The Tea Party
The Tea Party occupies a very fuzzy place in the moral consciousness of the United States: on the one hand there is the ulta-libertarian tendency that is part of American History on the other there is a racist backlash against the United States’first African American president. People don’t like taxes, fair enough. The colonists went to Boston Harbor and threw the tea overboard to make their point. They didn’t want a King and they wanted to be free from outside rule. In the United States, a significant amount of the population lives in rural areas that are culturally isolated. The government of Obama may seem like a foreign ruler to a farmer in Kentucky. It seems to me though that a lot of the fuss is about trying to institute some form of equitable health care and give everyone the same access to permanent doctor jobs in the country. There are some big players making big profit; insurance companies, hmo’s and drug companies; that are moving around this group of people to their own end. The group which seems racist because it is almost entirely white, seems to be myopic, in terms of not being able to see others'point of view and embracing the dated tactics of the red scare where anything that was either socialist or communist was un-American. Perhaps, the Tea Party, is about Americans hating being told what to do. Did the Civil Rights movement try to legislate us out of our historic racism without dealing with the core underlying principles? Did The Civil War in the United States try to do the same thing with lives and fire power? Have we refused to deal realistically and openly with the history of slavery in the United States? Each and every one of us on a personal and spiritual level. Have of churches and schools not helped each and every one of us deal with our collective slaughter of the Native Americans? If they did, we wouldn’t need the government to tell us what to do, the people would lead the charge for equity and justice.
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