Yet, with all of the anger boiling over at the teabagger protests, none of it seems to be aimed at the two wars in progress. "In progress" are very important words when it comes to protests.
The Vietnam War and the Civil Rights movements were in progress when people protested in the '60s and '70s. Other than the two wars, the only thing that has been in progress since the Tea Party movements began have been the Tea Party protests.
It's true that people have lost jobs and the deficit is sky high, but that was true in 2008. From the middle of 2001 until January of 2009, hundreds of thousands of jobs were being shed per month. That was in progress at that time, yet no Tea Party protests of note were taking place.
The US deficit began to rise in 2001. The Tea Party wanted to stop the "out of control spending" of President Obama and the Democratic Congress. They even promised to use impeachment, if necessary.
The teabaggers have claimed that Americans are losing their freedoms, but can point to no specific freedom which has been lost.
They complain about taxes, yet ride along government built and government maintained interstate highways to get to their protests. They possibly fly to those protests in jets protected, in part, by the federally operated Department of Homeland Security and, in part, by the Federal Aviation Administration.
Some have brought guns to their rallies to protest that their guns have been taken from them.
The protests of the 60s were brought on by the culmination of unjust treatment of people within the borders of what was then The United States or the growing deaths of young men who were being forcefully given the choice to go to the jungles of Southeast Asia or to jail. They were organic in nature. Speakers were not paid performers, but angry members of the protests. They were protesting the fact that the president and the Congress were not protecting them in the spirit of The Constitution. They were not legislating in accordance to the Constitution, especially the 14th Amendment. States were, indeed, making laws which abridged "the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States" . They were also depriving people "of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law"; and they were still attempting to deny people within their jurisdictions "the equal protection of the laws."
If one reads the Constitution, one will note that most of the articles and amendments spell out ways in which citizens of America should be protected, either from the federal government or from the state government. The Constitution is not a document which lists ways in which state governments would be protected from the federal government and it certainly is not a list of ways to deny rights to citizens - human being citizens, that is.
It's for this reason that the teabaggers, in their attempt to utilize a tool which was used earlier by those who marched in favor of equality and peace and in favor of government intervention to implement equality and peace, have defiled that tool.
While the protestors of the 60s were complaining that the government was not doing enough to "promote the general welfare", one reason given for writing The Constitution, at their protests, teabaggers complain that the government should stop trying to "promote the general welfare".
There were states that, in the 1960s, were using what were called Jim Crowe laws to justify squelching the rights of African Americans to go into places into which anyone who was not African American could go, like privately owned restaurants, and interfering with the rights of many, especially African Americans, to vote. Today, teabaggers are protesting in favor of the rights of private business owners to decide not to hire people whose skin or ethnicity is not what they'd like them to be and to increase the difficulty in voting that they feel should be faced by certain segments of American society, especially African Americans and people of Hispanic decent.
To paraphrase Rand Paul, Republican Senator from Kentucky, the government has no right to force restaurant owners to serve Black customers if the restaurant owners don't want to serve Black customers. Paul claims that, when people learn that a certain restaurant is practicing this kind of racism, people will stop frequenting the restaurant and the restaurant will fail.
First of all, any restaurant that was still in business in the 1960s which was allowed, via Jim Crowe laws, to deny service to African Americans was still in business because their customers either didn't mind that African Americans were not served or they outright liked the idea. These restaurants remained in business because it was obvious that their customer base was OK with their segregationist policies.
Secondly, in speaking of restaurants, while the suggestion made by Rand Paul is absurd, it, at least, has some potential to work. When speaking of voting, would Paul have suggested that people would no longer vote in Kentucky if Kentucky used unethical methods to keep African Americans and Hispanics from voting? As unlikely as the restaurant scenario would be, the voting scenario would prove entirely absurd.
Yet, allowing states to make it difficult for Hispanics or Blacks to vote is a "state's right" in which the federal government should not be concerned in the eyes of teabaggers.
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