The protest that wasn’t: teabagging

This is my penultimate post on this whole deal (my far more enterprising and courageous partner, Will, actually went to one of the rallies and did some interviews). For now though, let me just say: the whole thing was a complete and utter failure.

You might be tempted to say, “But Hanlon, lots of people showed up! The stuck it to the government bigwigs!” To you I say, fair enough, people arrived, but there’s a lot more to something like this than just showing up.

Specifically, our protesting friends apparently whiffed on any number of things, but the one that really smacked me in the gob was that the protestors hadn’t gotten the proper permits and actually couldn’t dump the teabags in DC. To wit, “We have a million tea bags here, and we don’t have a place to put them because it’s not on our permit.” How sad. All that organization and they just end up standing around wtih teabags they can’t put anywhere.

That does, however, cut to the core of the problem. As far as protests go, this may have been one of the absolute wimpiest protests in existence. Purportedly this was a giant middle-finger to a greedy government overreaching its bounds, spending wastelessly, and taxing us all to socialism. Before we continue, we need to get a few things out of the way.

1. The taxes collected this year are actually for the final Bush budget.
2. Statistically speaking, about 95% of the people waggling teabags will be getting a tax cut thanks to Obama’s plan when it comes into effect anyway.

Now that’s trouble enough as it is, but keep in mind both the scope of the rallies and that which they were echoing: unfair taxes and the Boston Tea Party. The HuffPo has a great write-up on why they completely missed what the actual BTP was about, but I want to focus primarily on what actions they took. The activists weren’t buying tea and throwing it into the river, they stormed the supplies, stole it, dumped it. Why? Specifically to rage against the BEIC, but it was the thievery that made the protest meaningful.

These idiots gathered on Tax Day to flail bags of Lipton in the air which they legally purchased, thus paying sales tax, and then going home to fill out their income tax forms. They’re protesting taxes, but continuing to pay them. Howling that this is socialism, but feeding into it with no hesitation.

Let’s assume, just for the moment, that the tea parties were 100% correct in motive, the government in fact is a giant semi-socialist monolith that wants to suck up more and more power and bleed us dry via taxes. For now, let’s completely ignore the tax breaks for almost everyone at these damn things, the general lack of real alteration in our economic functionality, and let’s just pretend that even the “taxation without representation” mantra somehow applied to our current situation.

The problem is that if we accept all of the above, the protest is completely meaningless if you’re still paying the damn taxes. Without the balls to back up their words, all of these tea party participants are like a bunch of children yelling at their parents while raking the leaves.

This would be one thing if the protestors were just protesting what they thought was a mildly unfair tax hike. Sort of like making a big stink when you find out the local Blockbuster upped the price by a dollar. But to be calling the economic plan “100 times worse than 9/11″ and equating Obama with Mao Zedong and Hitler, it means that this is as dire a situation as it gets. To hold a purely symbolic protest and not actually do anything is the absolute height of cowardice. Congratulations, you just made the Lipton folk very happy and the government still got your money. I hope you feel good about yourselves.

There’s a reason when workers go on strike, they stop working instead of just wearing t-shirts that say “THIS JOB SUCKS”. When the Hispanics in California wanted to protest against an immigration law, they took the day off to show the nation what it was like if the immigrants all got deported. That’s a damn protest; you pick a message and then deliver it. You don’t just bitch and moan and not take action. Sit-ins were organized to interrupt business, the man at Tiennanmen Square literally stopped a line of tanks. They didn’t just complain.

Did they organize a million people to not pay income taxes this year? That really would send a message. It would say “if you want to bleed us dry and waste our tax dollars, you aren’t getting them!” A million Americans not filing taxes would cause pandaemonium, the IRS would go berzerk trying to sort it all out and the government would see that its citizens were willing to pay no taxes unless Washington gets its act together. It would mean something.

In the end, these people were whiners and nothing more. Aimless, directionless anti-Obama squealers holding up signs that amounted to “I HATE OBAMA” and then going home to quietly follow all the rules. Frankly, if these are the people defending freedom and liberty, the country’s screwed.