She lost everything during the financial crisis. Then she helped lead the tea party.
PERSPECTIVE | ‘I don’t want the government taking care of me’
Photograph and interview by KK Ottesen.
Jenny Beth Martin, 47, became active in the tea party movement at its inception, first locally in Georgia and then as a co-founder and now president of the national Tea Party Patriots, which focuses on fiscal responsibility, free markets and limited government.
I’ve lived through financial crisis. And it puts things in perspective. In 2007 and 2008, my husband at the time, his business went through trouble. He wound up having to close his business, and we ultimately filed personal bankruptcy. We had little kids. We lost everything. We lost our house. We lost our cars. We were cleaning our neighbors’ homes and cleaning their bathrooms. Selling stuff at garage sales just to get cash to be able to survive.
So that fall, when the TARP bill passed, the bank bailouts, we sat there watching and going: Wait a minute, this is wrong. Businesses fail. Our business failed. And as much as life sucks right now, we’re rolling up our sleeves and finding a way to rebuild. I don’t want the government taking care of me, and I sure don’t want the government taking care of these other businesses. So fast-forward a couple months. President Obama becomes president, and the stimulus bill passes. Rick Santelli has this rant on CNBC: The stimulus bill is awful. Our Founding Fathers would be turning over in their graves. Who here wants to pay for your neighbor’s home who has more bathrooms than you, and they can’t even afford it? We should have a tea party just like our Founding Fathers. I heard that on the radio and knew I had to be involved. I started tweeting about it using #TCOT and #SGP. Smart girl politics and top conservatives on Twitter.
The next day, we got on a conference call, about 22 of us, and decided we’re going to have a tea party. Seven days later, we had 48 tea parties across the country with 35,000 people in attendance. I had never even been to a protest before. I didn’t even know to bring a bullhorn. Initially, the protests were focused towards Democrats, because they were in control, but when Republicans began to have control of the House our focus wound up being on Republicans as much as Democrats. But it wasn’t about elections. It was about issues and legislation. The debt that our country faces. I want to make sure that we’re doing something that’s making our country better for my children and their children.
I think one moment when I really did stop and just go, I can’t believe that I’m doing this — this is not what I ever pictured my life to be, was when Obamacare was being argued in front of the Supreme Court in 2012. I was out there for all three days. I just remember thinking: I’m one of those people who protest outside of the Supreme Court. Wait, I’m one of those people who organized a protest outside the Supreme Court.
There is always a struggle between people who have power and people who want to be free. This isn’t new. But the desire to be free is such a strong, innate desire in all of us that I am optimistic. So as difficult as things are in our country, we’re not in the middle of a revolution, we’re not in the middle of a civil war, and we’re not in the middle of World War II. We have repealed constitutional amendments. We ended slavery. We stopped segregation. And the problems that face us today, we’re going to be able to overcome them.
This essay originally appeared in The Washington Post Magazine.
