This morning my wife headed down to the post office to sell raffle tickets to help out with the local beautification project, which consists of a group of volunteers planting and caring for flower beds around town. They solicit money and hold fundraisers to buy the flowers.
I had to to install hardware and software at one of our remote sites, so I wasn't around to help. She was joined by two of her friends who worked for the previous Republican congressman. We live in the county seat of a very Red county, so many of our friends and acquaintances are Republicans. In fact my wife is also a Republican, but not of the rabid Joe Wilson stripe. She'd been there less than half an hour when a vanload of teabaggers arrived and began setting up right next to her. She politely asked them to please move to the other side so that they would not be getting in each other's way. With that, the woman who was the leader of the group launched into a tirade about Baby Boomers and how they were always getting involved with stupid things like flowers.
My wife calmly pointed out to the woman that she herself was obviously a Boomer. The woman did not acknowledge the point and instead moved on to a new tirade about government health care takeover and government plans to kill old people. According to my wife, the woman was extremely loud and obnoxious. A lot of people walking by came up and engaged the group, asking them how they could be against health care reform and criticizing their positions. My wife is for health care reform too, as are most sane Republicans. One of the women helping my wife out, a lifelong Republican herself, said that the group was causing her blood pressure to rise.
A person trying to collect signatures for a local candidate, obviously irritated by the presence of the group, decided to move on to another place to gather signatures. The police came by and asked the group to move their van, which had been parked for some time in a 15-minute parking space reserved for post office patrons. On top of being ignorant, the teabaggers are also inconsiderate, and apparently feel that they do not need to abide by the same regulations as the rest of us. They moved the van, rather than risk a confrontation with the police. But it seems they didn't make too many friends today in a Republican town where they would expect to find more support.
The teabaggers are out of touch with mainstream America. They are a cloistered group of wingnuts, who reinforce each other's madness, and block out all other sensory input that conflicts with their narrow vision of the world. They are rude, ignorant, and self-centered. They are convinced that they are the modern day heirs of a group of patriots who fought for equal representation, representation that they did not have, but the teabaggers do. But the teabaggers idea of representation is to have everything their way, regardless of what the majority wants or thinks.
The teabaggers are a fringe group whose ideas have been rejected by the public over the last several election cycles, elections in which the teabaggers had equal opportunity to be heard at the ballot box. What they seek is not representation, but to deny representation to the millions of voters who voted for change. They wish to be the dominant voice in the public forum and yet they cannot even be civil or truthful advocates for their failed policies. So they resort to theatrics, hysteria, and bullying, as evidenced by the group that invaded our town. The public is rapidly wearying of these fools. Perhaps they will realize someday that no one, except their own inbred group, is interested in their message and all of us are sick of their tactics.