A taxing situation

Right now I feel pretty good about myself. I paid my taxes today and I'm not even up for a job with the Obama administration. For most of us, settling up with Uncle Sam is about as much of a patriotic sacrifice as we're called on to make - so much as I'd rather not sign that check, it does make me feel a bit Yankee Doodley to do it.
Which makes me wonder about the folks heading out to the latter-day tea parties today. I've been getting notices and invites to these affairs for weeks -- usually done up in star-spangled red, white and blue with an eagle or two tossed in for good measure. But all these folks are intending to do is gripe that their government -- and let me say that once again, their government -- has figured to be their fair share of the operating cost for their country. So, they want to hark back to the Boston Tea Party and throw a public fit.
Well, there's a difference between the folks mailing bags of Lipton to their Congresspeople and the guys who tossed British tea into Boston Harbor in the dark of the night. Two hundred thirty six years ago, those fellows didn't have Congresspeople to send tea to -- it was the lack of representation in levying it, not the tea tax per se, that they took radical issue with, and ultimately what the Spirit of '76, Valley Forge and Yorktown were meant to set aright.
It's fine with me if folks don't like paying taxes, fine with me if they make a fuss and complain, but it's not fine to bastardize history in the process.