The Price of Tea in St. Paul

http://www.cnn.com/2008/POLITICS/08/30/rnc.protest/index.html
police temporarily detained and photographed at least 50 people who were inside the building.
St. Paul Police spokesman Tom Walsh said they were executing a search warrant.
"The cause for the search warrant is not public at this time," Walsh said.
As many as 30 police officers entered with guns drawn, according to witnesses in the building

What young people stand for is generally ill-informed, misguided and meaningless in these affairs, yet no greater threat to our freedom exists than telling them they are not allowed to stand for it.

Freedom of speech used to be real in the United States. It is just a campaign metaphor now, a faded dream of misty plateaus with one horned rainbow goats and Ronald Reagan standing fifty feet tall. Secret terror raid? Guns up, against teenage dissenters?

For freedom to be real, the young must be able to throw the odd egg or two, break a window, yell across the street and then run back home to rejoin their more timid young peers. Indeed, that egg is the vessel in which we deliver liberty to our descendants. When we bar the egg, we trumpet for the musket...

Those peers are the ones who will eventually be judges and scholars, and Reagan-esque leaders. They will know in their maturity, that freedom can only ever be guided by people who have worn an egg on their lapel. Those leaders will never admit how much it empowered their future, when they saw that the geeky little Jones boy, from the back of the class, had a carton of eggs hidden in his locker. And one was missing.

Democracy is born anew, and only sees light during that dangerous, adrenaline-surged moment when the egg cannot be recalled to the hand; when the smoke bomb sizzles; when the miss-spelled banner unfurls before live cameras. Speeches are just poems about freedom - freedom itself is the electric moment when a trembling young man watches as the crates of tea turn, and roll and drift slowly out on the pre-dawn tide.


Ride for the High Country