"Tea Parties"

[Silver Scizor]

In America, there have been large gatherings of conservatives in public places called "Tea Parties" named after the Boston Tea Party. At these gatherings, protests are held and local officials speak to support coservative views and to protest the high taxes. After President Obama took office, he introduced many taxes that upset a lot of people, especially the middle class Americans.

I for one am a Republican, and attend these protests. But many people see are non-violent showings as dangerous and want to put us out of view. The President even named the attendees to these protests "Right Wing Extremists", and claimed that we were a threat to national security.

I don't believe this is right, we did nothing wrong, we didn't set anything on fire or hurt anyone. But what do you think about this issue?

 

[Tatile]

If I remember correctly, one of the fundamental basics of America's founding was its freedom.

I can't really talk about the taxes thing, it's not really my place (I believe in taxes if the money is spent correctly, not an MP's pay-per-view or have it going into a software companies deep pockets, but that's another rant), however freedom of speach and the freedom to assemble should be upheld. 'Oh noes' if you don't agree with the reinging government's policy, that's the point of democracy.

From the sounds of it, someone is trying to take advantage of Obama's greenness in office, the latent free of terrorism and generic civil unrest in a bad economic climate and a host of other things, in order to keep 'public order'.

Quite what public order is is another matter. The interests of the masses does not always coincide with the interests of their rulers, and in this I mean not the plebeian, hoi polloi, but the informed that need to be better informed.

It's politics and people will always be caught in the middle, especially when popular opinion is needed as it is now. I imagine if a similar thing happened here twixt Labour and the Tories, there might be such mud-slinging (not that we haven't had enough of it as it is).

Is freedom here be compramised in the interests of security and control? To me it appears as though it might be headed that way (certainly seems that way here) and that's a dangerous path to take.

 

[Lucario454]

Don't you just hate when history repeats itself? > It seems America is in an endless loop of redundancy.
Well I think it's a bit unconstitutinal. All we have to do is a little reasearch and paperwork and we can get a new president. He has no right to say we're threat when we're just protesting. We have the same rights he does.
I say that if he goes any farther than he did we should vote to kick him out. We have rights of speech! If he goes around like the king did in the 1700's we'll be in a deep pit.

 

[RubiX]

In my opinion if they were indeed non-violent then President Obama was out of line. Protests happen everywhere and are an important part of democracy, you're just standing up for what you believe in and I respect that.

 

[Agent Zero]

Don't you just hate when history repeats itself? > It seems America is in an endless loop of redundancy.

LOL.
I love that post. And as a Canadian Tory I say that with the best intentions possible.

Though I think it's hilarious that the left has been protesting for years (even when they're in power) but when the right protests the left freaks out.

 

[baratron]

I think this topic is rather out of date so I'm locking it - start a new thread if you really want to continue the discussion.

It might break your brains if I point out that left-wing Americans are positively right-wing compared to most Europeans. So imagine what we think of right-wing Americans?