What is the Tea Party Movement?
A Personal View by Martin Henrichs
Rick Santelli’s rant on the floor of Chicago Board of Trade broadcast on CNBC in early 2009 was the spark that ignited the Tea Party movement. The American people woke up!
I was motoring down I-75 in Florida in February 2009 when I heard a radio talk show host fired up about a “Tea Party”. It was the first I had heard of it. At the Residence Inn
I picked up a USA Today and read a timely article describing what this Tea Party mania was all about—a reassertion of values which make America exceptional in the world.
Doug Mainwaring, a Tea Party founder, recalls in the August 23, 2010, Washington Times that it was “Main Street America’s indictment against the ruling class.” It was an eruption of sanity and reason, of stewardship and goodwill.” It was “not Democrat or Republican, but about the American people versus the hubris of politics as usual in Washington.”
It is about individual freedom and the future of our nation. In 1900 government only took
3% of our income, meaning we were 97% free, by 2000 government took 40% leaving us 60% free, but the bonds are tightening around our wrists.
The Tea Party calls attention to this trend toward slavery, as Mainwaring so eloquently states, “Success or failure hinges on dealing with our grave internal threat—the Leviathan that our government has become, the unsustainable entitlements, the incomprehensible enormity of our debt, the conceit of social engineering and command-and-control governance, the profligacy of Washington spending and the resulting confiscatory taxation to pay for it all. Most of all, it is the annihilation of our children’s future prosperity and liberty.
The Tea Party movement is reasserting America’s founding principles in the Declaration of Independence and The Constitution–that our unalienable rights are from God, not the government. That these rights include life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
According to Mainwaring, “There is a Grand Canyon-sized chasm between the mentality of Main Street America and that of our ruling class. Through the Tea Party movement, we are witnessing the rightful and necessary ascendancy of Main Street America over the Beltway, K Street (lobbyists) and Wall Street.—a cadre of legislators, members of the executive branch, lobbyists, union leaders, chief executives of for-profits and nonprofits, elitist members of media and academia.”
For too long we have witnessed the same tyranny our forefathers departed their home shores to escape—imposition of taxes and regulations without representation. Washington government is acting in complete disregard for constitutional limitations.
Mainwaring asks, “How much dead weight and cost are added through creating of enormous government bureaucracies, robbing the private sector of both capital and human resources? How much hard work and ingenuity has been stifled because of oversized welfare programs? How many people have been robbed of self-reliance and the joy of achievement because of entitlements? How much liberty, freedom and prosperity have we traded away over the years to fill the progressives voracious hunger to engineer our society?”
The Tea Party movement is not a few political firemen directing a hose of followers at a raging big government prairie fire. Rather, it is a rising tide of individuals who will peacefully smother what threatens to burn the American dream and exceptional way of life.
As Mainwaring puts it, “These are vast legions of confident, autonomous individuals who have experienced deep in their souls a very personal calling to preserve, protect and defend their nation.”
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Concerned Citizens,
Please forward this onto all your family and friends!!
God Bless America!!
