Undoctrination.org

When my daughter started junior college last year, I told her to expect to be force-fed massive doses of unmitigated liberalism by her teachers. And we weren’t disappointed. Case in point: out of about two-dozen essays in her writing-class text book, maybe three wouldn’t have qualified as left-wing whine-fests. And the course professor fit the mold nicely. Early on, she gave the students an assignment requiring them to write about a time they’d been stereotyped, and to offer up refutations of said stereotypes. Knowing what the instructor was looking for by way of the undertones of the example essays, my daughter was miffed. The way she put it: “I like being a female. It works to my advantage more often than it doesn’t.”  (Bless her heart. Pretty girls get to say things like that.) If she’d been stereotyped as a female, she didn’t remember it. Or it didn’t faze her, anyway. (And she’s even a blonde.)

Ah, but she HAD been stereotyped, and I reminded her of it. No, it wasn’t what the professor had in mind, but it conformed to the assignment guidelines nonetheless. So, my daughter wrote, I edited (tutors were allowed), and together we designed a paper that would put the good instructor into conflict with herself when it came time to hand out grades. The following is the essay she handed in. In light of recent events, I’d have to say it turned out to be rather timely.

Revelations 4/15

“On April 15th of last year, a couple of my friends invited me to the Tax Day Tea Party at the Liberty Memorial in Kansas City. I had a lot of fun with some friendly people, and I signed on for future events. I became a tea-partier, in other words. Since then, though, I have heard terrible things said about me and the others in this group. Politicians have called us Nazis; famous actors have called us mentally ill; political pundits on TV and in the newspapers say we are racists and full of hatred. Such charges against tea party attendees are based not in substance, but in ignorance.

I watched television after I came home from the tax day event that night, and I heard actress Jeneane Garofalo tell a nodding Keith Olbermann on his show that the tea party attendees were all racists, and that they used their purported disdain for high taxes and runaway government-spending as a cover for their hatred for blacks and immigrants. This may have been news to the African-Americans and other minorities who attended the rally in Kansas City and similar events around the country. Although Ms. Garofalo claims that tea parties are a result of some new white power movement, every race is welcome at these events, every race comes, and race isn’t even an issue; I would bet few if any attendees even think about such ridiculous things. We are all just people, and people who share similar concerns about our country. No one there cares what anybody else’s race is. If they do, their prejudices are unwelcome.

I will admit, however, that the protesters at these rallies are mostly white. The political opposition loves to point that out, as if any gathering of that race must be inherently evil, or that white people have no right to gather and voice an opinion. If one of these racially-minded accusers were to go to a tea party, that person would be hard-pressed to hear a single racially-insensitive word uttered. The reason the gatherings are mostly white is that minorities have been made to believe the culture of personal liberty and free-market capitalism, which tea partiers espouse, is somehow racist. Nothing could be further from the truth.

But if we are a bunch of racists, it’s not our fault, according to Ms. Garofalo. Tea party goers are afflicted by certain mental conditions. As a female, I, like the minorities who have attended tea parties, suffer from Stockholm syndrome. In other words, we are prisoners who have fallen in love with our captors: white males. (Ms. Garofalo’s got me there. I love my husband, and he’s a white male.) The African-Americans and Hispanics who share the beliefs of other tea party attendees must be mental cases. But with white men, she explains, it is something more substantial. They suffer from what she calls “limbic brain disorder,” in which, as she asserts, the limbic brain presses against the frontal lobe, causing the victim to disagree with progressive social policy and to harbor hatred for anyone who is not white. I’m sure she has the studies to back this up, but until she produces them, I’ll have to disagree with her on that point. I suspect most insane people don’t know they’re insane, but, still, I’m pretty sure my friends and I are not.

The brilliant actress is not alone in her enlightened thinking, either. The Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, made a derogatory comment about tea party attendees being well-dressed. First of all, when did dressing nicely become a thing to be ashamed of? It doesn’t matter. At the tea party I went to, I saw every manner of dress one could imagine. Some wore suits and ties, some wore old work clothes; many had designer jeans, a few were clad in worn out trousers; a couple of guys sported Harley jackets, others donned sports jackets. Mostly, though, it was casual to less-than-casual. I have to wonder where this stuff comes from.

Maybe Ms. Pelosi acquired her information from the same source as her fellow politicians who derided tea party goers as being a bunch of misguided senior citizens, and who made jokes about the average age at the events. I can account for the rally I attended, and, yes, I saw senior citizens there, but I also saw children. I saw teenagers and college students, too. In fact, the rally at the Liberty Memorial was organized by a 21-year-old girl from William Jewell College. I saw tattoos, I saw nose piercings, and I saw long-haired rockers. I doubt there was an age between infant and eighty that wasn’t represented.

But tea partiers, as one knows from watching the cable networks, are shipped in by corporate interests; they are, in effect, compensated protesters, so it doesn’t really matter what their age is or from what walk of life they come. This is another accusation that issues from the mouths of Keith Olbermann and Nancy Pelosi and just about every other politician or pundit who wants certain political philosophies to go away—and it has no basis in reality whatsoever. As I mentioned previously, the rally at the Liberty Memorial was organized by one person—a college girl who obviously suffers from Stockholm Syndrome. All tea parties to date have been put together by private citizens. Sometimes it may be done under the name of an organization, but always a grassroots organization of friends and neighbors whose activities are open for public scrutiny. And for some reason, the folks who in fact use fleets of buses to collect the homeless and unemployed to bolster their numbers at political events are the ones who point fingers at the tea parties when attendees show up on buses—as if that were proof of some corporate conspiracy. From their point of view, it’s understandable that they would think that. People just get together, though, and rent buses to ride together to tea party rallies. No detractor has yet been able to show evidence of any corporation organizing one of these events, secretly or otherwise.

Keith Olbermann told Ms. Garofalo that tea party people were potentially dangerous and might hurt somebody. Puh-lease. (And this coming from a twice-accused stalker of co-workers.) The only physical incident to take place at a tea party was when an opposition protester across the street came over and bit the finger off an old man who disagreed with him. (The finger was collected and reattached.) The friendliest people you could ever hope to meet are to be found at tea party rallies. They’re not the ones demolishing storefronts in Seattle, vandalizing property in Copenhagen, or tearing up businesses in Philadelphia. And no trash will be left behind.

A man angry with the government flew a plane into an IRS building recently, and before the dust had settled, news personalities attempted to link him with the tea party movement. As it turned out, not only had he never attended any of the events, but he was a Communist—the antithesis of the tea party philosophy.

I’ve heard a lot of criticisms of tea parties and the people who attend them, but none that are rooted in anything resembling substance. Over the past few months, I’ve also heard several African-Americans talk about their experiences at the rallies, and I’ve heard their frustration at being mischaracterized as deluded Uncle Toms or Oreos or whatever. Fear of what we don’t understand, though, and the casting of baseless aspersions that comes with it, will always be part of the human condition. We can handle it.”

Maybe the National Association for the Perpetual Suppression of African Americans would like to hold a flame to THAT pipe-full and inhale it. Give the teacher credit for doing the right thing with the grade, by the way. It must’ve been hard.

Glenn Kinyon, Staff Writer