Item in last week’s Sentinelgrams: "The public is invited to a TEA (Taxed Enough Already) Party in front of the Tippah County Courthouse at 5:15 p.m. Wednesday. This TEA party is to publicly express disagreement with our President and Congress for creating debt for future generations."

Ripley’s "tea party" was part of a nationwide protest scheduled in hundreds of cities and towns on Wednesday, April 15, which was the deadline for filing federal income tax returns.

The goal is to pressure Congress and the states to reject government spending – which has sparked a sharply growing federal deficit -- as a way out of out of the recession. A second objective is to build an anti-spending coalition among regular taxpayers.

What began as a handful of people’s angry blogging about federal spending – the bailouts, the stimulus package, President Obama’s national budget – has turned into scores of "tea parties" across America.

Apparently, what really moved people from yelling at the TV to rally in the streets was the President’s proposed $3.6 trillion budget, a document the Congressional Budget Office predicts will produce record-breaking deficits for years to come.

The TEA parties are also grounded in another reality, far more close to home than incomprehensible figures. Many people who are working hard for their families, don’t want to see that money taken away from them and given to people who aren’t working hard. They also don’t want to see their children and grandchildren saddled with having to repay these huge deficits.

It remains to be seen if the middle class will see this as politically effective.

The original Tea party, of course, refers to the tax protest by colonists in 1773, who dumped chests of British tea into Boston Harbor.

The U. S. was born out of a tax revolt by British colonists, but little happened in the two centuries that followed until the California property-tax revolts of the 1970s and 1980s. The grass-roots movements in that state to slash and cap property taxes led to successful ballot measures from the West Coast to Michigan and Massachusetts.

Those movements showed the validity of the "bottom-up phenomenon," which holds that at some point, when people have had enough, even the politicians have to listen.

Perhaps more than ever, people are watching how lawmakers vote. Those in office would do well to play close attention to their constituencies.

After all, in the words of one citizen: "We put you there, and we can take you out."