The September 12 march on Washington was more than a huge Tea Party event. D.C. police and network news organizations estimated the throngs of civic-minded Americans of between 1.5 to 2 million people. But, this sea of humanity walking down the heart of our nation’s capital was more than citizens fed up with out-of-control government spending, or Obama Care.
What happened on Saturday was only a glimpse of the awakening of what Richard Nixon once called the Silent Majority. To characterize this event as a seismic shift of attitude towards President Barack Obama’s policies would be a serious miscalculation.
This was no shift!
Truth be told, a sleeping giant who may have taken some concepts of liberty, self determination, a free market economy, and the benefits of small government for granted, have responded to a new call. Many of these people who participated in the protest have never done anything like it in their lives.
This is a very good thing.
These people of many different walks of life were not responding to a cult of personality. Conservatives don’t operate that way. We don’t need too. And for as much as some Conservative writers and politicians tried to mistakenly argue that Conservatism needs to be redefined, or reshaped, or repackaged, or the age of Ronald Reagan is dead, I say look at the amount of people who showed up to make their voices heard.
This is a reformation movement because the people are responding to Conservative ideas that don’t need to be tweaked one bit. They only need to be properly represented. And this is exactly what President Obama and the rest of the Democrats are desperately afraid of.
Samuel Gonzalez, The Last Tradition, 9/14/09
