The Tea Party Protests

If you've been reading along - either here or at the original Writing Spectacle - then you know I don't talk politics. Thank my mother for that, since she taught me there are three things you don't talk about in polite society: religion, sex and politics.

However, I don't think this issue is as much about politics as it is about citizens having their say about the government they elected.

If you haven't heard about the Tea Party Protests planned for today, here are a couple links to read:

Anti-Tax Tea Party Protests Expected - FOX News
The Wall Street Journal

From what I understand, it's a grassroots movement to protest the way the government is taking our tax dollars and throwing them like confetti at anyone who claims to need money.

I expect we'll hear a bit about this on the news today - probably a great deal of positive on the part of Fox, and a great deal of negative from MSNBC, with a smattering of both out of the other news networks. Personally, I think it's a positive thing when the citizens stand up to have their voices heard. In these economic times, when the average Joe is feeling guilty about spending money to take a vacation, the government should be held to some standard of fiscal responsibility.

It's like what we do here at the Sanderson household. Vacation? The last one we took was a three day trip to Denver in the summer of '07. It wasn't fancy. It sure as hell wasn't expensive. But we made a choice years ago that we were going to be debt-free, and we are. It took some hard choices, and some living well below our means, but we did it. If the government was half as careful with the money taxpayers entrust to them, this economic mess wouldn't be nearly as devastating as it promises to become.

When Joe Citizen doesn't have enough money to pay his mortgage, the government shouldn't be taxing the hell out of him to send money to ANY other country. And don't get me started on the grants for research into weird ass things. We don't need to fund that right now. We need to get stable, and once this country is back on its financial feet, our elected officials need to think about where every penny is going so we never get into this mess again.

Hence, the protests.

I don't know what you think about all this, but whatever side of the debate you fall on, you have to agree that America was built with the notion that every citizen has a say in the body that governs him. This is the concretization of that idea.

Personally, I hope the turnout is huge.