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This weekend's rallies aim for rebirth of liberty

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Tom Jackson

tjackson@tampatrib.com

Published: July 3, 2009

DADE CITY - The modern-day Minuteman - or, more accurately, Minute-person - would be as difficult to pick out of a crowd as his 18th-century spiritual ancestors. But by their habits ye shall know them.

They're either watching Fox News, or recording it on their DVRs. Their car radios rarely stray from the talk-dominated AM dial. Under "favorites," their Internet browsers list all manner of exotic right-wing Web sites. Their humor is punctuated with dark references to surveillance by all manner of federal agencies and personages, up to and including Homeland Security chief Janet Napolitano herself.

And if, in the course of conversation, someone expresses a failed memory regarding the details of Article I, Section 9 of the U.S. Constitution, modern-day Minute-persons will ceremoniously thump their pocket constitutions on the tabletop, evoking studious players in a game of slap-jack.

They are uniformly alarmed about governmental usurpation of individual destinies, dismayed by bold bureaucratic intrusions into the private sector, and are downright militant about the replacement of the American ideals of "created equal" and "pursuit of happiness" in favor of equivalent outcomes, shared limitations and redistributed misery.

These are, in short, my kind of folks. And this weekend, they're rallying across America in the latest wave of tea parties, demonstrations organized around an idea as old as the Revolutionary War, and as fresh as the thriving opposition policies favored by the dominant party in the nation's Capitol.

Today in Pasco County, operating under no officially declared banner - the organizers of the Tax Day rally, Donna Munsen's Pasco County Patriots, have gone curiously silent - peeved demonstrators brandishing signs carrying tough, but family-friendly, messages are expected along U.S. 19 at Gulf View Square mall. Festivities begin at 4 p.m.

Come Saturday at 2 p.m., the portable tea party moves to the lawn at the historic Pasco County Courthouse in Dade City. Organizers come to this one armed with an agenda (inform, educate, energize) and an action plan (for openers, stop yelling at the flat screen; re-channel that energy).

Old-fashioned Independence Day speechifying is promised by Barbara Madden-Rogers, Chris Gude and Emily Barsch, all of whom agree the country has taken a "scary" turn away from the "self-evident" truths of the very declaration Americans will celebrate with barbecues, ballgames, fireworks and sunburns this weekend.

'Get up off the couch'

"The worst thing people can say is, 'There's nothing I can do about it,'" says Gude, 45, an electronics engineer and descendant of Pasco's Gude-Barthle kumquat royals. "Of course you can. But first, you have to get up off the couch."

Madden-Rogers, a business systems analyst who helped launch the east Pasco tea party movement at picnic tables in the grassy park at the heart of San Antonio, speaks from experience when she says, "It's great to get all fired up. But then you have to do something about it."

Regarding that, tea parties are only a launching site. A good and honorable launching site, no doubt, in that the rallies are dedicated to the proposition cited by Abraham Lincoln in the speech that defined his presidency.

That proposition - "all men are created equal" - and its role in the American narrative, beleaguered since the firing on Union forces inside Fort Sumter, took a pivotal turn outside the little town of Gettysburg, Pa., ending this day 146 years ago.

The Union victory, despite breathtaking losses, enabled Lincoln to rally Northern support for a war that he saw in a Jeffersonian context, an assertion of rights that descend from the Creator to all humans, and that its successful conclusion would mean "these dead shall not have died in vain - that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom - and that government: of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the Earth."

Thomas and Abe

Tea party demonstrators take their cues from such American stalwarts as Thomas Jefferson and Lincoln, who deplored the common modern presumption of obligation among free people; and from James Madison, who authored the Constitution and deplored, presciently, "the abridgement of freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachments of those in power than by violent and sudden usurpations."

Those among the fired-up can (and no doubt will over the coming days) cite abundant examples of the encroachments Madison warned against. Honoring his work will mean that noisy networks of active resistance emerge from this weekend's events.

To do otherwise is to miss the point completely.

Tune in to Tom Jackson's "The Jax Files Weekend" at 11 a.m. on WGUL, 860 AM. Keyword: The Jax Files, for Tom Jackson's bonus musings.

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