Tea Bags: A Cautionary Tale
It almost seems like a dream, after all these years. Long before Barack Obama nationalized General Motors and enrolled the American people in involuntary servitude to Big Insurance and Big Pharma; before George W. Bush bankrupted the United States in a quixotic attempt to stamp out all evil and to secure the existence of the state of Israel in perpetuity; even before Bill Clinton repealed the most important parts of the Glass-Steagall Act and signed into law the Commodity Futures Modernization Act, sending the American economy hurtling downhill like a snowball headed for Hell, a doughty band of activists in Rockford, Illinois, held a tax protest, complete with the tea bags that have become a national symbol of discontent today.
There was even a tea party, organized by R.E.A.CH (Rockford Educating All Children), in which tea bags were dropped off a bridge downtown into the Rock River. Though I was, for a time, a member of the board of directors of R.E.A.CH, I wasn’t present at the tea party, and I don’t recall ever wearing a tea bag as a protest symbol. I was more fond of the pins that we at The Rockford Institute had made, sporting a decaying wooden sign, surrounded by weeds, on which were written the words, “Welcome to Occupied Rockford. P. Michael Mahoney, Presiding.”
Magistrate Mahoney was the federal judicial dictator who controlled Rockford’s public schools and the wallets of anyone who owned property within the boundaries of School District 205. By threatening to throw school-board members into jail for contempt of court, Judge Mahoney technically ensured that his judicial taxation was not without representation.
R.E.A.CH was founded to combat the federally mandated busing that was destroying neighborhood schools and to protest the unconstitutional “tort tax” that made Rockford’s property taxes for several years the highest in the nation. In February 1997, The Rockford Institute and Chronicles joined in the battle with the publication of Tom Fleming’s “Here Come the Judge” and a wildly successful rally against judicial taxation, attended by over 700 people on a cold and sleety night, at the Rockford Woman’s Club.
I don’t have the room here to recount all of the history, which I covered at length in these pages over the next six years. Suffice it to say that Dr. Fleming’s rousing speech, and a follow-up rally a year later, helped to turn the tide, to bring more Rockfordians into the cause, and to change the make-up of the school board, until there was a four-to-three majority in opposition to the federal tyranny. Some of those members even wore their tea bags to school-board meetings.
In the end, it all made very little difference. By the time the federal Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit finally slapped Judge Mahoney down and ordered District 205 released from 13 years of judicial tyranny, two of the members of the board majority, president Patti Delugas and vice president Ted Biondo, had caved under Mahoney’s threats and twice authorized more illegal taxation. Rather than focus their efforts on what they could accomplish (and what they had promised to voters)—standing up to the judge even if it meant jail time, cutting spending, and slashing the other taxes that they did control—Biondo and Delugas spent their time trying to comply with the most outlandish aspects of Judge Mahoney’s desegregation plan. (Racial quotas were imposed not only on each school in the district but on each classroom, which meant that certain classes, such as calculus, had to be dropped altogether when too few minority students enrolled.)
And so June 30, 2002—the day the people of Rockford supposedly regained control of District 205—was bittersweet at best. Yes, the district buses fewer students today, but neighborhood schools have never returned. Academic achievement continues to decline, and many of the federally mandated programs, rather than being removed when the illegal taxation came to an end, were simply transferred by the administration, with the approval of the board, into the general budget.
For Fiscal Year 2003, the first year of local control, the district’s budgeted expenditures were just under $270 million. For FY 2010, which ended June 30, the district’s budgeted expenditures were just under $340 million—a 26-percent increase.
Over the last year, many of the grassroots protesters from a decade ago have once again pinned tea bags to their shirts. Their anger is still aimed at a federal leviathan that holds far too much control over the lives and livelihood of the citizens of the Forest City. But today, there are no taxes they can legally protest, and no local politicians they can support in an attempt to rein in federal power.
Those protesters did all the right things a decade ago, and they lost—even as they seemed to win.
It makes one wonder if perhaps those tea bags might be better used to make tea.
This article first appeared in the July 2010 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.
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I don't know what the exact intentions of the folks in Rockford were.
But those protesters in Rockford need not have looked for results. The general matter on which they protested was at least not about a specific result, in the form of higher quotas or new development projects for which progressives protest.
The folks at Rockford were protesting on a matter of justice. That's the difference between conservatives and progressives. The progressive who protests to achieve higher quotas for a minority group does not realize that social mobility for that group shall only come from long years of working up the ladder; the status of such people is still limited by reality.
The conservative, on the other hand, protesting injustice does so, because injustice has a human cause and human intention behind it. Unlike arbitrary matters like unequal pay for minorities, injustice can actually be countered by exerting human will. It is only human will that can counter that awful human nature that causes acts of injustice. All those people who stood there at the Rockford Woman's Club were impelled to rally against injustice when they see injustice piled up on everything else.
Mere difficulty is besides the point. The very fact that people do unjust things is a failure of human society. It is that painful human exertion that helps slowly correct a human failure in itself.
But all this aside - what about results, nonetheless? Andrew Jackson had to work as a lone crusader against Nicholas Biddle's Bank of America, all the while his entire government, newspapers, public opinion, and big business were against him. That Biddle's corrupted policies were impoverishing thousands of American households was alone a reason for Jackson to not stand for it. He did one thing and one thing only - remove federal deposits from the bank, and tell people that he would not reverse the decision. Biddle responded with an attempt at creating a panic, Jackson stood his ground throughout all of it, and the bank's charter was not renewed. Soon, the bank closed doors, and no longer could the central bank continue its corrupted policies.
If those are the odds Jackson faced, and if Jackson could achieve the ends nonetheless, I don't think anybody in the world needs to complain about lack of immediate results.
In Prince George's County, MD, parents protested court-ordered "desegregation" to no avail in 1973. Neighborhood schooling was destroyed and the whites abandoned the county over a thirty year span. By the late 1980s, busing was ended because it became pointless. Instead of bringing the races together, busing drove them apart. Ironically, Judge Frank Kaufman, who ordered the school busing for Prince George's County, died in 1997, a year in which it could be pointed out that white flight from Prince George's had emptied the county's schools of almost all of its whites. Comically, the Baltimore Sun, in his obituary, declared Judge Kaufman a "friend of the underdog."
That story is so typical of what happens when we try to "reform" government. The only real "reform" of the schools is to get your kids out, something the Regime still allows because its leaders don't want THEIR spoild brats stuck in a seat next to the hoi polloi. That's why Obama's kids attend Sidwell Friends, like Chelsea Clinton did, instead of a D.C. government school.
By the way, Scott, when your school budgets were going up, did attendance go down?
That happend in California throughout the 2010s. Here's a new study of my state, as summarized in an article of mine just up today:
http://www.calwatchdog.com/2010/07/26/new-admin-costs-crowd-out-teaching/
Mr. Sanjay, my point is exactly the opposite: We actually achieved immediate results—brought the case to an end, got rid of unconstitutional judicial taxation, returned some of the stolen taxes to those who had been forced to pay them.
In the long run, however, nothing really changed. Taxes are as high now as they were before; the schools continue to decline; many children are still bused. And it's all being done under elected school board members who are no longer being coerced by a federal judge.
As someone who devoted much time and effort to the fight for several years, I'm convinced I could have used my time more wisely by, oh, eating dinner with my wife and children—something I rarely did during those years. The long-term benefits of that time spent together would outweigh the short-term "victories" we achieved.
Scott,
Thanks for the excellent example. Taking the long view is the only strategic option we have left and perhaps the only serious choice for the wise man in any age. Playing the role of useful idiot for the national scene gets more ridiculous with every election.
So up I got in laughter
And took a book I had
And put a ribbon in my hair,
To please a passing lad.
And there's one thing
No getting by,
I've been a wicked girl said I
But if I can't be sorry, Why
I might as well be glad.
The wise man is sometimes a sad man who can only describe the ways things were for "him and kin". But other times he is the delightful man, like Odysseus, who knew he had a home, loved it and was heroic in returning there. "I’m convinced I could have used my time more wisely by, oh, eating dinner with my wife and children" This was quite a discovery for him too as the poet tells us "he yearned to see,once again,smoke rising from his own chimney.' This last months issue of Chronicles, Recovering our Roots, was simply delightful. Keep up the good work.
Scott Richert, given the recent history of Rockford, what is the future of that city? Slow decline like Flint, Akron, Gary or Youngstown?
John, attendance did drop. We experienced both "white flight" and middle-class flight. Anyone who could afford to send his children to private or parochial school did, and those schools took in far more students than they could handle. Which meant that the destruction of the public schools also wreaked havoc on the private and religious schools in Rockford. Which explains (in large part) the vast homeschooling community here.
Robert, thank you for your kind words, both about this piece and the August issue.
Derek, I wish I knew. The collapse of manufacturing has hit Rockford hard, and the general economic collapse is threatening to bankrupt Rockford city government. On the other hand, Rockford's downtown, though struggling, is in better shape than it was when I arrived here 15 years ago. Unlike Flint, there is a core to Rockford.
The fact that Rockford lost most of its big industry in the Reagan recession has meant that we've been hurt somewhat less this time around. Yes, the unemployment rate is about 17 percent, but we're losing jobs by dribs and drabs now instead of by thousands in one day.
And many small manufacturers are attempting to plan for the future—new technologies, new processes, etc. There is some hope there.
Of course, if the Bush recession takes a second dip under Obama and heads toward another depression, all bets are off. But in that case, Rockford may be better off than other industrial cities its size. We're surrounded by some of the finest farmland in the entire United States, and that may make all of the difference.
As someone who devoted much time and effort to the fight for several years, I’m convinced I could have used my time more wisely by, oh, eating dinner with my wife and children—something I rarely did during those years. The long-term benefits of that time spent together would outweigh the short-term “victories” we achieved.
There's that quietist conclusion again. Yes, in this case, maybe you should have stayed home. But that logic would seem to apply to every cause, including that of the soldier serving his country. Meanwhile, the endlessly activist enemy marches on. If no one fights back, if the constant conclusion is family is what matters, then patriots concede the public square to the destructionists. And eventually, that destruction will reach your home, too.