OPINION: Tea party time
Had enough of multi-hundred-billion-dollar bailouts to pay for bonuses to losers who have brought your country to the brink of financial ruin? Tired of fraudulent stimulus programs that promise "jobs" but deliver only pork? Tired of the corporate-jet crowd taking your money so they won't feel their own failures in the least? Tired of having these obligations thrust upon you and your dependents, while worrying about merely keeping a job, finding a job, or making it through your next furlough? If so, join one of the 1,000-plus peaceful tax day tea parties scheduled for April 15.
The Colorado Springs tea party, sponsored by the DontGo Movement (www.dontgomovement.com) will be at noon, April 15, at City Hall. A press release for the Springs tea party says it is part of a movement organized in collaboration with former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich and Colorado Springs resident Michelle Malkin, a conservative author and cable news celebrity whose column appears in this section of The Gazette.
It's important to understand that participating in the party should not begin that day.
Instead, it should begin right now. Finish reading this editorial, and then invite your friends, relatives and neighbors to the tea party. Invite everyone on your e-mail list, and suggest they all invite everyone on their own e-mail lists. Invite all your friends on FaceBook, MySpace and Twitter. Get them to the tea party in Colorado Springs, or encourage them to find tea parties closer to their own homes.
"The goal of these protests is to call attention to the unprecedented wasteful spending by the Obama administration and Democrats in Congress," says a press release about the Springs tea party.
It's a great cause. Organizers should exercise caution, however, against making these tea parties overly partisan affairs. Until President Barack Obama's term began, Republican George Bush was arguably the biggest spending, most socialistic president this country had seen. He discredited the Republican Party by paving the way for the fiscal atrocities occurring in Washington today.
The Colorado Springs tea party will feature a food drive, to raise donations of food and money for the Care and Share Foodbank, says the release, "in the spirit of showing that people would rather help their neighbors out in times of crisis through charity than government bureaucracy."
WorldNetDaily, which had already tracked and reported on 170 individual tea parties throughout the country, reported Thursday the American Family Association is coordinating an additional 1,000 TEA (Taxed Enough Already) parties in various cities and towns. To find a comprehensive list of tea parties, those sponsored by the American Family Association and others, visit teapartyday.com/Organize.aspx?g=topics&f=96.
Some may be inclined to consider a tea party a bit too theatrical, or too dramatic a response to the bailouts, the stimulus package, the budget and the borrowing and printing of unprecedented amounts of money on the backs of taxpayers. If so, they should consider what led to the Boston Tea Party of Dec. 16, 1773, considered a major catalyst of the American Revolution and an iconic symbol of the freedom our founders fought and died to preserve. The outrage back then involved what was in essence a voluntary slaes tax, imposed by the British government on British colonists in North America. It was a tax on tea. To avoid paying the tax, all anyone had to do was drink coffee. Yet our country's founders were so intolerant of unfair taxation they were willing to risk their lives and initiate a war to oppose it.
Today's tea parties aren't about tea. They're about a government that's obligating the citizenry to insurmountable financial debt that will cause confiscatory taxation for generations to come, not to mention imminent devaluation of wages in the form of the looming inflation that will result from a burgeoning money supply. If only our problems today involved an excessive tax on tea.
