It’s long been the lament of the despairing soul who senses that things are so far out of hand they cannot be retrieved. It also has been largely a false fear. Liberals and conservatives alike have wailed these words, only to see the pendulum swing back their way, usually far more quickly than expected.
For my part, the Carter and Clinton years delivered shocks to my system, but I always felt things would come around. This kept me off the ledge and freed me to focus on the issue-by-issue battles, which seemed more sensible than crying out that my country was drifting toward some dark abyss.
But there’s something different about the last few months. I’m ready to say it: I want my country back. And apparently I have some company.
One week from today, from Dallas City Hall to LaGrave Field in Fort Worth to the Town Center Pavilion in Southlake to the Denton County Courthouse, across North Texas, the rest of Texas and America, Tea Parties are breaking out all over.
“Tea Party” is capitalized because it is now a movement, a phenomenon, an impassioned embodiment of those brave Bostonians who dumped three shiploads of tea into Boston Harbor on Dec. 16, 1773.
Those bold colonists protested taxation from an authority they did not elect. Today’s Tea Party movement protests the grotesque spending orgies and power grabs of representatives we actually did elect.
Gussied up in flowery language like the Troubled Assets Relief Program, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act and the Homeowners Affordability and Stability Plan, there is an effort underway to obliterate the America I grew up in.
The engineers of this one-party wrecking crew will not harm a brick on a single building. This is not physical demolition, but rather the nuking of what were once givens: The responsibility to pay our mortgages, businesses led by privately-selected leaders, a free market where both success and failure occur in an atmosphere of liberty.
Profligate spending is nothing new, but the Obama-Pelosi-Reid triumvirate has hoodwinked an uneasy country into believing that everything will be all right if we just follow them on a multitrillion-dollar exercise in expansionist, collectivist socialism.
But eyes are opening. I will serve as MC of the Dallas Tea Party next Wednesday evening (dallasteaparty.org for details) and keynote speaker that day at noon for the Tea Party in Southlake. Organizers stress that these events are not designed to alienate Obama voters but to reach out to people across the political spectrum who believe we are seeing power-drunk excess on an unprecedented scale.
Let’s not kid ourselves. Tea Parties will be attended primarily by people who did not vote for Barack Obama and who already deserve one of the biggest I-told-you-so’s in American history. But Democrats with buyer’s remorse will be treated with open arms.
If these events are to evolve into genuine ballot box revolt, it will be up to Tea Party attendees to catch this lightning in a bottle and keep it glowing until we can rein in this pernicious wave of panic spending by electing people of both parties who want no part of it.
Republicans obviously want to rein it in. But so do some Democrats who don’t buy the feigned “necessity” of their party’s rash actions. Together, we can pack countless venues to say we do not want an America that tells companies what kind of cars to make, tells taxpayers they must pay the mortgages of those who made bad choices and tells our progeny that they must dig out from our massive debt because we didn’t have the guts to solve our problems through free markets and pro-growth policies that encourage, rather than annihilate, wealth.
We want our country back.
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