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Tea Party enthusiasts and their New Conservative Neanderthal Party (NCNP) pals are gathering their anger as tax day approaches and I’m sure the patriots among them will be saying the usual stuff about the need for small government and personal liberty and not being tread upon by the boogey man.

For the past four or five years I’ve written columns about the “Rebellion to Stay the Same” and after another year of listening to folks go on about limited government and constitutional rights, free markets and the loss of personal freedoms and liberties I haven’t changed my terminology for the movement.

The “Rebellion to Stay the Same” continues. I still encourage progressive-minded folks to mingle with those who seem bent on protecting the rich at the expense of the poor. Visit with Tea Party’ers and spend some time asking them why they believe what they do. Ask them to talk in concrete terms, not rhetoric. Be polite and civil, like all members of the National Union of Friendly Americans (NUFA) are.

 Don’t butt in when a Tea Party member repeats something exactly like Michelle Bachmann or Ron Paul might. Let them say their peace and then ask them questions on how the big problems of the world might be solved with hollow statements and few facts about the world as it really exists, a great big blue ball of energy moving in nearly seven billion directions at once.

It’s impossible to simplify the complex nature of being human by spouting off about the need to reclaim freedom and liberty and our constitutional rights that have been ignored by “bad guys intent on taking over our lives and eliminating the free market system.”

In my view the post World War II free market world has made the people of the world more shopper than citizen. Blind consumerism and blind faith in a mythical America has removed Main Street America from under our noses. We’ve all been witness to the suburbanization and homogenization of this nation, the WalMart-ization, grand social experiments of a nearly unregulated free market. The sad thing is that we’ve all played a part in the subtle takeover, simply by acting like cattle as we try to buy our way to happiness. If you ask me, Big Brother doesn’t come in the form of an authoritarian political leadership but in the form of unregulated free enterprise that has no concern over the health and welfare of its customers other than they not die too fast and fall out of the cycle of consumerism.

It’s all about the bottom line. Forget any altruistic notions about the economy unless you make eyeglasses or fake knees.
There is little doubt that the need to dredge up the cheapest possible prices and largest profits has directly led to the abandonment of the American worker and the American manufacturing and agriculture base.
The democracy has become the Economocracy if you really want to get down to nuts and bolts.

When people say “Don’t Tread On Me” all I can say is Wall Street greed and corporate singlemindedness and devotion to the bottom line rather than social good has already put the boot to your beliefs. Complain all you want about the undue influence of government in our lives and I’ll turn around and tell you that the silent killer of our freedoms has been the fact that we’ve allowed our economy to migrate anywhere it needs in order to turn up the profits.

And we still call this a democracy. Perhaps someday we’ll all work for firms like Google or Facebook, where the only form of production I can see is allowing people access to the near infinite world of the Internet. There are no widgets being produced there, no hard productive currency so to speak, only access to those goods and services that exist out in the wider world. Advertisers clamor for that access to you. Eventually we won’t leave our homes for anything. All goods and services, maybe even our educational system, will be done on line sponsored by Google and Facebook.

What is produced is access.
Seems like an odd economic balloon that has an exterior but no interior other than air.
Mingle with believers of these mistaken notions. Be polite. But when someone says “I want my freedoms back” or “No more taxation” just pose a question that asks how we as a society are supposed to pay for all of our shared resources like schools and water systems and parks and roads—-and the military--when nobody wants to contribute any cash to the cause.
The rhetoric of freedom can be hollow when it doesn’t include the shared responsibilities that come with living in a free society of 312 million people. We all live together. Figuring out how to be our brother’s keeper and keeping the schools open gets lost in the rhetoric of the uninformed.