Tax Day Tea Party in Washington, DC

Judicial Watch, Inc. legal assistant Cristina Rotaru, a legal immigrant from the former Soviet Block and recently naturalized U.S. citizen, attended the protest rally. Here are some of her impressions and photos:

I had my very first experience of political activism at the Tax Day Tea party last Wednesday, on a dreary, rain-soaked day in Lafayette Square, across from the White House. The sound system on the stage was bad. I couldn’t hear the speakers past the third inner circle, so I decided to "picket," to walk around the park proudly carrying my sign to get a better feel for the spirit of the rally.

As I mingled with the other protestors, took photographs and chuckled at the cleverness of some of the signs, I realized I wasn’t the only political novice there. It’s not only that those I encountered were not "extremists" or "right-wing nuts manipulated by evil republicans" or the "wealthiest people in America" as the Obama administration and its porta voce, mainstream media, claim.

Most of the protestors I encountered had never been to a rally, had never done anything overtly political. They were as wide-eyed, genuinely moved and as incredulous as I, a brand-new American, was: The one question that I was asked more than once was, "Can you believe what’s happening?"

Ironically, in the shrill vilification of this true grassroots movement I can distinctly hear the scripted, pumped-up "denunciations" of the "class enemy" and "traitors of the working people and of the Party" of my youth, in Eastern Europe, that sent millions of people to the gulag. With my trained ear, I can hear distinctly a disdain for the Constitution and the citizenry of this nation in the name of "social justice" and the "have-nots" or whatever the newspeak is for the defunct "proletariat." That’s part of what I tried to capture in my sign, the first in the pictures below.