Let’s just be clear. I am about as politically liberal and left as we can get. I believe in the rights and equality of everybody, from fair wages for all jobs, to understanding that immigrants are and always have been the backbone of our country, that gays should be able to marry their ‘true’ loves just as much as we marry (and then divorce and then marry and then divorce) our hetero ‘true’ loves, and that we all have the ability to go to school, or the doctor.
Let’s also be clear that I don’t watch or read the news. But! I still have opinions. Gut opinions taken from snippets of hallways conversations, snatches of news radio during my commute, and general beliefs of what’s right and wrong.
On more enlightened days (yes, more enlightened), I feel sympathy for the Tea Party. With catch phrases like “take back America” or “restoring honor”, appropriating the name “Tea Party”, referring to the reason America became its own country by refusing to be ruled ragged by a distended government. I certainly can’t argue with reasons surrounding the creation of America.
But that doesn’t explain my sympathy for them.
IF I had ever been privileged to have everything reserved for me or handed to me, I, too, would be upset when those entitlements started going away. I, too, would imagine I felt the jaws of discrimination if I didn’t automatically receive deference, secure the best paid jobs, preferred credit coupled with the lowest loan rates, the exclusive neighborhoods and the best schools with degreed teachers, so that we could continue to promulgate. If my historically guaranteed lifestyle, passed down from generations for hundreds of years (say, since early America when one massacred native peoples to get what one wanted) started to change, started to deteriorate before my eyes, while other cultures started to improve significantly, I’d say ‘being a white male just doesn’t instill the same reverence it used to!’
Goddamn diversification!
Fuck equal rights!
As more and more minorities rise to be political and professional contenders, a Black President, a Hispanic Supreme Court Judge, three powerful women tasked with mopping up the financial industry…where does that leave the poor white man, who assumed himself to be much like a king or queen with divine right, the chosen ones, and who has complacently taken for granted that the future would never change?
Why, it’s just not fair! It’s not fair to force everyone to compete, to share, to wait, to prove themselves. How dare the women and minorities of this country try to change the status quo! What was wrong with it?! Everything was perfect before everybody wanted their voices to be heard.
The question is: Perfect for whom?
And so the tea party’ers sully the historical moments that triggered our fair (yet, imperfect) country, by wanting to reinstate their ideals, which foster their lifestyles. But we, as a nation, have come much too far to go back. So, tea baggers, good luck with that. I’ll take my tea. Black.
Taul, a rant 
Got something to add?