Why have I been doing so much writing about the Tea Party lately?

Is it so I can be mean? Not really. Sure, it's great material; satire is completely my thing and Lord knows there's an endless mine of stuff that comes out of a Tea Party rally -- any Tea Party rally. Besides, I don't like being mean. Ok, maybe I do sometimes. Just a little, for freedom.

Plus, the Tea Party is everywhere in the news right now. There is barely a Republican Party to speak of anymore it seems like. This "grass-roots" movement -- the origins of which began as a political protest against both party establishments and their support of taxation -- has swallowed the GOP whole. Or is it the other way around? Either way, they are now one in the same. When I think of the Tea Party and Republicans now, in the wake of health care reform passage, the only appropriate image that seems to come to mind is one of that dragon swallowing its own tail -- where does one end and the other begin?

Speaking of taxes and the Tea Party, it turns out in this latest poll that tea-partiers aren't even really all that upset at the taxes they pay anymore. They think their taxes are mostly fair. Imagine that. So, what exactly are they mad about again?

There are debates as to how exactly the whole Tea Party thing got started, but any assertion that they are still non-partisan, or even exclusively grass-roots anymore, is patent absurdity. Whatever "patriot" anger might have existed in the beginning toward conservatives, it's apparent now that it has been quelled by the sheer star power of visible conservative celebrities like Sarah Palin -- whom the tea-partiers practically worship in her coifed bespectacled perfection -- and more behind-the-scenes figures like former Republican House Majority Leader Dick Army of FreedomWorks, whose group basically serves as a hub for Tea Party organizing across the country, according to a recent article in the Atlantic. Well, sort of behind-the-scenes. I guess Army is going to be key-note speaking at a big rally in Atlanta, or so this article says. He's no rock-star like Palin, but still. Has anyone heard of a liberal Democrat speaking at any of these events anywhere? If so, kindly correct me.

Still, none of that answers my original question. After some pondering, I believe the reason why I've taken such an interest in the Tea Party is way more personal than political. 

Here's an example:

Howell Public School Board Trustee and well-known Tea Party leader Wendy Day is probably going to completely lock up her Facebook page now after reading this, but I really don't care what she does. It's open now and I'm using it, and besides, she's a public official and I consider it worthwhile for people to know. In her status message from last Monday she quotes Gandhi, of all people: "Regarding the Tea Party crashers: 'First they ignore you, then they ridicule you, then they fight you, then you win.'"

Now, setting aside for a minute her unintentionally ironic use of a disputed Gandhi quote -- this from a woman who just three weeks ago evoked such battle rhetoric in the name of fighting health care reform that she almost straight-up channeled Gen. Eisenhower on D-Day -- take a look at what one of her Facebook friends wrote when the thread became this written back-and-forth on whether or not conservatives can or should be friends with liberals. One guy, who I'm not going to embarrass any more than he has already embarrassed himself by naming him, writes:

 "I have great hope ... in knowing that if it comes [sic] a civil war to win back the Republic and sound Constitutional principles it will likely be the Conservatives vs the Liberals or Gun owners vs the anti gunners... I have a number of friends that have a different background than mine but I have no friends that are out to destroy my country."

Day has shrewdly kept silent during this mini-forum, which did include self-professed "liberals" who were puzzled by some of the responses. I see it as an excellent example of how deep the level of -- what word is even appropriate to use here -- malevolence -- certain Americans have for each other in what has become an utterly toxic political wasteland. 

Another Tea Party leader who I know personally is Glenda Brown of the 912 Liberty Tea Party of Western Livingston County. Before I thought of making this into a blog piece, I intended to write Brown personally, but I couldn't locate her email and her Facebook is on complete lock-down -- no messages, period.  I know Brown from the many years I attended Howell Church of the Nazarene as a kid. She has a daughter the same age as me, and another one slightly younger. We all grew up together and our parents were friends.

When I covered her Tea Party rally at the Howell Freshman Campus and turned it into a satire of sorts, I did it in part because some of it was just funny, but also because there was something inside of me that made me sad from seeing Brown and all those Howell Naz people there, with me on one side, and them on the other. Humor is always how I've dealt with sad. Thankfully, I guess, God has sent me enough sad on which to sharpen my humor skills to the angle of a samurai sword.

What I find sad is that good Christian people, like my parents, now have to be very choosy about where they attend church on Easter Sunday because they know they will feel a sense of displacement in the churches where they used to go because, although they are not that much involved in politics beyond voting, they are no longer firmly ensconced in the hand of the conservative right (Eight years of Bush was enough to cure that for them).

There is some real isolation to be felt for evangelicals who are not political conservatives, let me tell you. During the last presidential election my parents attended one local service where the minister devoted the entire sermon to politics and strongly inferred that voting for Obama was an unchristian act. As a believer, how on Earth do you respond to this? As if all these previous bonds shared over Christ's love have somehow magically been erased in the name of declaring oneself "on the right side" of the politics war. Seriously? We can't even sit in a pew together now? How shameful and sad -- for everyone. Somehow, I don't think this is at all what Jesus had in mind.  

There is nothing immoral in choosing to separate one's political beliefs with one's spiritual life, but you wouldn't know that with the kind of example Brown sets, who disallows any "liberals" from joining her organization's website. If she won't even welcome them in so-called cyberspace, what reasonable hope would a liberal have of feeling welcome in her church? I find it all so hypocritical, to be perfectly honest. It's no wonder church attendance is down everywhere from decades past.

What makes me more angry than anything is there are people in the upper echelon, mostly in media, who are getting downright rich off being irresponsible minions of misinformation as our little towns burn to the ground in angry rhetoric. People like that assclown Glenn Beck, who made a reported $32 million last year pimping out hate as a means of empowerment for any intellectually lazy slob who will listen. If you really want an inside bio on what an obnoxious creep Glenn "Miscarriages Make Hilarious Punchlines" Beck is, read this three part article from a guy who wrote his recent biography.

Palin has earned over $12 million since she quit her job as Alaska governor last July. 

I'm not even going to talk about Rush and his momentous earnings because it's a practical cliche anymore and I might very well end up giving myself a coronary.

Look, I'm all for making money. What I'm not for are celebrity ideologues who sweep down from atop Mount Moneybags and claim to know what it's like to live in the trenches, all the while making more money off that very message. It makes us all look like fools.

People, we are all Americans, period. First and foremost. My grandfather's grandfather fought for the Confederate Army in the Battle of Shiloh and walked home to Alabama a miserable couple hundred miles in abject defeat. Decades later, my grandfather was there in 1945 pushing back Nazis on the Rhine River during the Battle of the Bulge in World War II. My father was in the US Navy on an aircraft carrier in the Philippines during Vietnam.

Granted, my grandfather was drafted into the Army, but I'm sure he also had personal reasons for why he fought. I can't say for sure what the exact reason was, and he's gone now so I can't ask, but I'm pretty damn sure it wasn't so he could see his country devolve into the kinds of Civil War style divisions you see the right wing dangerously flirting with today in its strategic rhetoric.

After decades of supporting the Republican establishment, my father now supports Obama and the health care bill -- he also works an every day job just like everyone else and pays his taxes. Does this make him one of those "liberals" out to destroy his own country?  What about my high school friend who is also in the military now and spent years fighting over in Iraq, but who also sees the hope (yeah, I said it) in Obama's change? Is he just some socialist enemy of the state? Obama won the election by a popular majority vote of the electorate -- are we all just flat out socialist, Marxist country haters?

Oh I get it. We just don't know what you know. You have access to special damning evidence. That's what gives you the right to label me and everyone else. If you think it's that simple for those who disagree with you -- for anyone in my family or anyone else, for that matter -- you may still call yourself an American as is your birth right, but you certainly don't deserve the honor.

Authors Note: This article originally appeared in LivingstonTalk.com.