Ebony's Pearls

Cuccidata
Originally uploaded by nodigio

Quotes about yesterday’s tea parties.

“It’s the worry that President Obama is trying to do too much at once, spending too much money without making the tough decisions about how to pay for it all”

“And 48% think that the amount of federal income taxes they pay is ‘about right,’ a finding that shows anti-tax sentiment near a historic low for the last five decades”

“But if Washington continues to thumb their nose at the American people, you know, who knows what might come out of that. – Gov. Perry, TX”

These tea parties, unlike the Boston Tea Party, aren’t about taxes, except perhaps to a limited few people. They were, at heart, about our government ceasing to listen to us, the people. We’ve deplored the waste that is government organization and spending almost since the inception of our government. This is nothing new. We understand why we need taxes – to pay for the infrastructure of our country, to provide a unified defense, to provide fair and equal justice, to provide oversight to keep one group of people from taking advantage of another group of people (usually the ones with the least financial power), to regulate trade and international travel, to preserve the integrity of our nation’s traditions, culture, and social needs, and to pay people who will represent our needs in a body of people who decide the course of our nation. What is angering us is that our elected employees, the very people we hired to listen to us and to represent us, have decided they know better than we do what it is we need and want and have forged a course we feel is disastrous for our nation.

We are patriots – we love our country and we want to see it as a country we can be proud to be citizens of. We need to be heard – and we aren’t.

I think the tea parties will be ineffective as long as people keep thinking the issues are the ones of taxes, of out-of-control government spending, and so many other things. They aren’t focused. The Boston Tea Party worked because it was a focused event. Modern tea parties lack that single-mindedness that marks a great event. It lacks that because we are still too fragmented and thinking about the surface things that are wrong. There are many things that have gone awry in America because we relaxed our vigil and rested on our laurels and all those other adages and clichés that indicate we stopped paying attention to what our elected employees were doing. We’ve created a country where those elected employees think they are not just our voices, but our bosses. And they think they don’t have to listen to us.

If we narrow the focus of the tea parties to the heart of the matter, I think they will be more effective.

The heart of the matter is that our government isn’t listening to us.