So you Tea-partiers, Tea-baggers, etc., think you can march for "freedom"? Okay, take my challenge for your NEXT march.
Well, the Teabaggers had their little fun, and I am glad that they had the chance. I am glad that freedom of assembly, freedom of speech and the ability to petition the government for redress of grievances both real and imagined still exist, despite communist takeover of the Republic, even within a few blocks of "Comrade" Barack Hussein Qaddafi Marcus Garvey Haile Selassie bin Laden Kenyatta Obama.
But they miss a lot of the freedom fighters, the true challengers to government power, in their Washington tour.
So here's my challenge, Teabaggers - make it a real march for freedom.
Instead of starting at Freedom Plaza, start at the corner of Martin Luther King Jr. Avenue and Malcolm X Avenue in Southeast DC near St. Elizabeth's Hospital and Congress Heights. A Popeye's stands at the corner of these two avenues; a more fitting arrangement would be a statue of each of these freedom fighters, perhaps facing each other. These overwhelmingly Euro-American freedom-fighting Tea Partiers-On-Glenn would stand surrounded by the descendants and families of the actual freedom-depriving original sins of this Republic: slavery and post-Reconstruction Jim Crow. There may be in the neighborhood a few civil rights workers who can tell these Tea-Partiers what it's like for the government to take away your voting rights, your access to decent schools, your ability to board a public bus and sit, all on account of your freedom-depriving racial caste. Some of these badges and incidents of slavery and its aftermath persist, of course.
I cannot imagine that most of these Tea-Baggers would, by and large, give a shit, or may even feel like Lester Maddox and George Wallace and Bull Connor and Jeff Davis and Robert E. Lee were actually freedom fighters, not oppressors of freedom, though perhaps I judge them too harshly. But I digress.
They can then march up Martin Luther King, Jr. Avenue into Old Anacostia, then turn right and wend their way to the Frederick Douglass House, now maintained by the National Park Service. Of course, I suspect that for these Tea-Baggers, Douglass himself would represent interference in the free market for slaves, and therefore would be communist and part of the Soros New World Order.
Strange notion of freedom these bastards have, eh? President Obama threatens to create a health care public option, and he's raping "freedom." Of course, as noted well in another post yesterday, I suspect that a lot of these Tea-Bagger folks loved watching college football last night played by state schools funded as public options.
When I think of public education as an opponent of freedom, I think of Ole' Miss and James Meredith, or my alma mater the University of Maryland School of Law and Thurgood Marshall, denying admission to Black residents of their own states, or of the standoff at Little Rock.
I guess when a Tea-Bagger thinks of Ole' Miss he thinks of the socialist left-wing hell-hole of Mississippi that denies freedom by competing with, well, whatever noteworthy private universities exist in that humid piece of land that G-d gave to Cain. But I digress.
If some of these Tea-Baggers are really brave, they will take the Metro up to U Street as well after the march, visit the African-American Civil War Memorial and then march ass into Busboys and Poets and all of the Ethiopian restaurants in the neighborhood. If they want to learn what communism really is, they can talk to the restaurant owners, many of whom survived the Derg, the Ethiopian Communist dictatorship; they aren't here because Ethiopia offered a health plan decades, but because the government took over the whole fucking economy by force, deliberately killing many and ruining the basic economics of food in the country. If they go into Busboys and Poets, I would $20 for a closed-circuit view of the ensuing scene (broadcast into another ZIP Code.)
Words have meanings, and as a former officer in the Maryland Libertarian Party I can tell you I left once it became clear that too many of them simply have a different interpretation of the word "freedom" than I did as a native speaker of American English. If they think that a public option is a freedom-killing act, if they think that Obama is a communist Manchurian candidate or that fluoride in the water will sap their precious bodily fluids, I just cannot help those lost souls. But maybe a march up Martin Luther King Jr. Avenue might help a few of them.