Having Tea with the Captain

I have two close friends with the nicknames of Captain. Both are veterans of the war in Viet Nam and both are heroes as far as I am concerned for serving there while I was sleeping in a warm bed in Chicago. Neither would admit to being a hero, but that's how heroes are, so we will just leave it at that.

The more local of the Captains has introduced me to the idea of going on something of a recon mission next week. He heard about a meeting of some so called "Tea Party" people in our area and we have agreed to check it out. In theory, these folks are just ordinary citizens who have become disaffected by the direction the country has been traveling, particularly in recent times.

I would describe them as tipping point people. Those citizens who have been largely uninvolved, at least in any organized way, in political activism, but have joined some of the rest of us in the "enough is enough" crowd. Everyone has their own tipping point of course, but it's obvious to me that somewhere on that imaginary philosophical line is a median point that has finally been passed.

So, barring an unforeseen circumstance which would scuttle our recon mission, we will be attending the meeting to see if the theoretical people and the actual attendees are the same folks. And since I have been masquerading as a actual writer, it's a small step to become a pretend reporter for an evening as well, so I'll keep my ears open and try to make some mental notes and get back to you with a report in a future post.

In the meantime, there is a candidate for the Republican Party's nomination for Illinois Governor who seems to be the focus of the meeting. His name is Dan Proft, and having visited his website and watched his announcement speech, I found what he said to be intriguing. Saying and doing are different things of course, so this isn't an endorsement of his candidacy, absent more information.

The focus of this blog is concepts and ideas, not my personal preferences on politicians, so I will not be endorsing anyone here. I do have another blog, one which I created the day after tax day last year. It was created after attending the Tea Party Protest in downtown Chicago with my brother (and fellow outraged citizen) and predicting to myself that "Hey, this thing might have legs." I have never settled on exactly what that site would become because I have been mentally toying with several concepts for political activism. So I just registered the site name before all the good ones were taken. The URL of that site is http://americanteapartyvote.blogspot.com/ and I have temporarily named it The American Tea Party. Since registering the name, I have never posted to the site, but today I will post the announcement speech Dan Proft made there and although I don't expect anyone to hang their hat on my recommendations, if I ever endorse anyone for office, it will be on that site, not this one. The videos are informational on my part, not an endorsement. Again, more vetting would be required for that.

Until then, there is a U-Tube video on the right hand side of this site showing Profts appearence on WLS radio while making his first public announcement. The actual speech he made as his formal announcement will be found at the above URL or his website, Dan Proft 2010.

Now for a sip of tea with the Captain.