When you’re boiling water to make some tea, the water doesn’t immediately hit a rolling boil. It all starts with one bubble. That’s what the “tea parties” last Friday were – that first bubble leading to a full boil.
On Friday, I drove to the capitol building in Lansing, Mich., which is only about 30 miles from where I live, to attend one of the “tea party” protests that sprouted up as the result of Rick Santelli’s terrific rant on the floor of the Chicago Stock Exchange.
At the Lansing event, I snapped a few photos and talked to some of the protesters, many of whom seemed unaware that they were in direct defiance of the new rules following the coronation of Jan. 20 that suddenly rendered dissent unpatriotic.
There were probably between 500 and 750 people milling about – which is a good turnout when you consider that this amounts to almost every conservative within a 50-mile radius of the Michigan capitol.
It goes against every fiber of my quiet, middle-class upbringing to say this, but Republicans are just too damn polite at our protests. I’m not talking about getting pepper-sprayed, arrested, blocking traffic and being a skid mark on the skivvies of life that you’ll find at many leftist protests – and we certainly don’t want to make ourselves victims of self-inflicted irony like “pacifists” who go around threatening to beat up anyone who disagrees with their pro-peace agenda. But right-of-center protests certainly need to crank up the “ticked off” a notch or two. We also need to work on our timing.
Future events should be on a Saturday instead of a weekday – and given much more time to take hold. I heard from a lot of people who only found out about the event a day beforehand, and by then it was too late to make plans to attend.
Normal folks don’t have it as easy as many leftist activists and professional pests – we have actual jobs. Because of that, we have to look for “off” days to do our protesting. When you’re organizing a protest that will consist of hard-working people who are angered at continued theft of their earnings and freedoms, you don’t want to schedule the thing while your target protester is at work trying to earn enough money to pay for not only his or her own mortgage, but also for whatever deadbeats Obama has assigned them to support in his new “mortgage buddy system.”
The political right needs a “protest boot camp” of sorts. We don’t yet know how to put the fear of God into our politicians, and we’d better learn fast. With our tax dollars now going toward stimulating the economy of groups like ACORN (wise planning on the part of Democrats – never do something that may end up unpopular without funding the vehicle that will ensure your re-election regardless of voter anger), revolution may be the only way to get things done.
It is possible, however, that the revolution will come from the left before the right’s tea water reaches a rolling boil and Atlas is in full shrug. What will happen when the magical teat of hope dries up? It can’t flow freely for long at this rate. At that point, the thirsty calves will come wondering what happened to their milk, and they won’t be happy.
You know the “thirsty calves” I’m talking about – the types you see at Obama’s town hall meetings. Those gift/miracle-seeking rejects who make a studio audience of “The Price is Right” look like the Harvard Math Club. The day they go to the Santa-in-Chief asking for gifts, and the answer comes back “no,” things could get ugly. I must admit, it would be somewhat satisfying to see politicians responsible for these messes receive a Mussolini-esque going-away party thrown by a dependency class of their own creation. It’s a shame we’ll all be too broke by then to fully bask in the hilarity of it all.
Until then, let’s bring on more tea parties, and start planning for them now.
In 1773, the Boston Tea Party consisted of colonists protesting Britain’s “Tea Act” by throwing tea into the harbor. Why tea? Because the colonists were too far away from British parliament to throw them in. With that in mind, the question has been asked, “What do protesters hope to accomplish with these new tea parties?” The answer is simple: If it makes only one politician feel the need to take swimming lessons, it’ll have been worth it.
