Lisle Illinois Tax Day Tea Party

To be honest, I had no idea what to expect. I am not exactly the protesting type ... this was my first foray to an event like this. All my exposure to “protests” have been images on TV and the web of the Code Pink burnout hippie type, college aged “my mommy and daddy made sure my Visa was paid off so I can come to this” and the professional trustafarian Block Blockers who frequent G8 meetings.

Needless to say, what I saw in Lisle was nothing like this.

Mostly it was people like me who took a long lunch to see what all the hubbub was about with some stay at home parents (kiddies in tow) and some retirees sprinkled in. There were a dozen or so speakers ... no one whose name I recognized but they all received an enthusiastic welcome from the crowd. There was talk that ACORN had notified the organizers that they would be coming for a counter demonstration, but I hadn’t seen anything like that by the time I left.

I am no professional at crowd estimation, but when I got there at 12:00pm on the dot (I am a stickler for promptness) there looked to be around 500 people present.

By 1:30 (when I had to go back to work) that number had easily doubled.

Now 1000 people isn’t a lot, but this is Lisle, not downtown Chicago and there were half a dozen other rallies within 20 miles of this, so yeah, I think its safe to say that this was pretty significant.

Naturally, NPR (like the NY Times yesterday) did its part to marginalize whats going on with a half assed hit piece and a lot of dismissive commentary on "Talk of the Nation" this afternoon but Glenn Beck put alot of this into context:

"The mainstream media doesn't get it. They'll report on the tea parties just as a -- you know, oh, they're just a bunch of whack job Republicans who only care about taxes on the rich. Where were they with George Bush? . . . But the tea parties are not about taxes. They are about the reason for the taxes, which is an out-of-control government that cannot control its own spending."

He’s right, this isn’t about taxes or spending so much (from my perspctive) as its about a government out of control, and I think the press is certainly doing a disservice to the country by ignoring and minimizing this.