I turned on the TV last week and I saw Sarah Palin sitting on the stage at a Tea Party Rally. I thought to myself – Is this going to make a difference? Then I began to listen to the anger and vitriol spouted on this stage. I couldn't understand the motivation. What was supposed to be the point? A couple of right wing extremists sitting on a stage with a bunch of people in the background. They were trying to have a coffee clutch in the middle of a crowd that didn't seem to know what was happening. At least, that's the way I saw it.
I took a step back and I wondered if this was progress or an error. Did the right invent a new type of protest. We didn't have a speaker shouting at the people telling them what they wanted to hear. Instead, we had a threesome on stage talking about how the country was going to Hell and something needed to be done about it. It was like acting out the conversation that had already gone on. People watching the TV could feel like they were there as new ideas were being determined. It was like the TV was a voyeur looking in as these people determined how to protest the administration. It was like being in the middle of a party and a couple of big shots got together to decide how to take over the town. But we were all sitting there watching them do it.
I guess this happens all the time. On the news talk shows people sit around and talk about politics all the time. And, talk shows like Oprah have live audiences. So there really isn't anything new there. But, putting the reality background together with the idea of a protest talk show has a new look and feel to it. And, creating this new look and feel makes people who generally resist the idea of protest marches more comfortable with the idea of protesting.
I am saying this, because it wasn't that long ago that we had thousands of people in the streets protesting the start of the Iraq war, or the xenophobic anti-immigration laws. And the very same people who currently identify with the Tea Party groups were complaining that the protesters were antithetical to how our Democracy was meant to function. I don't know how many times I was told that we have a representative democracy and we need to let our leaders make those unpopular decisions. These same people now feel differently – How hypocritical?
I read in the paper how 500 people gathered in a park in San Jose, CA (population of almost one million) to protest taxes yesterday, tax day. These 500 people seemed to get a lot of press for a mere 500 people. The media in 2003 was ignoring the larger anti-war protests. We had 500 people in our small town (population about 35,000). If anything I believe the anger about the Iraq war was greater and the segment of the population that cared about it was larger. And, here we are eight years later and we are still in Iraq.
So, I am not worried that these tea party activists will actually change anything. They may be angry. They may not believe the government. But, that isn't any different than the anti-war protesters. What I actually worry about are people that have this degree of anger and they also have a stock pile of weapons. Instead of lying down in the middle of San Francisco in order to block traffic, right wing extremists tend to join militias and they have the idea that they would rather die for their country instead of surrendering to the enemy. And, this fundamental breakdown in civil order is far scarier than anything that the anti-war protesters did – even when there were thousands more anti-war protesters than there are tea partiers.
On April 2 a radio show that I like to listen to (On The Media) presented us with an interesting dilemma. It turns out that right wing extremists that collect weapons and train for military operations are not treated the same as Islamists that would exhibit the same behavior. Daniel Levitas of On the Media states "In 2003, the 63-year-old Texan (William Krar) was caught with a sodium cyanide bomb, along with 60 pipe bombs and half a million rounds of ammunition. The Justice Department didn't make a big deal out of Krar. It just sent out a few low-level press releases. And it didn't call him a terrorist, a decision reflected in how it chose to prosecute him. They gave William Krar his full constitutional rights. He ended up pleading guilty, he had access to a lawyer - all the rest. You can compare that with how the Justice Department treated Jose Padilla, who was arrested in Chicago O’Hare. He was a former gang member who had been affiliated with al-Qaeda. None other than John Ashcroft, the former attorney general, interrupted a trip in Moscow, of all places, to announce in an international press conference the arrest of Padilla."
I am sorry about the long quote, but this bias really bothers me and I wanted to present it correctly.
The way I see it is that it won't be long before these tea party activists realize that they aren't having any effect on the political process. After all, George W Bush was re-elected after it was discovered that Iraq didn't have any weapons of mass destruction (WMDs). Democrats may lose a few seats in Congress, but I don't think that the majority of Americans agree with the tea party extremists. Most Americans are in the middle and they see the protesters as out on the fringe. They don't like the far left or the far right. And, they will see that there are plenty of good things that the Democrats are doing, especially their own personal representatives. And, that means that the Democrats will be given a few more years to turn the country around and correct the errors inflicted on us by the Bush administration.
But, when this minority begins to feel that they don't have any control they may fall back on "the great equalizer," as the gun was called in the Old West. A minority of one can become a majority in a crowded room with a gun. After all, this is the same philosophy that the Islamic extremists have used against us in recent years. But, our government has employed extreme measures to quell the threat of Islamic terrorists. Unfortunately our government has historically turned a blind eye to the militias that arm themselves in the rural areas of our country. People with a fear of Islamic terrorists should fear our homegrown domestic terrorists more. After all, these people already inhabit our country and they have stock piled weapons and they are training themselves in military techniques inside our country. All it takes is for one of these guys to get angry and we have a terrorist attack. And, the problem is that some of these guys get angry very easily.