Nailing the Boston Tea Party

What movements like the Boston Tea Party movement generally have in common is that they hearken back to a time when things were “simpler” and “less complicated.” These movements are generally popular among people who are fed up with “business as usual.” Therefore, they want “a real change” rather than merely “a cosmetic change.”

The first Boston Tea Party took place in 1775, when angry white men disguised as Mohawk Indians climbed on board an English ship in Boston Harbor and threw its cargo, black tea from the East Indies, into the harbour. This act of vandalism was an elaborate protest against a tax on tea that the British authorities had levied to pay for the French-Indian War, which had ended in 1763 with France losing Canada to the British Empire. The British had sent troops to North America and expected the Americans to pay the bill.

I call this an act of vandalism because we all know what would happen if a group of Americans disguised as Seminole Indians dumped a cargo of Colombian coffee into the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of Florida to protest a tax on Colombian coffee. First, anybody caught dumping a ship’s cargo would be arrested for malicious destruction of property and face charges in criminal court. The owners, perhaps Folger’s Coffee, could also sue the prepetrators in civil court to recoup their losses. The environmentalists would all howl about what the coffee in the water would do to the habitat of marine animals like the manitee, and the perpetrators would probably be fined by the Environmental Protection Agency.

Then there’s the real Seminoles. If they object to the idea of a college football team calling themselves the Seminoles, you know they’re not going to like the idea of a group of Florida rednecks dumping coffee into the water while disguised as Seminoles. They’re like: “You take our land and you gotta take our identity too?”

I am not so naive as to believe that the Tea Partiers in the United States care if they offend environmentalists or racial minorities. If they’re not committing acts of vandalism like dumping cargoes of Colombian coffee into the water, it’s because their handlers, the Central Committee of the Republican Party, is well-financed by business interests like Folger’s and Juan Valdes.

Then there are people like Glenn Beck, who held a little revival in front of the Washington Monument. Would a country trying to “get right with God” allow its citizens to dump coffee off the coast of Florida? Not when business owners make generous contributions to church collection plates on Sundays.

Let’s take a look at what these Boston Tea Partiers really are. They have been brainwashed from day-one into believing that the War for Independence was fought over “taxation without representation.”

Clearly, that wasn’t so. Otherwise, the very first bill that George Washington signed into law wouldn’t have been an excise tax bill. When Daniel Shays led a revolt in New England over a government attempt to collect a tax on his whiskey operation, George Washington showed them the real definition of “taxation without representation” by sending in the troops. Most of Shays’ followers couldn’t vote because they didn’t meet property qualifications. They had to pay taxes because they weren’t represented.

If you look at the line of descent from the first Boston Tea Party to the present Boston Tea Party movement, it goes through radical fringe movements like the Know-Nothing Party, the Knights of the White Camelia, the Ku Klux Klan, the Militia Movement, the Minutemen, etc. These groups are all united by one thing: their resistance to change.

Anybody who has ever tried to institute any real change in this country has always faced resistance. Abraham Lincoln had to fight a civil war to abolish slavery. When Democratic President Franklin D. Roosevelt tried to push the New Deal through Congress, he faced resistance not only from Republicans but also from Democrats. Three years after the Supreme Court declared racial segration in schools to be unconstitutional in 1954, President Dwight D. Eisenhower had to send troops to Little Rock, Arkansas, to escort four black students to Central High.

All change is made in spite of some very entrenched interests, not because of them. Slavery was abolished in spite of the slaveholding class in the South, not because of it. The federal income tax was instituted in spite of the very powerful business interests that opposed it, not because of them. The immigration laws that we have today banning “illegal immigration” are merely a compromise, because we have always had people who opposed immigration of any kind.

We shouldn’t be surprised that President Barack Obama has faced resistance to his national health care plan. We should expect it.

The Tea Party movement is a small but very vocal minority that knows how to get attention. Some of their grievances may be legitimate. Like all Americans, they have faced hard times living in a slow economy. Many of them have lost their jobs and face the loss of unemployment benefits. Some of them draw social security and fear that their benefits are threatened by those who, they think, don’t really “deserve it.”

However, they’re not going to roll back the federal income tax. They won’t roll back the Civil Rights Act of 1965 like senatorial candidate Rand Paul seems to want. They won’t repeal Brown v. Board of Education either. Nor will they see the abolition of the Department of Education and the EPA. The longer that this country has “Obama Care,” the less likely it is that we will see a repeal of that.

Any extremist who decides to wear an Indian costume in the commission of a felony had better wait till he gets home before he takes it off. Otherwise, he’ll get nailed.