On tax day this year I headed out with two friends to attend two separate Tea Parties in Boston. Needless to say, the experience was amazing. We attended these Tea Parties to send a message to our government. A message that we the people are fed up with out of control government spending. This message was bipartisan and the people who attended held a variety of different beliefs. I myself a libertarian was joined by my girlfriend Kristen, a moderate, and her friend Shannah, a strict liberal who voted for Obama. We spent the night before creating signs together with the hope to show the government that spending and taxation is getting out of control.
The first Tea Party was held on the Boston Common from 1100 to about 1530. It was amazing. I spent hours walking around reading and laughing at the signs people had created and talking to others about current issues. The crowd was extremely diverse. There were kids and parents, teenagers in high school, the college crowd, moms and dads, the elderly. They represented different socio-economic levels within society as well from the poor to moderately rich. The event was marked by several key speakers yelling into a microphone to those who could hear and the occasional cheers and jeers of the crowd. In the end I would say at the height about 1500 people were present.
Next, a few hundred of us with our signs marched through Boston towards the second Tea Party. This experience was phenomenal. We had a police escort all the while people would stare in bewilderment at us (maybe understanding the message we were trying to portray). There were a few occasional jeers from random Bostonians, but, mostly the comments were uniformed (such as "F#@! Fox News" or "Go back to Soviet Russia"). At first, only a few hundred people were present, yet, within the hour almost 2000 people had showed up. We were treated to the quips of Michael Graham (an amazing public speaker if I might say so) and other speakers. After which crates of tea were thrown into the harbor followed by the singing of the national anthem (which almost made me cry).
The end result? For a grassroots movement this was an exemplary start. Not once during both Tea Parties was there a fight or an arrest. We proved that we can hold a peaceful protest to get a message out. While some might not take this seriously I feel that there are more people listening now. I just think its was amazing that with a crowd that had moderates with anti-spending posters mixed in with conservatives with anti-Obama signs mixed in with militia men with their flags mixed in with liberals with elephant flags mixed in with all sorts of other ideas that the worse thing that happened was a few words shouted.
No comments:
Post a Comment