Mt. Shasta Tea Party Patriots - A Dialog

I went to a tea party yesterday.  Not really.  What really happened is that I went to our local Mt. Shasta Physical Therapy Center to lift weights while my partner, John, splashed away in the center swimming pool.  I wasn't at all highly motivated for a physical workout and as I was preparing my IPod for my weekly review of "Gay USA", I found myself fumbling with the arm strap that I have not quite figured out.  A fellow senior athlete was about to commence his routine in the chest press machine when he smiled at me and joked, "These devices are beyond me."

Ron, as he introduced himself, wanted to know what was on the back of my T-shirt.  He could see plainly that the front was emblazoned with the message, "Do I look illegal?"  On the back, as it turns out, is an open-hand with "facebook.com/cuentame" inscribed under it.  "Cuentame" translates from the Spanish roughly as "tell it to me."  Cuentame is an immigrants rights organization that I discovered shortly before John and I traveled to Detroit last summer for the US Social Forum.  I got the shirts to demonstrate my displeasure with the "papers please" legislation that Arizona and Governor Jane Brewer had just then imposed upon people.  As an aside, I understand now that food growers in Arizona this season are in dire straits as large numbers of immigrants with or without papers are deserting the fields if not the entire state.  I mean, even if you were born here 1000 years ago in North America you could be asked time and time again for your birth certificate or whatever.  Suffer Stalin, suffer.  In the meantime, the idea is being floated in Arizona that parolees without jobs could be sent into the fields.  Lacking this, In some places I know prisoners are used this way.  So hang on for that one.

Ron saw immigrants as a definite problem.  I stopped fiddling with my high tech arm strap and got interested.  I shared that I thought the issue of immigrants overrunning the country amounts to a deliberately deployed distraction to keep us from attacking the real problem: the full-scale ripping off of working America by Wall Street and the privatization of the public spaces by the ruling elites.  (What a mouthful.)  At this point Ron told me he was a member of the Tea Party Patriots.  There are different flavors of the genre "Tea Party."  I asked about the Koch brothers and what I had heard about their funding of the Tea Party movement.  At this point Regina, Ron's wife joined our conversation.  Regina had not heard of the Koch brothers and averred that all the funds for the Mt. Shasta Tea Party Patriots come from their own pockets.  The Mt. Shasta branch is an extension of the Redding Tea Party Patriots.

I wanted to know what the members talked about?  I mentioned the Republican House vote to privatize Medicare and transform it into a voucher system that would pay one-third of the actual costs of private health insurance when the bearer of such a document went shopping in the free market.   Ron and Regina had not heard of Representative Paul Ryan or the effort to "reform" Medicare.  Ron said he would be against that.  I also asked them if in their meetings they talked about the debt ceiling talks in which the Republicans were demanding the significant cuts to both Medicare and Social Security.  That information was also new to them.  It was at this point that I was  invited to the Mt. Shasta meetings that are held on Thursday evenings at The Abundant Life Church of the Nazarene.  It's at six in the evening.  I'm not going to make it this week but it's definitely on my list.  Ron assured me that all points of view are welcome.  I must admit I was glad to be having a conversation with people here in our community about real issues.

Still, I was curious to know what the Tea Party Patriots stood for.  Regina gave what seemed to me to be a vague response having to do with the original intent of the US Constitution.  Specifically, it boiled down to this: the government should not be taking care of people.  That was not what the founders intended it to do.  No specific references were given.  But I was told in no uncertain terms, as my mother would say, "People needed to take responsibility for themselves."  Beyond this, the government spends too much money and it is too big.

I will be adding more of my observations tomorrow.