After the Bernard Gates / Cambridge incident, President Obama deflected criticism of his unwarranted intervention by referring to the situation as “a teachable moment.”

What? Teachable? I don’t think he was referring to himself and the intrusion by the office of the President into a local matter he had no business commenting on. So, the one thing that I can personally take away from this incident is that what President Obama and I consider “teachable” are two drastically different things.

I believe a “teachable moment” occurred last weekend, at the 9-12 March on Washington. While the actual attendance numbers will never be known, they range from a distorted “tens of thousands” (AP/MSNBC) to as many as one to two million (ABC/Daily Mail) and on the following Monday, representatives of the U.S. National Park Service were quoted off the record with even higher numbers, stating the rally could have been the largest of its’ kind to ever be held on the mall in Washington.

But are the numbers critical? I don’t think so. The bottom line is that we shut down the highways, crippled the ground transportation system and completely overwhelmed every single estimate of participation. They had no clue what to expect and they were all blown out the door.

So when was the teachable moment? It probably occurred somewhere between White House Spokesman Robert Gibbs claiming "I don't know who the group is," when asked for his reaction to the rally, and before the stage had even been disassembled, Senior White House Advisor David Axelrod stated "My message to [the protesters] is they're wrong."

Apparently, the teachable moment isn’t for the White House – which is engaged in one of the most arrogant displays of narcissism and partisanship displayed by our government in the modern era. Not one among us is stupid enough to believe that when one to two million people from all walks of life deposit themselves on the lawn of the capitol building that the government doesn’t know exactly whose rally it is. Didn’t someone approve a permit?

But then again, this is the same song and dance the White House played earlier this year, when Gibbs said “The president is unaware of the tea parties,” yet less than a week later at one of his signature, content and crowd controlled town hall meetings, President Obama stated “When you see, you know, those of you that are watching certain news channels on which I'm not very popular, and you see folks waving tea bags around, let me just remind them that I am happy to have a serious conversation about how we are going to cut our health care costs down over the long term, how we are going to stabilize Social Security.”

So, where is the so-called “teachable moment?” I have really been giving this some serious thought over the past several days. I felt that getting this story right was far more important than getting it out quickly. And here’s what I took away from my experience as an observer and participant in the 9-12 March on Washington.

First, the White House is paying attention to the Tea Party movement. They have been all along. And as they watch the number of participants multiply like a great constitutional virus, I believe it causes them a great deal of concern. This would explain the remarkable and unexplainable urgency which defines their myriad legislative efforts, especially when you consider how many years it would be before any of the enacted legislation is set in motion.

It also goes a long way in explaining the lengths they have gone to paint the participants as angry racists who are too ignorant and stupid to possibly understand how government works. 

In fact, those were close to the exact words used by the aforementioned Axelrod who said the day after the event:

[The participants in the 9-12 March on Washington are] "the angriest and most strident" voices and not representative of the feelings of a majority of Americans. "One of the great things about our country is people can express themselves even if they're not representative of the majority," Axelrod said on "Face the Nation." 

The message was clear an unambiguous. If you marched, you’re nothing but a hater who is in the minority. "I don't think we ought to be distracted by that," Axelrod said.

So, teachable moment #1 is that regardless of what they say publicly, the White House is CLEARLY aware of the Tea Party movement, and they would prefer that you take your ideas of limited government and shove them… where the Washington Monument no longer casts a shadow.

Teachable moment number two... while notable leftists and the media inaccurately portray Tea Party protesters as racists, they are guilty of their own discrimination, and that is classism.

On the Friday before the march, over a 12 hour period, I literally watched the per capita income of Washington D.C. and the surrounding area plummet as modest blue collar Americans from all walks of life descended in the area. Now, a lot of these folks are just like me, very average American citizens. On the other hand, some of them looked like they were plucked from a biker bar somewhere between Arlington and Sturgis. But the difference between our government and myself, is that on multiple occasions, I stopped what I was doing, sometimes to help with luggage, sometimes just to chat, and reached out to this activist contingent.

What I discovered is that you can't judge a book by it's cover. Or a Tea Party protester by their leather chaps and bandanna. Just like myself, these are people who know the issues, who have educated themselves to an amazing degree on both current events and national history in an incredibly short period of time – they know what they believe in and have the facts to intelligently argue their positions.

Which is one of the reasons I stated previously that the White House is aware of the Tea Party movement, and concerned by it – regardless of their public facade and rhetoric. These folks are “The Forgotten Man” - as described by author Amity Schlaes in her book on the Great Depression by the same name. The blue collar folks who arrived in D.C. for the march on Washington are the salt of the earth. They are the mechanics, the contractors, the laborers… the type of people who literally keep our nation running, pay a huge amount of taxes, and have never even thought about being politically active… until now. 

Something changed. Personally, I don’t think it was corruption – Washington has been corrupt for as long as anyone can remember. I think it was the emergence of disgusting double standards and bailout after bailout to massive corporations who continue to lay these folks off, cut their credit lines and generally diminish the quality of their lives.

If these folks continue to organize as I believe they will, and a tax revolt or national work stoppage is born out of their frustrations, compounded by the Washington egghead set telling them to shut up and go away, you will see an amazing and dramatic impact on our nation. Put simply – this large, homogeneous blue-collar group IS America. Everything good, decent and right about our nation are found here, in the dreams and aspirations of these individuals. They aren’t going away, and Washington ignores them at their own peril.

But back to my “Teachable moment #2,” While the media, and our current government (the GOP included) infer charges of racism towards the Tea Party movement, this charge is largely to camouflage their own classism. The power elites of our society have no desire to commune with Joe Sixpack. Sure, they’ll take him as a labor force, or an income stream, or a natural resource – say like the machines of “The Matrix,” growing and harvesting human beings as an energy source. But at the end of the day they are interested in only their own power, and will discard anything else like the trash they believe it to be.

And that’s exactly how I feel when the White House continues to be so openly and arrogantly dismissive of a huge chunk of the American population. A majority? Debatable. But for someone who ran a campaign which promised bipartisan governance, to respect all points of view, the administration sure gives the finger to this group of hardworking Americans who have gathered repeatedly to express their opinion and demand a redress of grievances.

Which brings me, finally, to “Teachable moment #3” – the myth of the angry mob.

In early August of this year, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, Senator Barbara Boxer  and many of their democrat colleagues labeled health care reform bill protesters as nothing but "angry mobs" and accusing them of swastika carrying "brown shirt tactics."

In any other period of American history, such a statement would have resulted in these politicians being pointed to the door and warned not to let it hit them in the posterior on the way out. Yet, there was no such outrage. Not from leftists – who agree with the sentiment as they fight to retain the power they inherited with the slimmest of majorities, and not from conservatives, who are pretty much used to being verbally abused in this manner. 

In actuality, if these Americans were truly an “angry mob” you would probably expect riots in the streets after being called out in this public and insulting manner. Yet, there were no such responses.

I return again to my previous supposition regarding the newly discovered activism of the middle class, and how worrisome this should be to status-quo career politicians. Speaking as a member of the aforementioned mob, we’re new at this. We’re frustrated to no ends by people who supposedly work for us – operating in a manner inconsistent with that commission. We are scared and annoyed because by employing the narrowest degree of common sense, we can see that the current fiscal policy of “print and spend” is going to end badly, and we wonder why we are working so hard and restricting our own lifestyles when those charged with our governance do no such thing.

So perhaps our mannerisms in a town hall setting don’t reflect Robert’s Rules of Order. But when we have called for months and been met with busy signals; when we have emailed and received no response or have been blocked because the individual we were trying to contact was outside of our district; when all we received for the physical letters we have mailed were smug form responses; or in that rare instance where we actually made contact with a snotty staff member who, rather than doing their job and taking our message to pass along, began to lecture us about how and why we were wrong on whatever issue motivated us in the first place – if you are looking for a group who SHOULD be pissed off, that would be us.

But all of this is typical for our government. It reminds me of an anecdotal story about the United States Post Office, which recently, after receiving millions of complaints about wait times in their lobbies being too long did the most obvious and reasonable thing they could do… they removed the clocks.

Again, clearly, despite the rhetoric, we have their attention. And not in a good way. They are afraid, and they should be. But why they continue to pour gasoline on this fire is a question I cannot readily explain. So, what you have is a very frustrated group, and with exceptional, justifiable reason. But while the major media focused on a handful of controversial signs at the March on Washington, that sample was hardly representative of the truth. Let me describe to you what I saw.

About one in three protesters carried a sign or a flag. The predominant flag of the day was the historically significant yellow Gadsden banner, and the vast majority of the signs were homemade and relatively clever. In the five hours I actively participated in the gathering and the march, not once did I see a sign that attacked President Obama personally. While many were critical of the President by name, they did so attached to a specific policy that the owner opposed. Some individuals accented their clothing with astroturf as a direct response to Speaker Pelosi’s fallacious insinuations that “this [tea party] initiative is funded by the high end – we call call it astroturf, it’s not really a grassroots movement.”

Nearly every one of these people paid their own way, took time off of work and traveled long distances – there were representatives from every state in the union present – to be there. To question the sincerity of this movement in such a manner and mock its’ motivation is reprehensible at best – and un-American at worst. 

Unlike the majority of participants in this event, Speaker Pelosi has probably never even mowed her own lawn, she wouldn’t know an authentic blade of grass if one up and bit her on the astroturf.

On Pennsylvania Avenue, people were visibly moved when the dome of the capitol building became visible. As we passed the First Amendment Center, where the text of that fundamental principle as enumerated in the bill of rights is displayed on a massive wall, chills ran down my spine, and looking at the participants around me, I could sense others were affected the same way. On the capital lawn, grown men got misty and embraced, the primary emotion was not anger – but pride in our nation and the sincere hope that our elected representatives were seeing our efforts on this grand scale, and would take heed.

Even the way that the massive crowd cleaned up the grounds as the event drew to a close was ultimately symbolic of the respect the participants hold for our nation and its’ capitol, unlike the widely publicized photos which were taken after President Obama’s inauguration, of the mall ankle deep in refuse. Apparently this mob is not only angry  but also tidy, perhaps even a bit fastidious - even recyclables were collected and sorted.

So, teachable moment #3 is a pretty simple concept. Tea Party participants may be growing in numbers, and may be significantly frustrated by their own government working against their will, but they are hardly an angry mob. At least for the moment.

Now I realize that this account flies directly in the face of what you have seen or heard on most of the major media, and that is disconcerting to me. While I have always believed that media bias exists, I had no idea to what degree until I witnessed the coverage of an event like this that I personally attended.

So, Washington, we understand your game. We know you are paying attention. We know you would prefer to ignore us. And we know that you will push your unconstitutional big-government agenda, designed only to expand your own power, as long as you can.

One sign I saw at the march said… “We came in peace… this time.” While I have no illusions that the Obama administration will listen to anyone with a viewpoint divergent to their own, perhaps it’s time for the congress to heed that message, lest this event is forced to return.

"Much learning does not teach understanding."

– Heraclitus, 535 - 475 BC

Jeff Williams is a candidate for Pullman City Council, Ward 1 Position 7