By Brian M. Boyce
TERRE HAUTE — For residents of Main Street Marshall, the taxpayers’ bailout of gazillionaires is just too galling to stand in silence.
“I’m furious as hell that we who save have to pay for those who live recklessly,” Paul Butler said into a loudspeaker, condemning the rescue of people in underwater mortgages that he said shouldn’t have been granted in the first place.
But the parking lot of 30 to 40 protesters at Tangles & Tans on Marshall’s Michigan Avenue wasn’t just a stomping ground for the mortgage meltdown Saturday afternoon.
Becky Kennedy, a local music teacher who helped organize the “American Tea Party,” said she feels “personally attacked” by the federal government’s stimulus plan, socialist leanings and overall “soft tyranny” moves. “They’re kicking us while we’re down and leading us to ruin.”
Cosmetologist Annette Spires, Kennedy’s daughter and owner of Tangles & Tans, co-organized the event at her business and said, “if they keep raising the taxes on small businesses, what will that do to this town?”
“The American Tea Party” in Marshall was one of several across the country, aimed at rallying opposition to a wide variety of social issues not necessarily limited to the recent federal stimulus plan, those in attendance said.
Jim McKittrick told participants where to sign up to help mail tea bags to President Barack Obama and other elected officials as a means of protest.
“This is not a Republican or Democrat thing. We’re losing our freedoms,” McKittrick said into a loudspeaker.
Wearing a National Rifle Association T-shirt, McKittrick lambasted legislative attempts to alter talk radio formats by political content, union efforts to end secret ballot initiatives and attempts to weaken the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
“We need to protect the Second Amendment,” McKittrick said. “If we lose the Second Amendment we’re basically doomed.”
Dictatorships such as the Third Reich in Nazi Germany also espoused removal of weaponry from the citizens, he said, noting America’s forefathers knew the people might someday require protection from their own government.
Butler, who described his family as “fairly conservative,” told the crowd he’s been concerned for years about the increase in expensive homes and mortgages with no down payment required. The inability of those individuals to make their payments should not be rewarded with tax-financed bailouts, he said.
“It’s my right to give,” he said, encouraging individual charity. “But it’s not the government’s right to steal from me and give it to others.”
Others in the crowd along the street dotted with older homes nodded, and many spoke with disdain about the “McMansions” near Indianapolis and the lending practices which afforded them.
Picket signs that read “Don’t Tread on Me” and “Stop Porking Our Kids’ Future” danced alongside American flags.
“The problem with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people’s money,” Kennedy said. “Don’t sell trillions in debt to China.”
Foster Duncan took the loudspeaker to note all elected officials take an oath to uphold the U.S. Constitution. “But not a damn one has done it,” he said, encouraging people to “make them pay for it come election time.”
Fred Clatfelter, legislative aide to Illinois State Rep. Roger Eddy, R-Hutsonville, joked, “I don’t understand a trillion dollars.”
Clatfelter said Eddy and other area politicians agree completely with the citizens’ concerns.
But, as Kennedy said in reference to Obama at the beginning of her address, “we hired you. We can fire you.”
The state of the country concerns her as a Baby Boomer looking forward to retirement, and as a grandmother who fears for the future.
“You’re leaving our grandchildren in debt,” she said.
The 1 p.m. session lasted a little less than an hour, and Spires said the 30 to 40 in attendance is only a beginning.
“We wish we had more people here, but that’s okay,” she said. “This is a start.”
Brian Boyce can be reached at 812-231-4253 or brian.boyce@tribstar.com.
