Tallahassee Tax Day Tea Party -- Report

Tallahassee's Tax Day Tea Party took place today at 5pm in front of the old capitol. I spent the early part of the day getting my sign ready. Not particularly clever or artistic, but it said what I wanted to say. (Clicking on the pictures will take you to my Webshots album where there are more pics.)



I got there about 4:30pm, and had some trouble finding a parking spot in Klemen Plaza. Most of that was probably due to the legislature being in session. There were a number of fellow protestors, though, who rode the elevator up with me. By the time I got up the hill to the front of the capitol, there was already a good sized crowd. I took a few pictures from the north end of the lawn, and then moved through the crowd getting video. I'm not an expert on these things, but I'm estimating the crowd at 1200-1500 people.









The views on display were mostly concerned with economic issues: the bailouts, government spending, debt, socialism. A few of the signs mentioned Obama by name indicating that some see the issue in partisan terms, even though the bailouts were already in place when Obama took office. True, he's trying to take government spending to a whole new level, but it's a difference of degree rather than kind. The advantage of having Obama as president is that so many conservatives have suddenly remembered that they are opposed to big government. It's like the past eight years were a wild Saturday night, but now it's Sunday and they're back in church.

Yet I digress. Some of the signs...

Basic common sense: "You can't borrow your way out of debt. You can't spend your way to wealth. So how do you figure government can do it?"




Anarchists: I didn't catch the significance of the 'A' when I first saw this sign.




A Culpeper Minutemen flag with the coiled rattlesnake. There were quite a few "Don't Tread on Me" flags, and one guy was handing out small rubber snakes to the kids.




View from the south end of the lawn:



More signage:

An exremist showed up. I spotted him easily by his sign.




This one was pretty clever, although I would say that Obama's policies, so far, have more in common with fascism.




Obamanomics: It's similar to compassionate conservatism only moreso.




I'm not greedy. I'd settle for a billion.




I like her stimulus plan: A hot cup of tea, a beautiful girl, and freedom!




A surprise appearance by Johnny Depp.




Uncle Sam was there.



Part of a speech by a local radio personality named Preston Scott. Sorry for the lousy color.



The crowd was enthusiastic and united in their opposition to government spending, but philosophically very mixed. Whether these protests can serve as a basis for reducing the size of government, or whether they can even slow it down, remains to be seen.

Screw it indeed!

Now, here's a campaign I can get behind. (HT: Instapundit) I can just see the religious conservatives sputtering with rage over this one. They will surely fail to get the point, because they've successfully convinced themselves that what they are truly worried about are the poor unborn children. What really bothers them is that people are out there fornicating right and left, and not having to suffer for it. How can we know that there is a god if people don't suffer when they sin?

"Come with me if you want to live."

Some religious conservatives want desperately to cast the current war as a struggle between Islam and Christianity. It is not. It is a struggle between Islam and liberalism (using 'liberalism' in its original meaning, not as a synonym for socialism). Liberalism has two great enemies: socialism in all its variants (fascism, marxism, democratic socialism, etc); and theocracy in all its variants (islamist, christian fundamentalist, etc).

In fact, properly understood, socialism is an outgrowth of Christianity. Its early proponents were explicitly Christian. Marx, ethnically Jewish but raised as a Christian, took the Christian ethics of self-sacrifice and gave them a pseudo-scientific base. So it's not surprising to see today's socialists acting like early Christians with their suicidal pacificism.

It is surprising, however, to see people who call themselves Christians ignoring the fact that Jesus was a pacifist who believed in forgiving one's enemies and turning the other cheek. The only time he ever raised his hand in anger was against a group of businessmen. Blessed were the poor, the sick, the meek, because they would find happiness in Heaven. The rich, however, would find it nearly impossible to get there. "Give your money to the poor and follow me." Is this what the religious conservatives believe? Not exactly. They practice a watered down form of Christianity, one which thinks this world is a Good Thing, rather than a steeped-in-sin, vale of tears--something to be enjoyed, rather than something to be resisted and overcome. In other words, they practice a liberalized form of Christianity, which has made its peace with capitalism and the pursuit of happiness.

Unfortunately, some of them think they can have their pursuit of happiness and their theocracy too. The islamists are not the only ones with medievalist fantasies, they are just more consistent and more radical. By envisioning the current war as a new crusade of Christianity against Islam, modern Christians are trying to reach back to the medieval period of Christian history. They don't want the Early Christian period, which was marked by the monastic movement and the rejection of all worldly concerns. It smacks too much of modern nihilism. Instead, they look back on the Battle of Tours, which marked the beginnings of a more wordly form of Christianity. When the Christians stopped the onslaught of Islam in 732 AD, they announced to the world that they would no longer turn the other cheek. They would fight, and they would martial the militant forces of the West to serve God. It was the beginning of the end for the Dark Ages, and it carried with it the beginning of the end for the practice of pure Christianity.

As Christianity attempted to control the world, it became worldly. The Church put its moral weight behind kings, and became a tool of state. It provided the state with learned men to make it more efficient. Those learned men would eventually remove it from the center of the universe and rip it assunder. Finally, tired of its armed theological battles, they would build a wall between it and the state, shrinking its sphere to the private world where it could be preserved only by compartmentalizing it, and adhering to it in a non-consuming, watered down sort of way.

Why?

Because Christianity is incompatible with life in this world. If society embraces life, it must eventually reject Christianity. If it embraces Christianity, it must eventually reject life. The mixture is unstable. It is either headed one way or the other.

It is good that Christians want to fight the war against the islamists. It is good that they want to preserve western civilization. They should understand, though, that what makes the west civilized is its love of this world. To love this world is an essentially irreligious viewpoint. It is certainly not Christian. It is not Islamic. It harks back to the Greeks and Romans. It is their gift to us, rediscovered in the Renaissance, and given fruition in the Enlightenment. Their legacy is what we are fighting for: science, individualism, ethical egoism, constitutionalism, rule of law, and humanism. That is what the islamists hate, and that is what we must preserve if we want to live.