I'll admit that Americans have been well conditioned into meek submission against whatever abuse their officials attempt to get away with, and the tea parties are a positive development compared to the norm.
But compare the tea parties to almost any recent European protests, or the immigration rallies that were put on a couple years ago in this country. Those people showed up in huge numbers and they actually acted mad.
The tea parties drew barely 300,000 according to the nonpartisan estimates I've read. By way of perspective, consider that nearly ten times more people attended at least one Obama rally during the recent campaign. And the tea parties would have gotten far fewer participants than they did if those mildly annoyed people had actually had to travel more than a couple miles to join in (the way most Obama supporters did).
If you're going to protest something, government spending during a recession is sort of low on most people's radars. I could join a protest against an obviously stolen election, the politically-motivated arrest of a prominent opposition party leader, or a clearly unjustifiable war. Taxes and spending just doesn't get my dander up, especially when I'm still on the fence over whether it's actually a bad idea.
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I'll admit that Americans have been well conditioned into meek submission against whatever abuse their officials attempt to get away with, and the tea parties are a positive development compared to the norm.
But compare the tea parties to almost any recent European protests, or the immigration rallies that were put on a couple years ago in this country. Those people showed up in huge numbers and they actually acted mad.
The tea parties drew barely 300,000 according to the nonpartisan estimates I've read. By way of perspective, consider that nearly ten times more people attended at least one Obama rally during the recent campaign. And the tea parties would have gotten far fewer participants than they did if those mildly annoyed people had actually had to travel more than a couple miles to join in (the way most Obama supporters did).
If you're going to protest something, government spending during a recession is sort of low on most people's radars. I could join a protest against an obviously stolen election, the politically-motivated arrest of a prominent opposition party leader, or a clearly unjustifiable war. Taxes and spending just doesn't get my dander up, especially when I'm still on the fence over whether it's actually a bad idea.
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