Oh, the Taxpayer March

Something seemed to be up when, on my run this morning, I passed many a smiling middle-aged person carrying "Hands off my Body," and "Don't Tread on me Signs." It wasn't until later when the bf and I went to The National Gallery of Art to go poster shopping that it became clear that the few people I had seen earlier were actually part of a much larger rally on The Mall.

The gathering, dubbed the "Taxpayer March," is supposed to be a conservative protest against Obama, health care, big government, and the like based on the left's own tactics. The clever slogans--"Bury Obamacare with Kennedy," ballsy t-shirts, and images of Obama with a Joker were definitely analogous to the loud signs, slogans, and Devil-horn Bush images of the Iraq War protests.

However, this protest looked like a meek imitation. Instead of lots of young people angrily storming the streets, there were many middle-aged people ambling down the road, occasionally stopping for a hot dog from a street vendor. From far away, the taxpaying marchers could have been mistaken for tourists; only their politically incorrect t-shirts gave them away.

But a few key differences between the this rally and the anti-war ones of the Bush era left me queasy. First, it struck me as odd that so many people looked the same in terms of age (hello AARP), accent (Southern), style (trucker), and--most obviously--race (white). I struggled to find one Asian or Hispanic protester. This demographic, coupled with the relatively small size of the protest, seemed to reflect the interests of a small group of people. Secondly, the protest was also ambiguous. With anti-war protests, you know that the goal is to end the war. Today, it was sometimes to end health care reform, sometimes to end taxes. Third, I saw lots of people wearing the same sort of gear, which struck me as very well organized. As in so well organized it might have been by a third, corporately-tied party.

Perhaps I was most unnerved by my own prejudices, by how different the protesters were from people I work and go to school with. But more than that, I am worried that this feeling of difference is what moves these protesters to rally in DC. They are from a demographic that's almost as far from President Obama as they can be, on the surface in terms of race and income. I worry that this separation now obscures deeper similarities: the hard-working background, the support of civil liberties, and--above all--the strong belief in The United State of America.