evacuating the building, the crew kept the cameras rolling. It made for a little drama in the movie, and Luke actually put together a short vignette that we played the next day. It was like a scene taken from a Hollywood production: police cruisers, sirens, bomb-sniffing dogsâwe had it all.
It all happened so fast it was surreal. Certainly, some of the staff and volunteers were shaken up by the threat. Most of us were far more annoyed than scared. The incident, like the march the next day, was underreported, if acknowledged at all, by many liberal reporters in the media. Where was the outrage? Where were the scolding lectures to the Democrats and their liberal attack machine about political civility?
The best part of the incident was the resolve demonstrated by the volunteers who were making the march a reality. âWhat are they going to do,â a volunteer asked while waiting to return to the building, âkill me, I guess?â The activists just shrugged it off and headed back up to the office as soon as D.C. Metro police was certain it was safe.
We would witness and hear this sentiment repeated over and over again among the activists of the Tea Party movement: Call us names. We will not take the bait. Ignore us. We will not stop. Threaten us. We will not back down. We love our country, we love our liberties, and this fight is too important.
When we finally worked our way up to the appropriately named Freedom Plaza on the morning of September 12, it all seemed worth the risk. It all seemed worth the work and the hassles and the threats. A beautiful sea of humanity greeted us as we worked our way to the stage.
N OW OR N EVER
W E NEVER DID GET to the stage. The plaza was too crowded with people. Tom Gaitens, FreedomWorksâ Florida director, was firing up the crowd. âWhat do we want?â Tom asked the crowd. âFreedom!â The whole scene looked and felt like a carnival or a concert. Everyone was laughing and joking and enjoying the fact that they were participating in something that mattered. That day we all became a cohesive community of concerned, and now mobilized, Americans: 9/12ers, conservatives, Tea Partiers, libertarians, grandmothers and granddaughters, fathers and sons, independents, Republicans, and Democrats. You could find one of anything and/or everybody in the crowd that day.
We had planned to arrive at the stage on Pennsylvania Avenue at around 10:00 A.M. , rally the gathering crowd with some quick comments, organize the various delegations by state, and march together down to the Capitol. Many of the groups that traveled in from across the nation had brought their stateâs colors to fly above the crowd in case things got chaotic. That way, people could find their local groups and march in an orderly procession down Pennsylvania Avenue at the designated time.
Billie Tucker and her First Coast Tea Party group from Jacksonville, Florida, had towed a massive replica of the HMS Dartmouth to Washington with them. The original Dartmouth was the first of the three East India Trading Company ships to dock in Boston Harbor in 1773 before the âMohawksâ emptied their cargo into the ocean in protest. The Jacksonville crew planned on âsailingâ the Dartmouth down Pennsylvania Avenue when the police gave the signal.
Ready to lead the march was a contingent of Revolutionary War reenactors who planned to call the procession forward promptly at 11:00 A.M.
On the morning of the march, we arrived at Freedom Plaza. That is, we were trying to get to Freedom Plaza. In truth, we couldnât get anywhere near the area because that whole quadrant of the city was closed off by the National Park Service officers and D.C. city police who were trying to manage the mass of humanity that had started flooding into the plaza at 7:00 A.M. Freedom-loving activists from all over America were shutting down a good part of the city simply because of their sheer numbers!
So we walked
It all happened so fast it was surreal. Certainly, some of the staff and volunteers were shaken up by the threat. Most of us were far more annoyed than scared. The incident, like the march the next day, was underreported, if acknowledged at all, by many liberal reporters in the media. Where was the outrage? Where were the scolding lectures to the Democrats and their liberal attack machine about political civility?
The best part of the incident was the resolve demonstrated by the volunteers who were making the march a reality. âWhat are they going to do,â a volunteer asked while waiting to return to the building, âkill me, I guess?â The activists just shrugged it off and headed back up to the office as soon as D.C. Metro police was certain it was safe.
We would witness and hear this sentiment repeated over and over again among the activists of the Tea Party movement: Call us names. We will not take the bait. Ignore us. We will not stop. Threaten us. We will not back down. We love our country, we love our liberties, and this fight is too important.
When we finally worked our way up to the appropriately named Freedom Plaza on the morning of September 12, it all seemed worth the risk. It all seemed worth the work and the hassles and the threats. A beautiful sea of humanity greeted us as we worked our way to the stage.
N OW OR N EVER
W E NEVER DID GET to the stage. The plaza was too crowded with people. Tom Gaitens, FreedomWorksâ Florida director, was firing up the crowd. âWhat do we want?â Tom asked the crowd. âFreedom!â The whole scene looked and felt like a carnival or a concert. Everyone was laughing and joking and enjoying the fact that they were participating in something that mattered. That day we all became a cohesive community of concerned, and now mobilized, Americans: 9/12ers, conservatives, Tea Partiers, libertarians, grandmothers and granddaughters, fathers and sons, independents, Republicans, and Democrats. You could find one of anything and/or everybody in the crowd that day.
We had planned to arrive at the stage on Pennsylvania Avenue at around 10:00 A.M. , rally the gathering crowd with some quick comments, organize the various delegations by state, and march together down to the Capitol. Many of the groups that traveled in from across the nation had brought their stateâs colors to fly above the crowd in case things got chaotic. That way, people could find their local groups and march in an orderly procession down Pennsylvania Avenue at the designated time.
Billie Tucker and her First Coast Tea Party group from Jacksonville, Florida, had towed a massive replica of the HMS Dartmouth to Washington with them. The original Dartmouth was the first of the three East India Trading Company ships to dock in Boston Harbor in 1773 before the âMohawksâ emptied their cargo into the ocean in protest. The Jacksonville crew planned on âsailingâ the Dartmouth down Pennsylvania Avenue when the police gave the signal.
Ready to lead the march was a contingent of Revolutionary War reenactors who planned to call the procession forward promptly at 11:00 A.M.
On the morning of the march, we arrived at Freedom Plaza. That is, we were trying to get to Freedom Plaza. In truth, we couldnât get anywhere near the area because that whole quadrant of the city was closed off by the National Park Service officers and D.C. city police who were trying to manage the mass of humanity that had started flooding into the plaza at 7:00 A.M. Freedom-loving activists from all over America were shutting down a good part of the city simply because of their sheer numbers!
So we walked
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