Saturday, April 18, 2009

A Thought on the Tea Parties.

I almost didn't go. Not that I was apathetic or disinterested. I was tired. My day starts at five thirty am and as I predicted, I got home past my bed-time. And I skipped some of my responsibilities - getting the trash ready and down the hill for the morning's pickup and the dishwasher put away - and my 88 year-old mother had to make her own dinner. My thought was that most of these protesters were just like me.

It is hard to get us to protest. We have lives and responsibilities that we must forego in order to do this. I thought back to an earlier protest I witnessed at this same spot. One that the local network news stations made a bigger deal about than this 15,000 person* protest. There were 15 women matching on this very spot on the West lawn of the state capitol building. They were marching for welfare rights. There was 1/1000th the number of people, but WSB made a much bigger deal about it.

But more than that. Who is protesting? People that have the time to protest. People who view protests as a high point in their lives, not a chore. Well, the welfare mothers was obvious. The only labor in their entire lives was at the hospital. But look at the protest groups and tell me where you CAN work looking like that? There is the book store and the hippie consignment store and ...?
For the anti-capitalist, whether collectivist or anarchist, work and family do not interfere with protest time.

And while I am on this, why the affinity between anarchists and collectivists? Don't the anarchists realize that the collectivists will not have the tolerance of their antics that the too busy capitalists have allowed? Let me remind them of the words of George Bernard Shaw that I quoted the other day. They will only be kept as long as they are useful. Now they are useful in bringing down the old order. But then? Does inflated scrotum guy think that the New World Order really has a place for his old ass? His age alone would doom him, but his behavior? Is this what Lenin meant by useful idiots?

*I am more inclined to say 30,000 as it seems to me like the at least the mass of an arena concert crowd and I worked those for 15 years.

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