Clearing Up Tea Party Misconceptions

There has been much written about the tea party movement over the last year, sadly, too much of it a falsehood. The media establishment machine controls the culture and the messages to the general public and got a President elected without much due diligence. Now they are wielding their power to try to discredit and demonize this grassroots movement of ordinary citizens fed up with their government at all levels. This only further serves to divide the country.

Our initial mission as original grassroots organizers was to go to Washington to protest the financial bailouts. We did not want our hard earned money to go to “too big to fail” financial companies when in fact they had failed. The initial culprit was none other than Congress itself, and the progressives at the time who believed everyone should be a homeowner regardless of their ability to pay off the mortgage. This is a little akin to saying everyone should be a parent. Not everyone wants the responsibility. Wall Street saw a way to package the loans and sell them as securities to other financial institutions around the world and to investors. It was the greater fool theory all over again post the dot-com blowup. This time the financers were not left holding the bag, it was the banks and mostly private investors – you and me.

Not long after that, the next shoe to drop was the “healthcare” legislation that was proposed. The majority of Americans did not approve of the bill and saw it for what it is, one of the largest transfers of wealth and power to the federal government from WE THE PEOPLE in our lifetimes, in the form of another huge social entitlement program that the progressives in power had been dreaming about for decades. With “Democratic” control of both houses of Congress and the White House, there was no stopping their social justice from coming to fruition. Damn the details like it will cost trillions of dollars, when we are already in a $14 trillion dollar hole, not counting unfunded mandates like social security.

So thousands of people called Congress and they did not listen, thousands wrote Congress and they did not read, and millions of people marched on Washington and they did not heed. People got angry and frustrated that their government would not listen to the will of the people, and there was a special election that Scott Brown won which was a referendum on the will of the people to stop government run healthcare, yet they regrouped and passed it through a reconciliation process and even threatened to circumvent the Constitution entirely by passing it by one vote – the Slaughter Rule – named after the architect.

Now, all eyes are on this November election. This stands as the biggest mission the tea party movement has this year and to date. We need to rid our government of corrupt career politicians that see American citizens as pawns to be moved for their own game. They view us as not intelligent enough to know what is for our own good. We have been vetting candidates and doing due diligence on the issues and bills at hand, and we hope to come to some consensus among members as to who is most qualified to serve and also have the best realistic chance of beating an entrenched incumbent, be it Democrat or Republican.

There’s a little Lincoln in all of us – a willingness to forgive. A deeply religious man, he knew this was the way forward after the bloody civil war. He was the statesman that we needed at the time to bring people together and heals our wounds. Today we have a deeply divided country along ideological lines. Nothing but a peaceful second American Revolution fought at the ballot box and not on battlefield is acceptable.

Our mission as tea party patriots is foremost to educate and inform from the grassroots level of our neighborhoods and office buildings the people around us about the actions of our government. The next mission has been to step forward and to not be afraid to speak out, and to draw others out into the public square for debate among citizens. For far too long, we as a society have been apathetic to the move of our government towards more centralized power and away from the people. Those of us strong in the movement hold the tenth amendment of the Constitution most dear in our hearts, for without it, we have little. It states the powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people.

In the words of Benjamin Franklin, surely if we do not hang together, we will hang separately,

Bill Bongiorno is co-founder of Northern Westchester Tea Party Patriots, nypatriots.com. His day job is a business owner of a public relations firm in Westchester County.