The San Diego Mission de Alcala was founded in 1767 six years before the event that I write about in my journal entry today. Work on the dam which is pictured below was begun in 1807 and was completed in 1816.
One of the earliest and most successful protest movements in a colony that would become part of The United States of America is known by most Americans as the Boston Tea Party. The details of the story are well known to historians, but over the years some of the facts have been ignored or perhaps deliberately distorted in a way that has turned historical fact into a folk tale, an American myth. It is important first to remember that Boston in 1773 was a small city in British America... that is British as in British Empire. Boston was not a city in the United States because the United States of America did not yet exist. The colonists were not Americans protesting against taxation by an “American” government but they were citizens of the British Empire protesting against a British Parliament. Disgruntled citizens complaining to each other when they gathered in the Boston Common were not protesting against taxation as a strategy for raising money necessary to support the common good of people in the colony, but they were specifically protesting because they believed the Tea Act imposed by the British Parliament violated their right to be taxed by their own elected representatives. The British Parliament’s tax on tea has been levied in other colonies, and In three of them protesters had successfully turned back ships carrying the taxed tea. In Boston, however, Thomas Hitchinson, the Royal Governor, decided he would not allow the tea to be returned to Britain. An impatient man who wanted his tea when he wanted his tea, he thought sending the tea back to England was an unnecessary inconvenience. He believed protestors would back down and the tea could be unloaded, but he misjudged their determination. They boarded the ships and threw the tea into Boston Harbor. They were objecting to taxation without representation.

These new Tea Baggers miss the point. They cluster around and support media opportunists like Sarah Palin, Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh, and they miss the point completely. They have forgotten that where they live in the United States of America representatives in government are elected by the people. Our taxes are not imposed by a government over there somewhere. Our tax system is maintained by our representatives, people we have elected to “represent” us in government. That’s the way the system works. We are, in effect, participants in our government through the representatives that we elect. The problem is that tea baggers and other right wingers basically dislike and distrust government period, and they simply object to taxation period. They don’t get it. Apparently they naively believe Americans can continue without taxes to be blessed with the kind of prosperity we have enjoyed since the Middle of the Twentieth Century when a progressive Republican President, Dwight Eisenhower, inspired voters and legislators to believe a system of graduated taxation based on income and accumulated wealth was a “fair” way to raise and maintain acceptable standards of living for all Americans... and still leave rich people rich. Eisenhower’s vision for America remained alive and dominant in the United States until near the end of the third quarter of the century. For twenty-five years following the Roosevelt-Truman-Eisanhower administrations the majority of Americans enjoyed the highest standard of living in the world. An expensive American education system was acknowledged by the rest of the world to be the best. A vast network of American roads and highways became the model for the rest of the world. Building the kind of infrastructure that Americans enjoyed up until the middle of the 1980s required relatively heavy taxation especially for those who were were certifiably wealthy The huge, successful middle class that grew in American was unlike anything that existed anywhere else in the world. Capitalism was working, and it held out the promise that all Americans would ultimately enjoy an acceptable standard of living.

But that was then and this is now. The nation has regressed. Capitalism has been redefined. Money is power. The CEO of a major corporation expects an annual salary in the range of 20 to 50 million dollars. Profit barons with their armies of lobbyists set the agenda in Washington and in state capitals. The mantra which the Sarah Palins and Rush Limbaughs chant to us is that government is bad and will hurt us if it can. We are a country where no politician whose campaign is based on a vision of an America that requires more taxes, even for the most noble projects, can hope to be elected. America is held hostage by political operatives who have been successful at making voters afraid to entertain any ideas for government projects, except war, that cost more money than is presently being spent. In the American vocabulary government and politics are words with negative connotations. To gain votes for their candidates, Republicans portray Democrats as the “tax and spend” party; and if that doesn’t do sufficient damage, the “S” word can be used, and in present-day America socialism is always trumped by the profit motive. When the President speaks of “the common good” in his health care rhetoric, he is said to be promoting socialism which will surely lead to communism.

During a spring rain shower yesterday morning, I rode my bike through the beautiful Mission Trails Regional Park. Wow! How fantastic is that! The park is actually within the city limits of the City of San Diego. I am beneficiary of the generosity of taxpayers who made this beautiful place and others like Balboa Park possible. I rode out onto Mission Gorge Road, a minor highway made possible because people I will never know personally paid for its construction and continue to pay for its maintenance. I am very happy to be part of a country where people unselfishly participate in projects that benefit the whole community.

Sorry, tea baggers. You may never be happy in this kind of country. Here we do things not just for ourselves but for others as well. It’s a great tradition going all the way back to the time when Boston was built around a green space which they called “The Common.” It was then and still is a place maintained for the benefit of all people.