Tag Archives: BLM

What Would Republicans Have Thought of the Boston Tea Party?

I mean, it WAS a Tea Party. That’s good. They were protesting TAXES! Yaay! And everyone dressed up as Indians so they were demonstrating political incorrectness AND pushing blame onto a troublesome minority at the same time. Great, a twofer! Come on, what’s not to like?
Well, hold on a minute. What about the violence part? I mean, they destroyed somebody else’s PRIVATE PROPERTY. You know tea doesn’t grow on trees (well, bushes), and it came on a boat all the way from China or India or someplace far away and those sailors had to go through storms and stuff and that cost somebody a WHOLE LOT OF MONEY and those violent protesters just threw it into the harbor! What if the owner didn’t have enough insurance? Or it didn’t cover acts of war or insurrection—and you know that’s what the insurance company would say, even if it was “Indians” who did it.
AND, even worse, they were protesting the legal actions of their OWN GOVERNMENT. It wasn’t that a few rogue tax collectors were out of control and giving a bad name to all the good tax collectors, it was the King and his whole government who raised the taxes! Gosh, you can’t take to the streets (or docks) to protest your own government, you should SUPPORT your government. No matter what. And if you don’t like it, just leave. God Save the King and all that (you DO stand up when they play that tune, don’t you?).
Gosh, what’s a good Republican to think? People with a just grievance but who are both protesting against the government AND destroying private property! Republican heads are spinning. We hate taxes but we hate violent protests against the government too! Where are my cognitive dissonance pills? I know, if the violent protest involves white people upset about money, it’s good and I’ll name a wing of my party after it. If it’s dark-skinned people upset about being beaten and murdered, it’s bad, and I can go on happily ignoring whose knee was on whose neck.

Erasing History


So pulling down the statues of Confederate leaders is “erasing history,” meaning we want to hide the truth about the past, let it be lost and forgotten in the mists of time, cover it up and bury it in the litter box. Well, that would be bad, right? Same thing as Stalin airbrushing his latest enemies out of official pictures in textbooks and news archives (some of those pics got pretty empty over the years). We can’t pretend stuff didn’t happen. We need to remember all the dumbass things we did so we don’t do them again (didn’t somebody say something like that?).
And of course, teaching stuff in school and writing about it in books doesn’t count, because who the heck pays attention in school or reads books? Maybe a short YouTube video… But what we really need are STATUES! Yeah, every government building should have a bronze, bigger-than-life-sized fertilizer truck with Tim McVeigh stepping out of the cab so we remember not to blow people up (and government employees remember to keep an eye peeled). Schools should all have statues at their entrance of Dylan and Eric with their trench coats and weapons ready to rock and roll—or another child-murderer of their choice (oh so many to pick from)—so we know not to kill kids.
Really? No, not really. Confederate sympathizers and apologizers, as well as actual sane people, know very well that we don’t put up statues of despicable things we need to remember, we put up statues of people and events we LIKE and respect and celebrate. And of course they DO love and celebrate the leaders of the Confederacy, cuz they told that darn Federal gummint where they could go stick their anti-slave talk. Nobody was gonna slave-shame THEM. And THAT’S the problem, a lot more than the statues themselves. Too many people still today don’t really have a problem with what happened in the slave-holding states back then and what is happening to the descendants of those slaves here today.
And for those of you who are limbering up your typing fingers to reply that the Civil War wasn’t about slavery, it was about states’ rights, read the various Confederate States’ declarations of secession. The “rights” they wanted to preserve were the right to buy and sell people, make them work for nothing and beat them bloody if they didn’t. Guess your statues didn’t teach you right after all. Pull ‘em down.