It wasn’t long ago that I’d warned that the mainstream GOP would work feverishly to co-opt the participants of the original tea party, which took place during the Republican primary in 2007 when a groups of Ron Paul supporters self-organized a fundraiser to raise a $6 million money bomb for their favorite candidate on the anniversary of the Boston Tea Party.  From there, the loose network organized a number of other fundraisers, but never called themselves The Tea Party.  When Ron Paul ended his candidacy, many of those activists joined the Campaign for Liberty, Ron Paul’s PAC.

Sitting on the coast and reading mainstream media polls more interested in race than substance, it’s hard to tell how many of the over 50 million self-described Tea Partiers are aligned with the original tea party participants and how many are simply aggravated members of the GOP.  A simple question tells them apart: do you support an imperialist foreign policy?  Those that says yes, or question whether the US is imperialist, are frauds.  Those who declare the need to dismantle the American Empire are the real deal.

Why didn’t the mainstream media ask that simple question during their tea party poll… or did I miss it?

Here’s a news item: the Tea Party doesn’t exist but tea parties do and the yellow movement described here is emerging out of grassroots political action taking place around the country.  There is, of course, a battle over the Tea Party brand but it’s important to remember there is no central committee, no leadership, no platform.  The organizations throwing the ‘Tea Party Conventions’ consist mostly of traditional right-wing PACs pretending to represent The Tea Party to the mainstream media.  It’s the mission of both the mainstream media and GOP PACs to bring the tea parties back into the Republican tent without changing the GOP’s core platform.  Their strategy to achieve this mission is to attach the GOP’s nationalist faction to the tea parties by getting ultra-nationalist networks of talk-radio, religious and personality cult leaders to incite their followers to organize tea parties and, hopefully pollute the core principles of the grassroots with inflammatory and confused messages about race and immigration.  So far the GOP has successfully tricked both the mainstream and leftist alternative media into thinking that the ‘Tea Party’ is a traditionalist, nationalist, fridge movement.  Nothing could be further from the truth.

The tea parties are reintroducing the universally appealing concept of localism into our political discourse by focusing on core principles that mainstream media and political parties refuse to address.

1. Sound Money.  For decades the mainstream media has avoided any serious discussion about monetary policy or economic principle.  The financial collapse has made it clear that our corporate Keynesianism is failing the American people and we need to create economic policies that support local/grassroots development.

2. The Constitution.  Our government is currently in a state of mass Constitutional noncompliance.  This is outrageously dangerous because the Constitution is literally the only thing preventing our government from becoming an autocracy.  This situation needs to be rectified by amending the Constitution and changing unconstitutional laws.  If the Supreme Court won’t do it’s job, Congress and the President must.

3. Liberty.  The freedom to do anything as long as it harms no one is the Enlightenment’s great political achievement and the foundation of the American system of governance.  Like Europe, our citizens have been conditioned by a paternalistic government to trade their liberty for security, but unlike Europe, there is a vocal minority dedicated to the never ending struggle for individual liberty.  Tea partiers are committed to that struggle.

Corporate America will continue to shield the American people from political localism as long as it can.  The important thing to remember is that bottom-up political organizing is taking place in American and it threatens the power of the top-down media.  All this author requests is that you keep an open mind and remember the words of Gil Scott-Heron: “the revolution will not be televised.”

Barack Obama told us he’d CHANGE America.  During the campaign, when Obama was asked about the CHANGE he would bring to Washington, he didn’t describe specific policies or proposals as much as he asked us to HOPE for the CHANGE.  The Tao Te Ching says that “hope is as hollow as fear.”  It appears Obama’s CHANGE is also hollow.

Why is hope as hollow as fear?  Because hope and fear both come from thinking about the future Self.  If an individual thinks that things will get better, they feel hopeful, if they think things will get worse, they become fearful.  HOPE did not ask us to be the change we want to see in the world.  It asked us to dream about a future with President Obama.  If we want authentic, evolutionary change to take place in America, we need to act.

Evolutionary change is rooted in ancient truths, spreads through informal channels and is applied in the most unlikely places, far from the glamour of the conventional and mainstream.  When the change emerges into the popular consciousness, it doesn’t  come packaged in a CNN Special or a New York Times commemorative coffee table book, it comes from unconditioned voices protesting a taboos that makes the experts uncomfortable.

One of the reasons it’s so difficult for evolutionary change to insert itself into culture is that evolutionaries find it difficult participating in conventional conversations which are based upon assumptions they disagreeable with.  Gay marriage is a perfect example.  A progressive will argue that the government should recognize any two individuals who want to marry while a conservative will say the government should only recognize marriages between a man and a woman.  An evolutionary would deny the government the right to recognize marriages. Why would government – the people with the right to the legitimate use of force – be informed of an individual’s marital status, must less authorize people to change that status.  The answer to this questions leads to much more significant ones about our government’s state of Constitutional noncompliance and the intrusive nature of the income tax, among others.

When evolutionary topics enter the mainstream media narrative, not only does a web of new questions emerge, but so does a world of new possibilities.  It’s like the scene in the Wizard of Oz when the curtain is pulled and the wizard is revealed as a normal man using a powerful machine.  Our natural reaction to the man behind the curtain is curiosity: who this man is, what does he want and what can his machine do?

In America, the people ‘behind the curtain’ work very hard to keep us inundated with never-ending debates, pointless news, meaningless art, disposable products, and futile projects that make it difficult to become aware of evolutionary perspectives.  They don’t do this because they want to suppress us: they do it because they want to suppress themselves.  By lying everyday to earn money and privileges that fill their ego’s with the phantom of ‘success,’ they get their vengeful reward – Vengeful because they view themselves as the victims.  From their perspective, they haven’t been victimized by the neoloiberal economic paradigm, but by other individuals who have robbed them of their dignity.  The theft may have occurred in a playground decades ago or it might take place everyday at home or at work but their need to control their environment comes from an inability to control themselves.  Homes, clothes and cars that signal outward ‘power’ often signal inner weakness.  That weakness comes out on the nights and weekends when the mind wanders away from work and ‘success’ and into its dark recesses containing more fundamental questions about competency.  Did I do a good enough job? Was my text message too revealing? Should I have said that to my father? These questions all stem from one root: did I do the right thing?  It takes a leap of faith to ask the question honestly enough so it can actually be addressed: Did I do the Right thing?

It’s a spiritual question and it requires a spiritual answer.  What is that answer?

Welcome to humanity…