I attended the second of the two tax-day protests in downtown Raleigh yesterday. (I was still finishing my sparkly poster during the first one. 
I took about 100 tea bags with me with a two-sided note attached: a quote from Thomas Jefferson on one side, and a quick LPNC.org promotion on the other. With what WRAL reports as about 1500 people at the Capitol Building, though, I ran out of those pretty quick! It was a great multi-partisan turnout.
Naturally, as in every protest movement, you have your folks with misspelled signs, personal-attack posters, and off-color messages that tend to embarrass the core protesters. Unfortunately, too many of them ended up with a microphone in front of their face. I facepalmed a few times listening to the media coverage last night and this morning.
Consequently, as many liberals saw the tea parties as a protest against their beloved Obama, some individuals in the media acted as if we had no right to object to anything the government was currently doing and dismissed the protesters with incredulous sarcasm. Personally, I’m glad they didn’t dismiss 2008’s large Obama/Hope movement with the same disdain, or we’d have McCain and Palin in charge and getting closer to an unreasonable marriage of Christianity and State.
Personally, as a Libertarian, it was frustrating to see the GOP and Fox News so heavily involved. Why? Well, the Libertarian Party has been doing tax day protests every year nationwide since it formed in the 1970s. Having the GOP and Fox News coming out as if leading the way in these protests is almost hypocritical on their part being that the GOP leadership is much to blame for our current economic state. I feel like the intelligent, libertarian message was drowned out by those targeting Obama and his administration… and I still hate that I ran out of my information-tagged tea bags.
The bottom line of the protest for me, every year, has been that taxpayer apathy is a dangerous fuel to government’s power. Since the federal income tax was made permanent with the Revenue Act of 1913, and the coinciding Sixteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, citizens of the U.S. have resigned themselves to assuming any “big” solution (involving money they can’t imagine ever having, let alone spending) requires a government solution rather than a big movement in the private sector.
Instead of looking to their communities to come together, they march to their legislature with outcries of “We’re entitled to X, so use our tax money to give us X.” By taking on this attitude, and electing people to office inclined to cater to them, they resign more of their money, and more of their personal choices, to the hands of the government.
Is there really a “greater good consensus” we can all agree on so much so that we can leave it in government’s hands to make our decisions for us?
Even computers don’t all agree on everything.
This disturbing attitude of helplessness and entitlement is in direct conflict with the nature of our people defined in the original U.S. Constitution and the Bill of Rights. It is my sincere hope that logic, reason, rational thought, and skepticism will prevail in time in government so that we will not have to bleed in revolution.
