Opinion - Whatcom View

POSTED: Friday, Aug. 14, 2009

Tea Party members hoping to reverse federal deficit spending

The Bellingham Tea Party is one of hundreds of similar organizations that have sprung up in cities all over the country. Of course, the name "Tea Party" is a historical reference to the original Boston Tea Party, in which a handful of colonists, thinly disguised as Mohawk Indians, crept onto British ships under cover of darkness, and dumped a load of tea into Boston Harbor to protest the high taxation and oppressiveness of the British crown.

Modern day tea partiers, dressed up as regular Americans, have lined the streets carrying American flags and hand-lettered signs in broad daylight and chatted and waved at passing motorists to protest the high taxation and oppressiveness of the U.S. federal government. To the best of my knowledge, the millions of attendees at the thousands of Tea Party events nationwide in the last year have totaled less collateral damage than the original 1773 event.

More recently, we have achieved notoriety by attending town hall meetings to voice our opposition to more government control of our presently (or formerly) private affairs. For this, our opposition has characterized us as "angry mobs" and our actions as disruptive. I have no doubt that tempers will flare when you put groups of people having fundamentally different ideologies together in the same room, especially when the main speaker takes a particular side. Incidentally, that is not how it worked out at the town halls hosted by Rep. Rick Larsen. I think everyone was civil, but the discussion was spirited at times. We did not set out to disrupt the meeting, and I do not think any disruption occurred (at least by us).

What is The Bellingham Tea Party, anyway? We started as a very loosely organized group, to promote a single event - the April 15 tax day tea party. With the success of that event, we started to think about ongoing educational programs, and other events. In order to handle tax issues properly and to make it easier to do business, we have just become a non-profit organization: Whatcom County Citizens for Freedom (WCCF). We are locally organized and locally funded. All of our contributions come from small business and individuals from in and around Whatcom and Skagit counties.

The people I have talked to are not right-wing extremists. All of the individuals I have met are "normal" Americans with families, careers, and hobbies. Most of them have never attended a political rally, or even a town hall or a city council meeting. Many have told me that they would "rather not be doing this." As a group, I think we would rather be at home with our families, or working in our yards, and not taking time off work. We have always assumed that we elected representatives to protect and uphold the Constitution on our behalf. It is only when our representatives appear to be doing the exact opposite that we become concerned, and make the hard decision to get personally involved. The Bellingham Tea Party mission is to reverse deficit spending and the concentration of power in central government, in order to preserve states' rights and individual liberty for future generations.

The next big event is a multimedia presentation on Sept. 11 at Mount Baker Theatre called "We the People," in which we plan to commemorate the Sept. 11 attacks, and remember the people who lost their lives and family members, as well as those who stepped up to help at a time of great need. We also hope to inspire a new sense of national pride and promote the founding principles of the United States of America. Tickets are $7 from Mount Baker Theatre. For more information, please visit our Web site at bhamteaparty.blogspot.com.

Karl Uppiano is a software engineer from Ferndale and a self-described recent, and reluctant, "classical liberal" activist.