Thursday, April 16, 2009

Tea Party at the Alamo - I was there


Yesterday, April 15th, Tax Day, was also the day for hundreds, and perhaps thousands of Tea Parties in small towns and large cities all over the U.S. I attended the early portion of the Tea Party in front of the Alamo in San Antonio. I arrived at around 3:15 p.m. There were some radio programs airing live near the Alamo (KSLR and WOAI). At 4 p.m. Glenn Beck and Rocker, Ted Nugent took the stage and aired the Glenn Beck program nationwide on Fox News.


I would have liked it better if the stage had been high enough for the crowd to be able to see what was going on, and if the sound system had been working well enough for people to hear better. Still, I was impressed by the thousands (I would guess around ten thousand or more at that early hour), the entire Alamo Plaza was packed with a standing room only crowd. I was able to find a place under an oak tree about 60 or 70 yards from the stage. I will admit that the crowd was diverse: both young and old, men and women, ethnicities of all kinds, children and teens, vets, pets, folks in wheel chairs, folks with signs, banners, flags, tee shirts with logos, etc. The crowd around me was well behaved, polite, some were even friendly.


I am taking time to describe the crowd standing around me because I think you need to hear something from an eye-witness. I have heard about the way these tea parties have been lambasted by the liberal media. Howard Kurts of the Washington Post reports, "At a Chicago demonstration, CNN's Susan Roesgen started arguing with a protester over why he referred to President Obama as a fascist. "I think you get the general tenor of this," she reported. "It's anti-government. Anti-CNN. This is highly promoted by the right-wing conservative network Fox." Though it is possible to find media nastiness concerning the tea parties, the greater issue is the way the liberal media simply ignored all the tea parties. Usually, anything involving more than one hundred thousand people in multiple locations will be covered on the networks, unless, of course, it is decided by the networks that this is a GOP or other right wing sponsored event. Speaking as an attender, I can declare that this was not sponsored by any political party, although it was attended by people from all persuasions with one thing in common, a desire for taxpayers to be listened to by someone in government.


Did the tea parties make any difference? Time will tell. Just a thought. Ed

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