Tea baggers want to bring 1909 back

September 16, 1:39 PMLiberal ExaminerJenny Kakasuleff

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Demonstrators protest on Capitol Hill in Washington, Saturday, Sept. 12, 2009, during a taxpayer rally. The Washington Monument is in the background. (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana)
 

This past weekend, a mob of angry protesters marched against perceived injustices by their popularly elected government. Over the course of several months, America’s most sensationalist cable news commentator, Glenn Beck, was able to round up tens of thousands of the millions who view his program to march on Washington and express their grievances – no matter how misguided they may actually be.

Liberal estimates by the un-fact-checking Michelle Malkin falsely claimed 2 million protesters were in attendance, though the official figure has been placed around 70,000.

Tea bagger’s varied on the source of their anger. There are those who declare that they have had enough of the out-of-control spending in Washington – no word on where they were when Reagan tripled the deficit and raised taxes, or when Bush, Jr. doubled the deficit again. After all, republicans were “stealing from future generations” long before Obama took the oath of office. As Jon Perr notes:

The Bush tax cuts delivered a third of their total benefits to the wealthiest 1% of Americans. And the staggering $2 trillion price tag for Bush's giveaway to the richest needing it least dwarfs the estimated $900 billion cost over 10 years of President Obama's health care proposals."

Let us not forget the nearly $1 trillion cost to fight an unnecessary war in Iraq, which also could have paid for universal health care.

Such inconvenient truths make it difficult to believe that deficit spending defines the true motivations of these protesters.

There are others who unapologetically believe in a host of conspiracy theories, which claim that President Obama was born in Kenya or Indonesia; that he has created “death camps” for conservatives; that children will be sent to re-education institutions for socialist indoctrination; that he is a communist, racist, Nazi, fascist who has introduced health care reform as an underhanded attempt to give blacks reparations, and to kill off the elderly and indigent.

CNN attended the march and asked many of the tea bagger’s what had motivated them to protest:

One man replies, “What we want is to get back to where our country was 100 years ago!” My first thought was, really?! You are marching on Washington because you want to roll back time and rekindle the “good ole’ days?”

Let us take a walk down memory lane and look at what Americans were up to 100 years ago:

* You could expect to live to be 47 years old; compared to 77 today.
* You may have been one of the lucky 14% of Americans with a bathtub.
* Only 8% of your neighbors had a phone – of any kind.
* No Internet; no IPod; no microwave; no television – you get the idea.
* There were 8,000 cars in the U.S., and only 144 miles of paved roads.
* The average wage was .22 cents per hour.
* Diarrhea was the third leading cause of death.
* 90% of doctors had no college education.
* There were no antibiotics, and no insulin.
* Most Americans rented their homes; in 1950, half of all Americans achieved home ownership for the first time.
* Neither John McCain, nor Sarah Palin would have been eligible to run for the presidency since Alaska and Arizona had not yet been admitted to the United States.
* Two out of every ten adults could not read or write.
* Only 6% of Americans had graduated from high school.
* There was no such thing as a 40-hour work week.
* Two-thirds of all workers in textile factories were children.
* Women were barred from voting.
* There was no Medicare, no Medicaid, no Social Security, no unemployment and no social welfare benefits for the elderly and disabled.
* We were on the cusp of World War I.
* Russia was on the eve of the Bolshevik Revolution that would bring Lenin and later, Stalin to power.
* Soviet aspirations sought totalitarian domination, which would eventually lead to the Cold War and decades of nuclear tensions.
* A young Hitler was preparing to lead the extermination of an entire race.
* The Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act did not exist.
* One in eight Americans was non-white in 1900; whereas in 2000, it was one in four.
* Southern states had changed their constitutions to disenfranchise blacks and poor whites from voting or participating in democracy.
*Jim Crow laws were widespread, and segregation was legally sanctioned.
* The Ku Klux Klan was thriving on a platform of white supremacy, and had infiltrated juries, elected offices, and government agencies to a much larger degree than communists could ever dream.
* Lynching’s.
* The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People was founded 100 years ago – in 1909 – and most of the gains made by minorities (and women) have occurred over the last century.

Perhaps, it is as former President Jimmy Carter suggests; thinly-veiled racism disguised as partisan opposition that continues to exist within a vocal minority of the country and most prominently in the south. It is no coincidence that a majority of “birthers” reside in the south, and Joe Wilson, the congressman who took the unprecedented action of attacking President Obama’s character in the middle of his speech on the House floor is from the same geographic region.

There are 300 million people in the United States – and 2% showed up to express their manufactured outrage. The lackluster turnout failed to live up to the hype – a Million Man March these protests were not – let alone a silent majority. This fringe group consisting of paid astroturfer’s, conspiracy theorists, racists, white supremacists, anarchists, and peppered with Ron Paul libertarians has morphed into a movement that goes beyond reasoned discourse into idiocy of epic proportions.

Invoking the constitutional verbiage “We the People,” tea bagger’s have essentially declared themselves the anointed ones, whose opinion is the only one that matters – democracy, facts, and logic be damned. I wonder which parts of the list above protesters are most interested in resurrecting. Outdoor plumbing; or perhaps the part that would have prevented a half-black man with a Muslim-sounding name from becoming president? 

Copyright ©2009 Jenny Kakasuleff