America is angry

[ZeitgeistObserver]

America is angry
Apr 13, 2010 by Nicholas Kohler


Late last week, as families across the U.S. prepared for Easter, gubernatorial staff in state capitals across the U.S. were busy dealing with a strange homegrown security threat. An organization calling itself the Guardians of the Free Republics, according to its website committed to the “behind-the-scenes peaceful” dismantling of the U.S. government “without controversy, violence or civil war,” had sent letters to all 50 governors telling them to resign within three days or face removal. The demand was part of a “Restore America Plan,” launched, said the group on its website, after “consultation with high-ranking members of the United States armed forces.”

Part of a “sovereign citizenship” fringe in the U.S. that repudiates government and such modern realities as taxes, the Guardians of the Free Republics argues that “illicit corporations” usurped the U.S. federal government in 1933, and refers to the Internal Revenue Service as a “foreign bank cartel.” Its plan seeks a fundamentalist return to the American constitution and an end to both the “foreclosure nightmare” and the horrors of Department of Motor Vehicles registration, which the group refers to as a “hijacking of automobile ownership.” While FBI investigators said they did not believe the letters themselves were threatening, they did worry the group’s anti-government message might spur others to violence.

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While Tea Partiers are overwhelmingly white (88 per cent, according to the Quinnipiac poll), more than 50 per cent are women, and more than a quarter have completed post-secondary education. “If I were to sort of try and put them down on the psychologist’s couch and get inside their psyches a little bit, my sense is that this is a group of people that’s just frightened to death by what they view as monumental changes that are taking place,” says political scientist Marc Hetherington. “These people must be looking at a world that is changing so fast, and it’s dizzying to them and in ways that are very disturbing.”

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Then a friend told her that the lowest rung of elected office within both the Republican and Democratic parties—often called the precinct level, depending on the state—“is where we actually decide who gets put on the ballot” by electing local party leadership. Dawald looked into the situation at her local Republican precinct and found that over half the committee positions stood open—a dearth of local participation that holds true across the country for both parties.
“I signed up myself!” Dawald says, standing outside the Tea Party Express bus in Nashville. She adds that Tea Party activists across the U.S. have done the same, and that she knows of some precincts where Tea Partiers have taken total control. “We believe that can be done for the Democratic party, too,” she says, before describing her state of mind as she took up politics.

http://www2.macleans.ca/2010/04/13/america-is-angry/