Crashing the Tea Party's Tax-Day Rally

We saw you, Tea Partyers. We saw your angry signs and your hate-filled rhetoric sputtered from the Washington Monument and all over town yesterday. How quickly your mean words directed at Obama about taxes become rantings and ravings about gay marriage, abortion, prayer-in-school and all the hot-button right-wing causes. One of you stood by us at the smoosh-the-penny machine and we worried that the kids would ask about your vitrolic buttons and cruel t-shirt picturing Obama with the word "DOPE." You scared us. You all did. We felt unsafe in our nation's capitol, unsafe in our nation, as we walked around in our multi-racial, two-mom family unit, drove around with our "All Families Have Value" and rainbow MOM bumper stickers.

But we took some consolation in the fact that your numbers couldn't even cover the hill at the Washington Monument by half, when the whole town was filled for Obama's inauguration. And even you, you "Taxed Enough Already"-"Live Free or Die" (several wearing various Texas memorabilia, sad to say) crowd, took advantage of all those wonderful tax-supported national museums and monuments, needed the police and municipal services for your rally. You're all bark, not much bite, even if there were FOX news vans everywhere. Even thought recent articles say you're smarter (and wealthier) than the rest of us think (and of the nation in general), I saw you yesterday. And you're not.

Though you are all white and older and obviously scared.