Why Did We Have Those Tea Parties Anyway: An Answer To The Left

On April 15th my boyfriend and I went to two Tax Day Tea Parties, one in Winston-Salem, NC and one in Raleigh, NC. I want to talk about my thoughts, not only about what happened during the protests, but what should happen after. I will be setting a few goals for myself and I want to encourage others to do the same.

We arrived at the location of Winston-Salem fairly early before the event, and were able to watch as the amphitheatre filled with people. My boyfriend had kept up with the event's website and stated that around three hundred people had signed up to attend. When we left the event we found out that there had been between 2000 and 3000 participants, which was shocking and very exciting. We also arrived early at the Raleigh Protest. There were probably between 3000 and 4000 people in attendance there. The speakers there were great, and the street protest brought a lot of agreeable honking from people riding by in their cars.

Maybe we shot ourselves in the foot by having the rallies on Tax Day. Maybe we should have called them something other than tea parties. The left seems intent to bash the protests on these two points. Anyone who watched the clip of the reporter hounding the participant in Chicago knows that one of their favorite arguments has been "What do these rallies have to do with your taxes?" Well, to me they have nothing to do with my taxes that I filed for 2008 and everything to do with the taxes that I and my children will be filing in the future. The enormous amount of spending done under the Bush and Obama administrations has to be paid back by someone, and we all know that our politicians aren't going to reach into their own pockets and pull out the trillions of dollars needed to pay back our deficit. Members of our current administration have had enough problems just remembering to file their own taxes.

The second point the left-wingers try to make is that the participants of the Boston Tea Party were protesting against taxation without representation, and that this has nothing to do with the state of things at the present time. Well, I argue that it has. Both of the senators from our state of North Carolina voted for the huge stimulus bill that was rammed through congress. I met a few people at the protests who told how they had e-mailed these politicians with no results. One woman stated that later, after the fact, the Republican senator sent her an e-mail saying that he had made a mistake in voting for the bill. The other one...

A twenty-one year old Duke University student spoke at the Raleigh tea party. She spoke of how she had called the office of our Democratic senator and asked the person answering the phone if the senator had read the bill before she had voted for it. The person answering the phone left for a few minutes, and when they came back they stated, "We do not have an answer for you at the present time."

The issue being protested against is not taxation without representation, but taxation with mis-representation. Our elected officials are not listening to the people that they are supposed to be representing, but instead are passing huge spending bills that we, the taxpayers, will eventually have to pay for. They aren't listening to us, the people providing their paycheck, but they are listening to an agenda that the taxpayers haven't asked for. For example, I know I didn't ask to own a piece of Bank of America, but I guess now I do. The amazing thing is, even as a part owner, I will see no benefits. But the government does see a benefit - it has a foothold of power in the banking industry.

The people coming together for these protests had many other issues that they were angry about, as do I. But these are the main issues that were represented during the protests. The question now becomes "what do we do to go forward?" I, for one, will be spending more time e-mailing my elected officials, as well as doing everything I can to educate myself and everyone around me about how we got into this mess and what we need to do to fix it. And I want everyone to know that we need to stop showing so much apathy. That is one of the reasons we have the problems that we have. The only way to fix this mess is to stand up and let ourselves be heard.

This is a call to action.