Tea party should focus on finding solutions
8:56 am, May 14, 2011
Written by Letters Editor
91Comments
In response to my friends and neighbors Dan Regenold, Mike Burnham and Bob Galbraith, who organized the Tea Party Meeting on the Glendale Square on April 15: Freedom of speech is one of the things that makes America great, but do we really want the square turned into a staging ground for political campaigns and demonstrations? The Tea Party’s folksy simplistic economic views have already taken over the Republican Party and Fox News, so expressing them on the square doesn’t add much to the public discourse. And the basic idea that citizens are self-sufficient individuals with no mutual obligations and no need for a federal government is bizarrely out of place in a small village, on a square recently renovated with federal stimulus dollars, in front of a building with a plaque proclaiming that it was built with estate tax money. It would not be difficult to fill the square with teachers and other public employees who could point out the incongruity of GE paying no income tax while the local school district lays off teachers, or of a governor imposing austerity after leaving his job with Lehman Bros., a firm that helped wreck the economy. We have the freedom to do that, but our energies might be better spent finding solutions that benefit us all, not just the “successful” among us.
Paul Breidenbach
Glendale
