Where Have I Seen This Before?

1773. The colonies are feeling oppressed. An out of touch monarch is ruling from a distance and demanding that his distant subjects continue to bend to the whims of his arrogance. In order to fix the budget crisis across the sea, it was decided that taxes levied on the colonists of this New World would fix the debts run up by years of war and poor spending habits. After the Stamp Act of 1765 had taxed colonists on virtually every piece of printed paper they used, from playing cards and business licenses to newspapers and legal documents, the Townshend Acts of 1767 went a step further, taxing essentials such as paint, paper, glass, lead and tea. 

The tea. That was the deal-breaker. These were, after all, British subjects. Mess with their playing cards, but not their tea.

Oh. And the Boston Massacre. In 1770, those same colonists were fed up with the ubiquitous presence of British soldiers in their streets. A group of unruly types threw snowballs at a sentinel guarding the Customs House. Reinforcements arrived and fired into the "mob," killing five and wounding six. 

Maybe tea wasn't such a big thing after all.

If they were British. 

These were Americans, and they called themselves the Sons of Liberty. Others called them tea smugglers, getting around that heavy tax by avoiding the King's hefty taxes. Men such as John Hancock and Samuel Adams. As an act of protest, a large group of protesters voted to refuse to pay taxes on the imported tea. To make their point more clearly, a group of men dressed in native garb boarded three ships and threw three hundred forty-two chests of tea into Boston Harbor. Men such as Patrick Henry, Paul Revere, and the aforementioned Adams and Hancock. No one is really sure who actually did the deed, since they were "in disguise." They hacked open the chests so their contents would be spilled into the water. It took more than one hundred men more than three hours to destroy forty-five tons of tea with a current market value of nearly a million dollars. 

We refer to these men today as "patriots." 

Not terrorists. 

Not thugs.

They knew how to change things in a way that has become known as "revolutionary." 

In two hundred fifty years, I hope that's how they talk about what happened in the spring of 2020.