"...Heard 'Round The World."

I don't know that I can improve on what I wrote in last April 19th's posts, Patriot's Day and "April Morning", but I have a few more thoughts, brought on (in part) by the Tea Partys this last week.

The causes of rebellion were many. "Taxation Without representation" was the main slogan we remember today, but it was a symptom which, if the British had been paying attention to, they might have avoided. Up until the French and Indian War, the colonials were pretty much ignored, and allowed to attend to their own affairs.

(The F&I was expensive, and led directly to the Seven Years War on the European Continent, which was even more expensive. In order to pay the debts incurred in the two wars, the Crown imposed taxes on the colonies for the first time. Even though the tax burden on the colonists was lower than on Englishmen "at home", the colonists still objected to the taxes, since

1. They had never had to pay such before, and
2. They had no say whatsoever in what was being taxed, or at what rate.

If the Crown had said "Here is your share of the debt we incurred on your behalf, it is up to each colony to determine how best to pay it off" all sorts of difficulties might have been avoided...

(It is often noted that many of the Founding Fathers were smugglers; in fact, smuggled goods were often quite a bit more expensive than the "taxed" goods, due to subsidies granted to the vendors of the taxed goods. So part of the impetus for purchasing smuggled tea, for example, was that it was a small act of rebellion against Ministerial high-handedness; conversely, part of the resentment was aimed at subsidies for the official monopoly of the East India Company.)

So. The American Revolution was not just about taxes, any more than the battles at Lexington and Concord were just about the Redcoats coming to seize the local militia's stockpiles of powder and cannon. The American Colonists had been allowed to pretty much run their own affairs for well over a century, and all of a sudden they were being controlled by Crown appointees, their legislative bodies dissolved, and so forth.

Similarly, the Tea Party movement today is being accused of all sorts of evils, including

• Racism: Obama is part Black, so anyone who disagrees with him must be a Klansman.
• Partisanship: This is obviously a plot of the GOP.
• Treason: Anyone who protests the government is anti-American. (Amusing, coming as it does from folks who just a few short weeks ago were telling us that opposition to government was the highest form of patriotism...)
• Being a tool of "Conservative media." The Tea Party movement originated here in Seattle. I really doubt that Fox News--which ain't all that conservative, by the way--would have chosen Seattle as the place to start a "Red State Rebellion."
• Greedy. Because, obviously, anyone who opposes wasteful governmental spending and plunging the nation into debt for generations to come just doesn't want to pay Their Fair Share.

So, a couple of points. It's not about "I don't wanna pay my taxes anymore", it's about wasteful spending and foolish, counter-productive fiscal policies. It's about confiscatory taxes levied on the most productive portions of society, to the point that they have no reason to be productive. It's about proclaiming that the economy is in a mess, and the way to fix it is to print money to throw at social programs without even vetting how much, or what.

The second point is that, at the Seattle Tea Party, most of the people identified themselves as Independents. I gather that this was the case at most of the Tea Partys across the nation. Now, a person may say that he or she is an independent and always vote Republican, or Democrat, or whatever, but that "Independent" label means that he or she is open to the possibility of voting for another candidate. Someone, one of the speakers, at the Tea Party last Wednesday made the point that the current situation did not happen overnight when Obama took the oath; he did, indeed, inherit a mess. In fact, this mess was several years in the making, and some of the roots go back to the 70s, or earlier. (I look forward to the day when we can stop making jokes about "It's all George Bush's fault." Unfortunately, the current president seems to really believe it. But that's another post...)

And although Congress has been controlled by the Democrats since 2006, government spending did ramp up before that. Well before, in fact. Which the same speaker continued by saying that

The Republicans were spending money like drunken sailors;
the Democrats are spending like drunken Republicans.

Of course, sailors, drunken or not, have a hard time getting credit when they're out on a spree; they certainly can't print their own money...

The problem is not a partisan one. It is not a racial one. It is not an ethnic one. It is not a socio-economic one.

It is a national problem, that will only be resolved when people across the country agree to hold their elected representatives accountable for their actions. (Which includes ensuring that any appointed officials are held accountable as well!)

This is something that needs to happen at the local and state levels as well as at the national level.

It is not, I say again, not, a matter of this party or that party, of race, ethnicity, religious affiliation, or socio-economic class.

Our representatives, elected, appointed or hired, work for us; they need to read the instructions.

They especially need to understand which powers are enumerated.

Every once in a while you hear someone call for Term Limits: They exist. We each have our opportunity to give our elected officials their Performance Appraisal every Election Day. Right now, every single one of them for me, from City on up, is a Does Not Meet The Standard.

This test is Pass/Fail.