a melendez umbrella group

Tea Party Boondogglers

by Michael Melendez

We hear so much lately about the Tea Partyers, that increasingly clamorous cabal that would have us believe they represent the “true patriots” in this country.  It might be remembered that the core of the participants found at that outing on a winter’s day in December of 1773, were in fact merchants who were complicit in the smuggling of Dutch tea into the Massachusetts colony.  The tea they destroyed by unloading into Boston Harbor was cheap British East India tea, which once distributed, would have interfered with their profits and long term smuggling plans.

The bulk of the myth that has been passed down to us concerning this event seems to have developed much later in the history of this country. We hear much about the rebel’s higher motives and how they acted to resist the tyranny of the crown in order to secure our present day freedoms.  And how now this resurrection of the spirit of these fine patriots will liberate us from an increasingly liberal government determined to undermine those original god-given freedoms that define us as Americans. Ronald Reagan would have been proud knowing that there are those who continue working hard toward his vision of apple pie and unfettered capitalism.

I wonder if the original Tea Party revelers would have found their revolutionary passions a sufficient condition for their famous protest, or might it have been that they acted more out of self-interest, immediate profits, and the protection of their investments?  And so, I extend this same suspicion to our current day Tea Partyers, those who would maintain and extend the hegemony of the moneyed class and the multi-national corporations they represent, who would reduce or dispense with government services providing for the protection of the poor and disenfranchised without healthcare, or the dignity of a living wage.  Those same people who would oppose and dismantle regulations protecting our earth and providing for a just and sustainable future for our children shroud themselves in a cloak of illusion and mythical intentions in order to obfuscate and conceal their true intentions.

Let us be informed citizens, it is our greatest protection against the darkness that grows out of ignorance and the propaganda of empire.