Here's some shit. Eat up!

From what I have gathered from the Zernike reading, a talk with my mom, a Wikipedia article, and the CBS- NYT poll results, the contradictions of the Tea Party are seemingly some of the most confusing pieces of subject matter I have attempted to wrap my head around. The Tea Party, as Wikipedia defined it, is an American political movement that has sponsored protests and supported candidates since 2009. So there’s the when. The Tea Party’s platform is apparently explicitly populist and is essentially recognized as conservative and libertarian. A Gallup poll reported that approximately 80% of Tea Party activists consider themselves Republican. The CBS-NYT poll data showed that 66% of Tea Partiers voted always or usually Republican, and 25% of them voted equally amongst Democratic and Republican, so the percentages are fairly similar between the Gallup and New York Times polls. There’s the who. These generally conservative/libertarian people have contributed to a movement that has no central leadership, but is composed of a loose affiliation of national and local groups that determine their own platforms and agendas, with caucuses in the House of Representatives and the Senate of the US. What allures members of the Tea Party is its endorsement in reduced government spending, lower taxes, a reduction of the national debt and federal budget deficit, as well as adherence to an originalist interpretation of the US Constitution. Seriously, America? I think you all just want a reason to bitch, and you aren’t willing to pay more taxes because, God damn it, you really want that boat house in Nantucket.

For kicks and giggles, I had a talk with my mom asking her about what she knew about the Tea Party. She told me that it was about how Obama wants to raise taxes for US citizens that have an income of at least $200,000/year, and that the Republicans are very against this. She said that the ‘T’, ‘E’, and ‘A’ stood for some acronym about taxes. (Thanks, Mom. Real helpful.) Based on this knowledge, you can imagine that confusion still ensued. So upon taking in all of my other sources, I construed enough data to give me at least a general idea of what this is all about. I see how the Tea Party movement became popular with such strong leaders who are able to rile up crowds and sway audiences to essentially scream out their windows at the top of their lungs, “I’m mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this anymore!” In the Prologue of the Zernike reading, crowd leaders were described as enthusiastic, angry, and convincing in shouting very strong statements. Howard Beale is much the same in his role in ‘Network’; he is definitely angry, convincing to many, and persuasive with his audience to act a certain way. Regardless of whether anybody truly understands what Howard is saying, they eat that shit up. The same could be said of certain Tea Partiers because noted later in the Prologue, Ms. Jodine White, prime Tea Partier example, admitted to thinking that her beliefs contradicted the very essence of what she affiliated herself with in the Tea Party. I do not doubt the power of the Tea Party; it actually started out in the mere hundreds, and grew to a whopping 25% of the country in a matter of a couple years. This movement demonstrates the power of a human voice. It seems a little brainwashing to me because people are blindly joining the Tea Party because strong political figures are for it, the activists have a convincing voice, people want to feel like they’re a part of something powerful, and they are constantly encouraged to gather more followers like cults are going out of style. So my conclusion has come to this: People don’t know their shit. I don’t know my shit. My mom doesn’t know her shit. America doesn’t know its shit. Lord, help us all.