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Let’s face it. The teabaggers Just Don’t Get It. Right now, the Founding Fathers are all facepalming in their graves. And they’ve never heard of the double-entendres and sexual references that have us snickering today. And I’m not even addressing the racism or fascism or any of the other half-baked right-wing nonsense we’re seeing at today’s Teabaggings.
So let’s go over junior high school history again…
Yes, everyone in the Colonies was pissed off about taxes. That’s about the only thing today’s Teabaggers got right, but they failed to grasp why they were pissed off. The situation was that first, the tea taxes were obnoxiously high, and second, they were used to pay for a military occupation of the Colonies. If you were in Boston or one of the other towns in the Colonies in 1773, you’d see British soldiers in the streets. The situation was kind of like Baghdad today - gee, you think people would be a little resentful about being forced to fork over money to pay for armed troops to harass them? That’s why there was a lot of smugglers. The tea laws were about as well-respected as Prohibition was, which is to say hardly at all.
But that isn’t what set off the Boston Tea Party. What happened was that the British East India Company, the mega-corporation of mega-corporations of the 18th century, ended up with a large surplus of tea that they wanted to get rid of. They sent their lobbyists to London, pulled some strings and greased some palms in Parliament, and got a law passed exempting them alone from the taxes that everyone else was expected to pay. By doing this, they could dump their tea on the American markets at prices far below what others could charge. In other words, they pulled a Walmart. They were about to undercut every mom-and-pop tea business in the Colonies, and as you may guess, that made a lot of people very unhappy.
They held huge meetings, petitioned the governor to send the East India Company’s ships away and refuse to allow them to unload their cargo. The governor repeatedly refused - the East India Company lobbyists had bought him too.
After a few screaming matches in Boston’s meeting halls, the Sons of Liberty marched over to the ships and dumped their cargo into the harbor. This was a rather significant act of property damage - the tea was worth close to a million dollars in today’s money. This pissed off the British government so much that they passed the Coercive Acts, demanded that Boston repay the value of the destroyed tea, and sent warships to blockade Boston Harbor. This caused more escalations - as a result, the first Continental Congress was convened, and before long, colonists and British soldiers were pointing muskets at each other and fighting a full-scale war.
The point is that if you want to bring up the Boston Tea Party and not have people snicker at you, you’d better be breaking things. The equivalent act today would be something like burning down a Wal-Mart, or going to a port and dumping entire shipping containers of imported Chinese junk into the water. If you’re too chickenshit to cause millions of dollars of property damage, you’re not holding a true Tea Party!
Personally, I don't think the wingnuts have the guts...
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