We're not the dowdy, old fogy fuddy-duds the mainstream media try to portray us as. We rock! Our ideas rock! Our music rocks! And on November 2nd 2010, we rocked this nation from coast to coast! So whether you're 18 or 80, if you love freedom, calling your own shots, limited government, American exceptionalism, the Constitution, and telling DC (and Boise, Tallahassee, Sacramento, Austin, Albany, Nashville, etc) to mind their own damn business, you're a Tea Party Rocker. So let's rock!

Friday, February 18, 2011

Wisconsin protest shows need for conservative pop culture

What stands out in my mind, after three days of watching video from the public employee protests in Madison, Wisconsin, is the presence of young people at the protest. I'm not talking young teachers or state employees, I'm talking kids!

School kids who should be sitting in class, learning about what caused the budget crisis in the first place. Kids who should be learning about it in terms of math, civics and economics. Kids whose teachers should be passing along that knowledge without any bias or partisanship. It would be a perfect opportunity to explain how the tax structure is unfairly stacked against those who produce wealth and actually create jobs, but favors those who produce the least, despite the fact they're by far the biggest beneficiaries of government largess.

But their schools are closed, their desks are empty, because their teachers have called in sick to attend the protest. The classes that should be taught are not, because the Leftist beliefs of their teachers (and other unionized state employees...which is all of them in non-right to work Wisconsin) demand the students be loaded up and taken on a field trip that would bring a tear of pride to Hugo Chavez's eye.

Here are some examples of what's going on in Madison, and on the streets outside the Statehouse, that you'll probably not see in the drive-by media. I found them on You Tube. In the first video, we see how much the students really know about why they're there:



I really like the kid who says, "We're trying to stop whatever this dude is doing." Yeah...like, you know, that dude who, like, runs things is, you know, like, not doin' something that, like, my teacher is all like 'oh man, that sucks' and everything, you know what I'm sayin'?

Then there are the protesters outside, blocking traffic on the taxpayer-funded streets of Madison:



Note the sign, at :30, which reads "People Over Profit"...class agitation that would make ol' Chairman Mao, Uncle Joe Stalin, and Marx, Lenin and Engels beam with pride.

Finally, look at the high school kids, and some that look junior high age, wielding bullhorns and chanting their pro-union battle cries, right in the Capitol rotunda:



17 years ago, I first heard Limbaugh talk about the indoctrination being forced upon little "skulls full of mush" in government schools. That generation, raised on Ritalin and fed a steady low-accomplishment, high-self-esteem mental diet, are now among those shouting into bullhorns and waving protest signs, instead of teaching their students the harsh cold realities of civics, taxation, and economics. If we don't reach today's skulls full of mush --thanks, Rush -- our future is, in the best case scenario, a more extreme version of what we're seeing on the streets of Madison today (and likely in other state capitals in days to come). The more likely scenario is that we won't have a nation at all, at least not one that resembles what I was taught to love, and defend to the death if need be.

As I've said before, kids don't surf the Heritage Foundation website, they don't listen to Beck or Hannity, and they don't watch Fox News. They listen to rap and "death metal", watch movies and reality TV, play video games and daydream they're LeBron James. If they get any "news" at all (and I seriously doubt the kid who calls Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker 'that dude' is a news consumer), it comes from Jon Stewart and Steven Colbert.

Pop culture is the way we're going to have to reach them. We've got to deliver our message in an envelope they'll actually open. We've got to reach them on the dance floor, the mosh pit, in their cars, at the movie theaters, and through their X-Boxes. Otherwise, all our words are going to sail over their heads, in one ear and out the other, and will sound like Charlie Brown's teacher.

I attended a Tea Party rally yesterday on the steps of the Idaho Statehouse. The theme was "no new taxes", and the keynote speaker was Grover Norquist. His speech was interesting and engrossing to all but the three very loud, very profane, 30-something or younger hecklers. I noticed that, out of a crowd of about 60, only a dozen or so appeared to be early 30s or younger. That included the media, the profane hecklers, and two passers-by, who stopped to see what the hubbub was all about.

Even if school kids had been allowed to take a field trip to the rally, the majority wouldn't have gotten a thing out of it. Norquist is a very knowledgeable and engaging speaker, but to a teen or 20-something, he would have been Charlie Brown's teacher. He didn't have a hip-hop beat behind his speech, or a wall of grinding guitars, or even a Hollywood entourage worthy of a crappy HBO show.

A conservative, patriotic, smaller-and-less-intrusive government message is what's going to save our country, but if it's Charlie Brown's teacher delivering it, kids will shrug their shoulders and go back to their X-Boxes.

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