I am not a member of any tea parties here in Fort Myers, Florida. However, I am affiliated with a couple online and also know a lot of Tea Party supporters, so to read this letter to the editor in The News Press on Monday, April 2, 2012 is real disturbing to me
Make Believe
Tea parties are for little girls with imaginary friends.
Brendan Lally, Fort Myers
And then on the next page to see the Headline by E.J. Dionne of the Washington Post entitled “Tea Party tosses traditions of conservatism overboard” really got my blood pressure soaring. If it were not for a Tea Party, there would be no America today. No, I do not mean the Tea Party protests and the elections of 2009 – 2010. I am going further back.
Let us step into the time machine and take a trip to Colonial Boston in 1773. At the time Great Britain had ruled over the colonies. On May 10, King George had put the royal seal of approval on the Tea Act, which was supposed to convince the colonists to purchase Company tea on which the Townshend Duties were paid, thus implicitly agreeing to accept Parliament's right of taxation. It had also granted the Company the right to directly ship its tea to North America and the right to the duty-free export of tea from Britain, although the tax imposed by the Townshend Acts and collected in the colonies remained in force.
The Colonists were not pleased, and as such recognized the implications of the Act's provisions, and a coalition of merchants and artisans similar to that which had opposed the Stamp Act of 1765 mobilized opposition to delivery and distribution of the tea. The company's authorized consignees were harassed, and in many colonies successful efforts were made to prevent the tea from being landed. This culminated in the Boston Tea Party where colonists (some disguised as Native Americans) boarded tea ships anchored in the harbor and dumped their tea cargo overboard. The group (led by Samuel Adams) numbered somewhere between 30 and 130 colonists dressed as Mohawk Indians who had boarded the Dartmouth, Beaver, and Eleanor and destroyed and tossed 342 chests of tea overboard into Boston Harbor in the span of three hours. This was one of the fuses which led to the American Revolutionary War. Granted, there were other events which precipitated the colonists to revolt, but the Boston Tea Party set the stage for the final straw to the colonists to break ties from England.
If it were not for those patriots, those Sons of Liberty, there would be no America now. In 2009 with ObamaCare on the forefront and also the stimulus bill, people were fed up with Obama’s policies that they revot4ed. Not with throwing tea into harbors or even going out into the streets with guns and hacksaws, but rather with loud voices and constitutions in their hands and confronted their Senators and Congressmen who had put in their support for ObamaCare and the stimulus, as well as a few laws like Dodd-Frank and Sarbanes-Oxley. That led to the election of Scott Brown to fill Ted Kennedy’s seat in Massachusetts in January, 2009 after Kennedy died as well as the massive election in 2010 when the Republicans took back the House with victories by Allen West, Michelle Bachman, and other Representatives backed by the Tea Party.
The Tea Party IS alive and well in 2012 also. Granted, there have been many of the Tea party darlings like Rubio, Ryan, and others who have backed Mitt Romney for president, but they are in no way establishment based now, which is what many have said on Facebook, Twitter, and other social media outlets. May we do what we can to keep the House, take back the Senate, and evict Obama from the White House in 2012. To quote Darrell Lee in The Patriot Zone on Facebook,
Dear President Obama,
The answer to 2012 is 1773.
Retrospectively Yours,
The Tea Party
