Of late, it has become fashionable to question the intelligence, decency, competence, and/or humanity of those holding an opposing political view.

While those on the “right” need to recognize that this is bad and stop doing it, those on the “left” claim to know better- and yet keep doing it anyway.

So, in an attempt to help those on the liberal or progressive or populist or whatnot end of the spectrum live up to their professed ideals during this difficult time of government shutdown, I am going to delve into the mind of the dreaded “Tea Party” and the thinking behind the Tea Party Government Shutdown.

Yes, I know it’s getting close to Halloween. Are you spooked yet?

I want to get one quick thing out of the way, it’s largely moot, but it’s important to bear in mind. There is no Tea Party. There are several large, national organizations that have “Tea Party” in their name; however, the only “real” Tea Parties in this country are just as leaderless and fluid as the Occupy movement. The whole teabag thing and “Taxed Enough Already” were just memes that gave a wide variety of right-leaning people a shared way to voice their frustrations. That’s it. Anyone who claims to speak for “The Tea Party” is lying, just like anybody who claims to speak for all teenagers.

Okay, so how did a non-organization wind up holding the Federal budget hostage and causing a government shutdown?

Well, just because they’re not actually a “real” organization doesn’t mean that there aren’t certain shared threads uniting a whole bunch of disparate individuals into an amoeba-like juggernaut- a shapeless and implacable political force.

The shared threads? They’re angry. Well, really they’re scared and angry.

They are terrified that any moment now they are going to lose their jobs, their homes, their health, their children, their rights, their freedoms, their retirement, and a thousand other important things that everyone wants to keep safe. They are desperately frightened that their nation is being bought out by special interests who are making ordinary folks’ lives worse for the benefit of a select few. They are mortified by the implications of this for the future and for their children’s futures.

And they are angry that no one is taking their concerns seriously. They are furious that people keep telling them that they can’t do a damned thing about it.

Sounds like a lot of liberals, doesn’t it? Heck, it sounds a lot like the Occupy movement.

Sure, there are plenty of bucktoothed yahoos on TV spouting racist crap or talking about how “the gays” are ruining `Murka. Every day, Facebook is filled with the latest outrageous gaffe committed by some “Tea Party Republican”. Fair enough, but try looking from the other side sometime- try watching Fox News. They’ve got plenty of footage of pot-smoking morons in dreadlocks talking about how we all need to align our consciousness-balancing vectors or something equally unfathomable.

Do those potheads really represent a majority of liberals? Was Occupy Wall Street nothing more than a gathering of “central casting” stereotypes from a Woodstock reenactment? Of course not.

The same is true of the Tea Parties. They are being misrepresented as idiotic yokels by people who are supposed to know better. I won’t blame it on paranoid conspiracy theories, I will instead chalk this up to ratings-hunting and the difficulty of telling stories accurately in soundbites. Regardless, it’s bad journalism and both sides need to stop.

Sorry, I promised to get into how these Tea Party people can be perfectly fine with shutting down the government and not be complete morons.

Let’s start with a simple premise- your government is no longer a force for good in the world. Whether you thought it was before or not is irrelevant to the current discussion. There is a wide difference of opinion throughout the Tea Party and amongst conservatives and libertarians on the concept of “good” government, so we’ll let that lie.

So just imagine that your government is no longer a force for good. Maybe it’s been taken over by Big Business or the Military-Industrial Complex. Perchance somehow the Bavarian Illuminati are involved. Maybe the rich and powerful have just figured out how to pit left and right against each other to the point of rendering the body politic ineffectual. Regardless of how you think it happened- imagine that your government has crossed the line from helpful to dangerous.

There are a wide variety of reasons that someone could come to this conclusion. Perhaps they fought in two poorly-managed wars simultaneously then came home with PTSD and no hope for a better future. Maybe they lost their home to mortgage sharks and the government didn’t do anything about it; or, perhaps someone from the state took their children over a misunderstanding. Perchance they lost their business over some arcane regulation that no one thought applied until they got socked with a million-dollar fine. Heck, maybe they just got too many undeserved traffic tickets from cops because they commuted past a lot of speed traps. It doesn’t matter.

The point is that in most cases something very real happened to these people (or to someone close to them) that convinced them that our government is either not protecting its citizens, or worse- is actively hurting the people it should be helping.

Again, let’s leave aside the conspiracy theories. Everybody has them- it’s Monsanto, it’s the Bilderbergers, it’s the Jews, it’s the Big Banks, it’s the defense contractors… WHO is taking America away from the People is irrelevant to the bigger picture.

Let’s just boil this down to its bare essentials:

People are hurting and their government isn’t helping them.

Holy crap! I think I just heard liberals and conservatives agreeing on something! Hell, I think I just heard the Tea Party and Occupy movements agreeing on something!

The difference between the sides is not the acknowledgement that there is a problem, it’s what they believe they can do about it. Let’s take a peek at how history has played out:

1. The Tea Party movement demanded that the government be accountable to the People.
2. The establishment politicians ignored them and millions of people’s lives got worse.
3. The Occupy movement demanded that the government be accountable to the People.
4. The establishment politicians ignored them and millions of people’s lives got worse.
5. The Tea Party movement got a bunch of people elected to the federal government with the express purpose of forcing that government to be accountable.
6. The establishment politicians ignored them and millions of people’s lives got worse.
7. The Occupy movement got nobody elected.
8. The establishment politicians ignored them and millions of people’s lives got worse.
9. The Tea Party shut down the government.
10. The establishment politicians united in calling the Tea Party stupid, selfish, short-sighted, and foolish.

Okay, wait a minute.

A headless, amoeba-like mass of “backwoods” politicians with nothing uniting them beyond a burning distrust of the government establishment just punched said establishment in the nose. Not with guns or bombs or any other form of violence, but by using a legal (if extreme) piece of parliamentary manuevering. That these people did not resort to violence given the intensity of their convictions should stand as evidence of their intent to do good rather than ill in the long term.

Mind you, I say this as someone deeply frustrated by this shutdown. It is delaying the sale of the house I moved out of almost a month ago because the would-be buyers are trying to use a Federal mortgage program. So, I would very much like this shutdown to be over.

Okay, back to the point. Imagine, if you will, that Occupy had done exactly as the Tea Parties have done- rallied their might to replace moderate (in this case) Democrats with hardcore radicals who were willing to stalemate the government to stop “corporate welfare” or to rein in the investment firms that caused the housing crisis.

It seems to me that for just one moment, there might have been the possibility of the Federal government of the United States being held accountable by both the right and the left at the same time. Not business-as-usual, not status quo, not The Spice Must Flow… no, an actual compulsion for our government to take action not just for the happy and contented but the disempowered and hurting.

Is that such a bad thing?

Sure, the shutdown is a pain in the ass. My ass, amongst many. It’s definitely not the sort of thing we want to see every day. Yet this could be, and should be, an opportunity for a coalition to be built- just not between party leaders and the President.

No, this is a chance for the outer wings of the two parties to unite to tear down the veil separating Congress (and Washington D.C.) from the rest of us. This is a chance for the Tea Party and the liberal Democrats to eliminate loopholes and perks and exceptions for members of Congress. This is a chance to end corporate subsidies to industries that pad their bottom lines instead of being good corporate citizens. This is a chance to tell the NSA where to shove their surveillance programs!

But only if the left can stop demonizing the Tea Party and recognize that we all have a lot in common.

We’re all human.  We are all fallible and limited in our understanding of the world. If we can see beyond that and direct our members of Congress (on both sides) at certain narrow areas of policy agreement (areas that the party leadership on both sides want to avoid talking about) then this shutdown can be more than a nuisance.

It can be a new beginning for the America we all want to be living in.