Just Went to a Tea Party Rally

[Ramulux]

So, I was just at the tea party rally down the street and I ended up getting into a discussion that lasted like 2 hours. I was just chilling listening to a guy give a really stupid speech and after he was done I decided to talk to one of the people hanging out. I kind of played stupid and asked her what was going on and what this was all about. She then proceeded to tell me some of the basic conservative beliefs and such. I then began asking her to explain certain beliefs and offering up my response in a very moderate way.

She said all sorts of stuff I could of really pushed her on but I didn't because I wanted the conversation to last as long as I could. One of the more surprising things I began to understand is that this woman didn't seem to have a problem with many of Obamas policies in theory, but rather the way in which they were implemented and what she viewed to be wasteful spending and unnecessary government intervention. I also found that if you explain your position slowly, carefully and pretend that you are just a person who is interested in what they think as opposed to some liberal, then they are surprisingly open to reason.

After a while, she called over her husband who had his little graph of debt under each president that I am pretty sure was bullshit. We then started talking and he was much more intelligent than his wife so it was a little harder to feign ignorance, but we ended up having a fairly polite and substantive conversation about all sorts of things from the bailout, to the wars, to health care. I sometimes forget what its like talking to an actual conservative when all you hear in the media are fake neocon republicans. We found many areas of agreement from the bailouts, to the Iraq war, the Bush tax cuts and medicare part d, all of which he was against. I even got him to agree with me about increasing financial regulation and even setting up an independent consumer protection agency. He understood why we pay taxes and didn't have any problem with how much paid although we disagreed when I tried to explain that taxes decreased for 95% of the country over the last year.

He was a serious guy and at times it seemed to pain him to agree with me, but I ended up agreeing with him about a lot of stuff. After I thanked them for the healthy discussion and began walking home it occurred to me just how much worse than democrats the republican party is at representing actual conservative beliefs. I realized that the crazy extremist ideology of people like Glenn Beck simply isn't held by a lot of conservatives. This experience was very surreal and just made whats going on in Washington even more perplexing, where are the actual reasonable conservatives? They exist all throughout the country and are completely ignored by the media in the same way actual liberals are rarely seen on TV.

My main point is that, our elected representatives are so fucking bad at simply having beliefs that are actually aligned with their respective political ideology. I was listening to this guy and I was just like "Wow, a conservative saying things that match up with reality", and it just bummed me out. Neither side is truly represented and if they were we wouldn't have the problems we are seeing right now. Or at the least there would be republicans willing to vote for bills that made perfect sense instead of coming up with ridiculous illogical reasons not to.