A Million Points of Fight

Dirk:

Any article that properly chronicles  the spontaneous birth of the "tea party movement" would have to recognize that there was no starting date, no single direction, no headquarters, no structured leadership and no unified position on the issues.......... just a "million points of FIGHT".

Thus your story would be too limited in scope and mislead your readers if you write about "Party" with a capital "P".  The significance of the "tea party movement" is that it's a lower case "p", as in "We the people."

The CT Tea Party is just one new arrow in the quiver of the "tea party movement" that the traditional press seemingly can't fathom or understand.  And who's to blame them?  They haven't seen anything like this, as nary a current scribe was around the last time this occurred... on a chilly December day in 1773.

So bravo to you for wanting to tell your readers about the "CT Tea Party" but it should be a singular paragraph in a 3000 word article that celebrates the American body politic in all it's rambunctious tumult.  For this is no movement about hierarchy or org charts, no story about a Washington think tank or interest group rallying troops with a letter.  This movement, for example, is about an anonymous singular citizen who by chance just happens to see the elusive Rosa DeLauro pulling up outside one of her offices.  It's a Tweet or Facebook posting by a new breed of minuteman who texts the clarion call "Rosa walking into her NH office at 59 Elm right now" that results in a dozen constituents showing up within minutes to demand answers on government run health care.

So, Dirk, if you want to know the origins of the tea party movement, with a lower case "p", I humbly recount my observations below, as I was honored to be there somewhere near the beginning.  But know this as you read on:  I'm just one observer of a movement too important and too big, yet too decentralized and too diverse, to ever be described by any label that starts with a capital letter.

The first tea party in Connecticut was in Hartford on February 27th, 2009.  That was a Friday, and I had to work.  The following day, however, there was another tea party in New York City, so I packed up my son, made some signs with poster board and wooden sticks, and headed down to lower Manhattan.  The entire ride down I spoke to my son about the Constitution, and the First Amendment.  Right there, all wrapped up into one gathering of citizens, was a lesson in four of the five clauses of the First Amendment, and what better lesson for a 9 year old than that?  To my surprise, there were easily 200 people there, in the bluest city in the bluest state, with four days notice.  Everyday ordinary citizens stood on the lip of a stone fountain just a foot or so above the crowd and spoke into a megaphone about such quaint topics as freedom and liberty, limited government and the Constitution.  It literally brought tears to my eyes, and I knew that I had to organize my own tea party.  Dirk, that is the beauty of this movement.  I was inspired by the impassioned speech of a middle aged Jewish man from New York who was railing against Chuck Schumer.  The following week I applied for a permit for the New Haven Tax Day Tea Party.  Since that time I have met the most extraordinary people.  Selfless patriots who will donate time and money and will stop at nothing to rescue our country from the brink of "fundamental transformation."  

The very first statewide conference call in March 2009 had 6 people on it.  The state coordinator at the time, Pam, asked who would be willing to handle the media and have their name out in the public.  There was a catastrophic silence.  Every one was afraid of being targeted or ridiculed.  You see Dirk, most of us work.  Many of us own businesses, including me.  As one woman on the call said, "I can't afford to lose customers if I take a stand they don't like."  I will never forget that.  We were all keenly aware that we were the minority in this state.  We were keenly aware that the President was riding a wave of popularity and downright hero worship unseen in many years.  After several minutes of awkward silence and voicing of concerns, I said, "I'll do it, if I don't do something my business is going to fail any way, if I'm damned if I do and damned if I don't, I might as well go down swinging."  We began planning tax day tea parties in New Haven, Hartford and Norwich.  

Since that time there have been dozens upon dozens of tea party rallies in Connecticut.  Every corner of the state, from Torrington to Greenwich, Enfield to Danbury, Pomfret to Stratford, there are tea party patriots cropping up.  We stay in touch through facebook, twitter, email and cell phone.  There are 17 towns that have a "mini-tea" every single week.  The town of Cheshire pioneered the weekly mini tea and is the longest running weekly tea party in the entire country.  The weekly mini tea, born here in Connecticut, has been exported to other states via google groups.  

Remember the now infamous "mob memo" that started the town hall uprisings in August?  That started right here in Connecticut.  I met a man named Bob MacGuffie at a tea party early on.  He had an idea of going to a town hall that his representative, Jim Himes, was having.  We managed with a few days  notice to get 20 or so people to go.  We met outside with a plan to spread out and ask questions, keep him on the ropes and pin him down on the stimulus and bailouts.  It worked.  Of the 30 questions he took, our group got 17 of them.  That is where the "rock the town halls" came from.  Bob wrote a memo, a how-to, about the strategy we employed.  He sent it to me.  I emailed it to other organizers all over the country. Everyone picked up the ball and ran with it.  Pretty soon, town hall push back was happening all over the country.  Its not an exaggeration to say the tea party folks, working on their own on a local level, coordinating only by email and cell phone, killed the healthcare bill.

We are a group of people who have never protested anything in our lives.  We are not professional organizers or rabble rousers.  We are making it up as we go along.  We started by protesting the government expansion in general, then politicians in particular.  Every time our federal representatives show their faces in this state, we are there.  Sometimes we only get an hour or so of notice.  We and the Dump Dodd folks dogged Chris Dodd every single time he stepped foot in Connecticut.  And if he brought the President or Vice President with him, so much the better.  We have become a fierce and brave, but ragtag, bunch of foot soldiers.  We've stood in the pouring rain, the freezing cold, the dark of night, the crack of dawn.  We once spent four hours outside of a town hall in West Hartford trading shouts and chants with the bused in and paid moveon.org and Organizing for America (yes, I have the video to prove it)  The town hall had been planned for one location for a week, but literally the morning of the town hall, it was moved across town.  A member of the media sent me a text message about the change.  Emails, facebook alerts, tweets and phone calls went out.  We stationed one person at the old location to redirect people who didn't get the messages.  Despite the location change, despite the busing in of the other side,  we outnumbered them.  They had pre printed "healthcare for all" signs.  We had battered and fraying homemade signs, Gadsden and American Flags and megaphones (we had learned a thing or two by this time).  

Now we are harnessing our energy into real and tangible political muscle. We've taken the fight to the political parties.  We've become members of town committees, we are recruiting and vetting candidates.  Just yesterday there was a "candidates school" to teach people who grew out of the movement how to run for office, speak to the press, raise money, knock on doors.  And we are concentrating on turning out votes on November 2nd.  Most of us operated completely outside of the two party system.  Most of us are not even on the radar screen of the republicans and democrats, some of us have never voted!  This Thursday we are joining State Senators in a press conference about 10th Amendment Legislation being introduced in the General Assembly.

Dirk, there is no leader, no one person directing this multi headed hydra.  Its not like herding cats, because there is no herding going on.  Its not precisely a bottom up organization, because there is no "up" about it.  Its sideways.  My role, as state coordinator, is "information peddler in chief"  I post the rallies that people organize, I email information on the state of various bills making their way through Congress.  I talk to the press.  I serve as I liaison between the national movement and the local movement, I spend a lot of time on conference calls regarding where when and why the next thing is happening, and then I push that out to the rest of the group.  I get up on the stage, grab the mic, and whip up the crowd, encouraging others to speak up and get involved, just like the middle aged man in New York did for me.  

This story is playing out all over the country, town by town, state by state, Americans are doing a quintessentially American thing, pushing back against intrusive and overbearing government. "Don't Tread On Me" isn't just a motto, its a way of life.  The majority of Americans know the government is not the solution to their problems, it is the problem.  Unlike every other country on the entire planet, when things get bad, we want the government out of our way, not to help us fix it.  This movement recognizes and understands the indefatigable American spirit, the pull yourself up by your bootstraps attitude that built this country into the freest, wealthiest, greatest, most powerful nation in the history of the world.  That is most of us in this country.  And now, we are the Silent Majority No More.

Tanya Bachand

State Coordinator, Connecticut Tea Party Patriots