My Personal Chicago Tea Party
We were watching a history International channel show about Hitler’s bodyguards during lunch today (you know, because we’re not supposed to be watching the news now, because it either depresses us or gets us too angry nowadays), and it mentioned that when Hitler got out of prison (after the attempted Beer Hall Putsch in 1923) he had a hard time getting off the ground politically because World War (I) was over and people were generally happy. And when people are generally happy, thet aren’t interested in more radical ideas.
When they said this on the show, I said to by husband that it took until the collapse of our economy (and the Great Depression) to bring people around to supporting Hitler, that Hitler just needed the economy to collapse to be able to rally support.
 
And my husband replied that this is the same thing that happened with President Obama.
So, apparently without watching the news, modern-day politics still infiltrates our lives and mindsets. (I mean, I even hear people talking about the Chia Obama, because you can really show your patriotism by having plants growing out of a likeness of our President’s head... like at ChiaObama.com.)
 
But before I was stopped from watching the news so much, I was surfing through the 24-hour news media stations, I stumbled across Glen Beck talking about getting finger prints from home sellers in Cook County. According to a CBS news story (“Giving The Fingerprint: Home Law Raises Concern,”), “The new law, which is set to go into effect June 1, 2009, will force anyone selling property in Cook County to provide a thumbprint from their right hand.” For you see, without explaining why taking a thumbprint from a home seller is needed, we are told that this law (which actually is set to expire in 2013, unless they actually decide to keep this)requiring our prints is a smart idea.
And I remember hearing about Rick Santelli making a speech in a news debate on the Chicago stock floor, explaining that people don’t want to have to bail out people who have extravagant homes they couldn’t afford in the first place. (Oh, fine, here is the YouTube link for the video, with references to the “Chicago Tea Party”), and without hearing all of the speech, I wanted to look into the Chicago Tea Party (which yes, has a web link). I thought this would literally be a chance to dump tea into either the Chicago River or Lake Michigan, but I was able to find out that (I think, from an “official” site) on Tax Day (the day after my performance art show in Chicago, and hours after I have surgery on my head to remove a cyst on my skull) people are gathering for a protest walk at noon CST from the Daley Plaza (50 W Washington St.) to end at the Michigan Ave Bridge (the Tribune Tower). Well, I don’t hear anything about dumping tea in this protest (and I have been saving tea bags for my tea dumping anyway), and I’m not fond of giving my email address to organizations that I cannot be positive about affiliations and potential future spam (that and I don’t know if I can make it after the surgery on my head anyway), so maybe I’ll do a symbolic protest after I get out of surgery on Tax Day with my own tea myself. Because it makes sense to do a symbolic tea dumping if it is in protest of the government giving away too much money that we don’t even have to help people we don’t think should even entirely be helped.
Okay, some deserve helping, but some do not. Though I support helping people in trouble (If we are financially capable of helping them financially in the first place), I don’t support getting our nation further into debt with countries like China (since our country has no money and we are insanely in debt now, thanks to both Bush and Obama) so that we can pay a ton for a very ecpensive life preserver to help those drowning – both the ones who are genuinely in trouble and the ones who didn’t know how to swim but figured someone would bail them out if they needed it anyway.
Urgh. Okay, maybe there’s nothing I can really do about this, or change anything in what the government does, but maybe I can take old tea and dump it in the Chicago river to make a personal point, if nothing else.
04/16/09
Oh, it has been a tough few days.
On the 14th (you know, the day before tax day), I ran a performance art show. I was the host of “the Poetry Game Show” for 2009, where 6 “contestants” read poetry of mine and were judged by studio audience applause to announce the winner of the “Performance Poet Prize” of a golden crown. I had a ton of fun, even while wearing a retro suit jacket, a loose tie and a white and black wig (and I’m glad I thought of this show idea before last Halloween, so I could use the wig and the crown for this show — url at janetkuypers.comor scars.tv).
But we got home and didn’t unpack anything, just slept so we could leave before dawn to make it for the surgery on my head the morning of the 15th. I had a cyst surgically removed from my scalp the morning of tax day, because (we can only guess) a piece of glass, or some object from the car accident I had over a decade ago, lodged itself in my scalp skin. Well, as it worked its way out it left a hole in my scalp that my body has been trying to cover, so I have had a bump growing on my scalp for years. Occasionally the bump had grown hard and fallen off, leaving a bigger hole on the top of my head for my body to try to cover with more skin (and a larger cyst). Well, doctors saw it and sent me to a specialist, where they decided to cut all of the cyst and surrounding skin off and stitch it back together.
That was yesterday morning’s job.
Good thing my husband told me what he went through when he had stitches on his head when he was 14 (that because I couldn’t feel anything, I should listen for the sound of the stitching thread literally whirring through my scalp skin, which knowing to listen for it, it sounded really cool), because I knew what to expect for this outpatient surgery on my head.
Yeah, the doctors were removing stuff from my head to try to make my head right. Let’s see how that works out...
So after my head surgery I thought about time downtown, and I thought about the Chicago “Tea Party” (which had nothing to do with tea, but the letters stood for “Taxed Enough Already”). Well, I knew I wasn’t going to be able to remain there for any tax rallies, so I literally brought a small jar of tea leaves with me to drop into the Chicago River (instead of dropping whole bags of tea into the river; it’s not like I was going to pull out the tea bag later after steeping the tea here...). Think of it as my little way to say that I don’t like paying such high taxes (yes, it will come, Obama says our taxes won’t go up, but how exactly are we going to get out of debt if we don’t?) because companies tried too hard to make the unaffordable available to everyone under the sun (instead of teaching people that they have to work harder and earn things).
Well, at least the head-numbing medication didn’t wear off yet, and I could pull off throwing tea leaves into the Chicago River on tax day. Because 35.5 hours after the surgery my head really hurts like Hell now.
And maybe my dumping tea leaves into the Chicago River didn’t make a difference, but it was my little way of protesting what people have done to our economy, ruining our 401(k)s for our retirement (I used to have enough money saved for my retirement, and now I have a tiny fraction of my savings left, so I’ll have to figure out how to live in my older age with no money) and reducing the value of our home that we honestly still work to pay off instead of asking for our government bailouts. Because we’re not interested in having the government pay for someone else’s mistakes, but the last thing we’re interested in is having our future tax dollars go toward helping out people who lunged head-first into a shaky economy with a purchase they could never otherwise afford.
Janet Kuypers
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