Confused Liberal (Part 3)

Alright. I had not intended to write “Part Three” of the Confused Liberal. But shit happens. And yesterday was a shitty day. Please forgive my lack of eloquence. There is no other way to adequately describe my day.

My day began with a notification from the IRS that my tax return had been rejected. REJECTED. Yep. They are not taking it. And curiously enough, it’s not because they owe me money. They are rejecting my tax return because someone else has filed a tax return with my husband’s social security number. Oh, and wait, it gets better. Not only has this person done this for 2008, but they also did it for 2007. Let me just tell you, I would rather have Karl Rove and Rush Limbaugh make a Kristi sandwich than call my husband with news like this. It was a bad start to my day.

Somehow I made it through the day, head pounding, and to the Palinmobile for my commute home. I drove out of the city, past three homeless men with cardboard signs, past apartment buildings I’m blessed to not have to raise my children in, and past a strip mall where I could get any part of my body pierced or tattooed or purchase any type of exotic condom. Traffic flowed well as I passed all of this. THEN ... I hit Stepford County. Ironically enough, President George Bush Freeway is the county line marker. Just as I crossed over the freeway traffic ground to a halt.

I inch along for the next twenty minutes while fielding calls from my husband. He left work early to file a police report about our tax issue and was now home filling out the mound of paperwork required by the IRS and the Social Security Administration to get this cluster fuck cleared up. I handle all our finances and he needed the information contained in my brain to get these forms filled out properly. The pounding in my head is growing worse with each ring of the phone. Little did I know it was about to get a lot worse.

As I approach the first main intersection in Stepford County, I can see up ahead quite a few people standing on the corner of the intersection. This is unusual. People don’t walk much in Texas and certainly rich people don’t hang out on the corners of busy intersections (someone might mistake them for trying to catch a city bus). Let me set the scene of this intersection. It is a shopping mecca. The four corners of this intersection contain Whole Foods, Barnes and Noble, Harolds, Talbots, The Gap, Banana Republic, Gymboree, Nordstrom Rack, Babies ’R Us, two Starbucks, Studio Movie Grill, and several expensive restaurants, specialty boutiques, jewelry stores, and hair salons. This is by far not a complete list, by you get the idea. It is a place where the rich eat, shop, and play.

As I pull up to the traffic light, it dawns on me. This is a tea party. I look over and see a young girl, maybe seventeen, holding a sign that reads “Obama is stealing my future.” OH MY GOD. I’m tempted to roll down my window and explain to her that if indeed her future has been stolen, it is because her college fund (or more likely trust fund) evaporated when the stock market tanked because of the rampant deregulation of Wall Street that occurred before she even started high school. I also wanted to ask her where she and her poster had been when the Iraq war was stealing the LIVES of young men and women not much older than her. Where was her outrage then? The next poster my eyes landed on said, “The Constitution: 230 years in the making—3 months to erase.” What? I wanted to yell, “Hey, Constitution Boy! I bet your hair was really on fire when Bush was in office!”

C’mon tea baggers, have any of you ever protested anything in your lives? Where were you last April 15? And what exactly is it that you are protesting? Your tax rate is the same as it was last year, so it can’t be that President Obama has raised your taxes. Are you protesting that your wealth has been cut in half? Again, President Obama is trying to fix this. If you don’t like how he is going about it, then why not offer up some alternatives? Let me tell you one thing I know for sure: You will NOT fix what is wrong with this country by creating posters of the sitting president with a circle and a slash mark covering his face. You guys need to get a freaking grip. You make more than 95 percent of the rest of the population, you drove to your tea bag party in $50,000 SUVs, and last night you slept in $500,000+ homes. Look around. You’re a bunch of privileged, rich, cry babies.

I’ve often wondered how to get the people I live amongst outraged and motivated to take some action. Now I know. All you need to do is convince them you’re coming for their fat checkbooks. The irony is this. The person they should be holding responsible doesn’t live in Stepford County. He lives in Dallas County. In Preston Hollow. Behind a gate. With Secret Service protection for which they are paying.