEA might hate the idea of lawful OC, they can't arrest us all--ESPECIALLY if we are spread out, with our families, and have a few smartphones rolling video...
So I'd vote for NOT choosing one chain to patronize. Let people decide locally, amongst themselves, where they want to go. If a group of 20 people from Richmond VA decide that they DO want to go to a single restaurant together, then GREAT. But if the dozen or so people here in the Greenville NC area decide that 3 want to go to Parkers, 4 to Panera, 3 to Cracker Barrel, one to Sheetz, and one to Arbys, then so be it...
Decentralization should be our primary goal. Keeping this as "hard-core grass roots" as is logistically possible will give us the highest probability of success I believe.
We've chosen a date. We now need to settle on a "time-window", and coordinate amongst ourselves locally to decide what we want to do LOCALLY.
Hurray, Hurray!
The First of May!
Open Carry
Across the USA!
