Topic: Political Literature
Ron Paul's Tea Party One hopes that the symbolism of Tea Party 2007 will be engraved in American history as deeply as the vandalism of the Boston Tea Party of 1773. It would prove that the liberties secured in our Constitution made revolution without war possible.by Larry Ward
(Libertarian)
Tuesday, December 11, 2007
The Tea Party - The Ron Paul Revolution will be hosting the tea party in your community on this December 16th. Be there no matter where you are. This is big. Presidential candidate Ron Paul says often, that nobody really knows yet, just how big these things are.
It will be a joyous day for those of us who are already turned on to the thrill of freedom that the Ron Paul Revolution is making, not merely into a possibility, but into an inevitability. Ron Paul's liberty message is a seed that has prospered and incubated on the internet, protected from FCC regulations and media bia and censorship. But on this December 16th, it will blossom into a great, public sunflower of liberty.
"This December 16th" is somewhat more than a party of the faithful assembling to congratulate each other- a clique of internet geeks as media would have you believe. Our hope and enthusiasm are founded on universal principles that appeal to the better angels of all men and women of good will when they are able and allowed to hear the freedom message of the Ron Paul campaign; so our enthusiasm to see Ron Paul elected President is contagious. Media will not be able to quarantine the events of this day. We will be heard in spite of media and our enthusiasm will awaken hope and resolve in multitudes of men and women of good will. Our properly euphoric celebration will liberate multitudes from the informational controls of media and the daunting and oppressive sense that any who stand up in defense of liberty and common sense, stand alone and in harms way.
Even as I write on this December 11th, 2007, the Ron Paul Blimp makes is way up the Eastern Sea Board, piercing the darkness of media blackout with the light of the liberty message of the Ron Paul Revolution. The blimp is en route to be in historic Boston, Mass. for the tea party gatherings in that city on Sunday, December 16th of this year of our Lord two thousand and seven. Doubtless, cheers will erupt from the assemblies in Boston and across the nation as internet technology allows audio visual broadcast of the grand moment when the Ron Paul Blimp unloads a tiny bit 'o tea into Boston harbor
And cheers will doubtless erupt as updates are reported on the detonation of the money bomb that the estimable Mr. Trevor Lyman has orchestrated for that day. Mr. Lyman's "This November 5th" campaign produced 4.2 million in typically one hundred dollar contributions to the Ron Paul Campaign fund in one day. www.RonPaul2008.com reports online donations instantaneously, showing them graphically by way of red mercury rising in a thermometer as donations arrive. On November 5th, the mercury rose like a tsunami tide and similar success is anticipated for this December 16th. (I know I've got my C-note earmarked for detonation when I awaken on that Sunday morning.)
Tea Parties will be held in communities across the nation. In my home town of Las Vegas, we're meeting in front of the IRS building with our symbolic tea boxes as reminders that American Patriots dumped tea imported from Britain into Boston Harbor on December 16th of 1773 to declare that they would no longer tolerate the unfair tax on tea. Central to the Ron Paul campaign is the argument that the IRS tax on our incomes is illegal and its revenues not needed to finance the legitimate activities of federal government.
But the most symbolically powerful assembly will be at Boston's historical, Fanuel Hall. It is often opined that America has lost her way. Call it fact, fiction or metaphor as suits you, but the tragedy runs deeper. America has lost her soul. The Ron Paul campaign fights for material prosperity and rightly so. But it is the manufactured forgetfulnesses of our Revolutionary roots that has made us vulnerable to the multitudes of new offices and swarms of officers that harass our liberty and plunder our individual and national, material treasure. Sound money and a sound economy are visible on the horizon of the Ron Paul Revolution. But they are illuminated with a renewed awareness of the moral, spiritual and intellectual roots of our nation's founding.
It should bring us no end of joy that new generations appeal to these roots in their quest to renew American liberty, prestige and prosperity. So this book worm would like to contribute to the depth of the 2007 Tea Party by recalling some of the history that makes things historical, and by calling to mind, the very human nature of the independent men and women who came before us and whose passion for independence and personal liberty gave birth to our nation. The first tea party was somewhat more than a dry historical statistic. Real people risked life, limb and liberty limb to engrave the event so deeply in the national consciousness that it remains accessible to us to this day, as a universally known symbol of our right to repudiate tyranny in any form and establish, through peaceful elections, new government that is respectful of individual liberty and Constitutional law.
Samuel Adams, who was comfortable rubbing shoulders with the hoy ploy like me and leading them in actions that were, shall we say, honorably at variance with the letter of the law, assembled some folks to dress up as Indians and dump tea that was imported from England and punitively taxed by the British, into Boston Harbor. Though to this day, Sam Adams cannot be conclusively fingered as the architect and executor of the event, everybody knows and always has- wink, wink. British Colonial government would have cheerfully placed Mr. Adams and his cohorts in prison for their actions. (And let us note well, that today's Department of Homeland Security would doubtless abduct them without warrant, hold them incommunicado at Guantanamo Bay without benefit of habeas corpus, and try them on Fox News with vague accusations and without benefit of rights to present a defens that are secure in the tragically neglected 6th Amendment.
But Sam Adams was equally comfortable with the upper crust. He was himself, a well read man and a God fearing Calvinist. His family's sound, moral foudations were the cause of financial ruin as his father's annoying press was in the habit of printing material that was embarassing to the ruling establishment and that establishment put him out of business. The father's son, Sam Adams, advised his more respectable cousin, lawyer John Adams, to be out of town for the evening of December 16th and cousin John accommodated by scheduling a visit to Cape Cod without asking too many questions. John Adams, though committed like Dr. Paul, to legal and political action rather than civil disobedience, was entirely able to look the other way. Also, like Ron Paul, the legal and political actions of John Adams were a thorn in the side of the British governors who were the tyrannical establishment of those times, and they would have rejoiced to have grounds to silence Adams if they could find any grounds that might suggest that he participated in planning or execution of the seditious tea party of December 16th, 1773.
So John was away at Falmouth when the tea party occurred and it behooves us because it occasioned the need for the exquisite and enormously literate Mrs. Abigail Adams to write a letter to Mr. Adams, reporting on the event. Therefore, the mixed joy and solemnity of the revolutionary colonists on that occasion are recorded for history in her trenchant letters. The letters were, perhaps redundant since the volume of tea that was dumped was sufficient to remain undissipated as it was carried on the Atlantic tides as far as far away Falmouth within a few days. The sweet fragrance of tea in the sea breeze would have informed Mr. Adams adequately and in due time.
These events are reported by another great woman of American letters, Catherine Drinker Bowen, in her biography of Adams which I recommend highly to any who would like to recall or discover the grandeur of these historical moments during which our nation was conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. The book reports too, on a matter that is extremely relevant to the Tea Party of two thousand seven. Mrs. Bowen's volume brings to life a most extraordinary event that took place at the very Fanuel Hall where Ron Paul Revelers will assemble on this December 16th to announce and promote the Ron Paul Revolution.
In early July of 1776, a breathless horseman arrived in Boston, carrying a freshly printed document that had been published by the Continental Congress at Philadelphia and signed by unanimous consent of the 53, highly respected representatives from the 13 colonies. John and Samuel Adams were among the signators as was Boston's premier employer and entrepeneur, Mr. John Hancock. Rumors about the document's content had ridden ahead of the horseman on the wings of word of mouth, whetting enthusiasm to know the exact words. There being no cell phones, TVs or YouTubes to carry the news, Bostonians assembled at Fanuel Hall to hear the document read aloud. The crowd was too big for the Hall so they assembled in the square in front of the Hall and a local politician (I apologize for not recalling his name) stood on a platform built in front of the hall to read the document alound; and for the first time, Bostonians heard, the Declaration of Independence.
Again, letter's from Abigail Adams to Mr Adams, record the moment for us. The reader, Abigail notes, had difficulty reading some of the ten dollar words. He stumbled, particularly, on the term inalienable- as all of us undoubtedly stumble on our first reading of the Declaration. But the meaning of the words was clear to all and the assembled crowd stood in awed silence to savor every drop of their meaning. A new nation had been born that would defy tyranny and establish government, for the first time in history, to protect individual liberty from the abuses of tyranny.
On this December 16th, we have communications technology which makes it possible to spread news of the magnitude of the signing of the Declaration of Independence into every living room in America and indeed around the globe, with the electronic rapidity of light. One tragedy of recent decades is that this technology has been monopolized by special interests whose prosperity is rooted in the erosions of American liberty and sustained by using communications technology to conceal from the people, ideas and articulations, facts and events that might encourage and empower people to reclaim their liberty and restore the land of the free and the home of the brave. The Ron Paul Presidential campaign and its message are events of this liberating kind and the establishment is scared stiff and zealous in their efforts to keep word of the revolution from the general population, or, where the man and the messeage cannot be silenced, pervert them into nonesense with ad hominem attacks.
So, as in 1776, many will hear proclamation of the Ron Paul Revolution for the first time on this December 16th, reverberating from the historical ground of Fanuel Hall and from similar gatherings across the nation. I hope these few details about Fanuel Hall's history will make folks who peaceably assemble there for Tea Party 2007, more sensitive to the presence of the ghosts of American history who will be among them, encouraging and applauding their resolve that our nation shall have a new birth of freedom and that the nation that their passion and labor brought into this world shall not perish from the earth- that it shall not be aborted by the nightmare of history in two, short centuries.
Larry Ward Las Vegas, Nevada Tuesday- Nov 11, 2007
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