First Tea Party was about real issues

As a history teacher, I am a bit bewildered by this whole TEA party movement. The abbreviation may make a great acronym, but, historically speaking, it seems there is little similarity between the real tea party in Boston harbor in December 1773, and this new so-called movement now.

In 1773, colonists disguised as Indians crept aboard private ships and dumped the property of a private company into the murky waters of Boston harbor.

They did it to protest the imposition of taxes upon them by a distant Parliament in which they were not represented and to which they could not address their grievances. As these taxes were imposed on the colonies to pay for the expense of protecting them during the French and Indian War, one could argue quite easily that these were legitimate taxes imposed albeit somewhat illegitimately upon a people who enjoyed the protection of the British government and military without seeing the need to pay for that protection.

It was the rather nasty behavior of King George III and his soldiers representing him that really led us to see that our English brethren no longer regarded us as equal partners in the great trade and social experiment that was British North America. The tax issue itself was rather secondary to the problem of non-representation.

In modern American life there is no free lunch. Not in restaurants, not in business and not in organized governments.

Taxes are the way we pay for our lunches whether they come in the form of wars, roads, schools or health care. Someone must pay, and democratic governments rely on the consent of the governed to impose taxes to pay for necessary functions of government. We are a democratic nation (small d) structured on a republican form of government. We govern ourselves through our representatives. There is no distant and oppressive Parliament imposing its will upon us. Quite literally, we are the government. We renew that fact each November. To equate our Congress with the British Parliament of 1773 is not only wrong, it is just downright silly. The main complaint we had in 1773 (non-representation) simply does not exist in 2009.

Modern TEA Party folks have every right to assemble and express their grievances to the government they themselves helped elect. They do not have to dress up as Indians, but can gather in a public park, organize and enjoy wonderful refreshments while they complain about how rough things are.

And things are rough. Much is needed to repair the unbridled and unregulated corruption in the private sector that has plunged us into this fix. Bernie Madoff was not a government official. The folks at Dan River Inc. and GM and AIG were not parliamentarians ready to do us in as a people. They were private individuals on the make.

I and many others have no qualms at all with government officials, whom we elect, stepping in and suggesting responsible actions to turn around the mess that many among us caused. It seems to me, that was what the election of 2008 was all about. Everyone from Cicero to George Washington to even Jefferson Davis will affirm a legitimate government’s right to tax its people. Paying taxes is, in fact, the civic duty of each citizen. I don’t like to pay taxes especially, but with privileges, as my mother used to say, come responsibilities.

To equate the present actions of a freely elected administration with tyranny and oppression is bothersome to me, as it is simply wrong. Differences in opinion, as Thomas Jefferson once noted, are not differences in principle. The principle we quite rightly operate upon is government which articulates the will of the people expressed through free election. A rather large majority voted for change in 2008; that’s what we are getting, I hope.

It behooves us all to pause for a while and see if it works before we don our headdresses and board ships to toss our own tea into the churning waters of some ill-adapted metaphorical Boston harbor.

Dixon is a resident of Chatham.