By this time tomorrow, the tea parties will be over. People will be at home, probably watching Fox News whether they like the channel or not; it’s about the only game in town where these parties are being covered except in the most derogatory and juvenile fashion. The poor, uneducated and easy to command slur has been expanded to cover the entire right, not just evangelical Christians.

By this time tomorrow, we’ll have protested, carried our signs, maybe said a few words before the camera. A tiny percentage of those people will have their 15 seconds of fame – and the video will go viral, extending it to 15 minutes or even more. We may have another Joe the Plumber or Tito the Builder; people who said the right thing at the right time and energized us all. We’ll also be plagued by mobys and fringe lunatics and by people who were nervous about speaking in front of the camera and said something stupid.

The media will eventually stop smirking about “teabagging” like a junior high science class learning about the planets. (Uranus! get it? huh? Ur-ANUS! heehee!) Probably ten minutes after people have forgotten that we called these protests tea parties, not teabagging. Plastic turkey, redux. Everything about April 15th will be dissected. The discussion will continue to be channeled toward questions like, “Do you think they know that President Obama cut taxes for most of them?” (That $13 bucks helped a lot, thanks! But I would have preferred the promised net spending cut.) They won’t speculate who’s eventually going to pay that money back, if we’re not going to do it. The media will show a sign complaining about pork, and wonder if the rubes have any idea what a teeny little percentage pork comprises of overall spending.  They won’t wonder about the pervasive corruption associated with pork, nor will they wonder why overall spending is so ridiculously high.

A friend of mine suggested that the only reason we have polls is so the media can tell how much we’ve been demoralized and know where to focus their efforts. I don’t buy into conspiracy theories – except, to some extent, a “conspiracy of shared values” and Obama has proved his willingness to manipulate people into sharing those values. But certainly what this guy predicted in 1985 has been happening. We are far more conditioned to accept big government and socialism than we were thirty years ago.

Both parties in Congress will resume blithely ignoring us and continue the borrow, spend, borrow pattern. Unless we keep the heat on. This is the first protest for a lot of people. What we’re doing is important; I’m not discounting that. But it can’t end here and still be effective. All the reasons why you should attend a tea party are reasons why we need to stay involved afterwards.

Stay in touch with the people who organized the tea party you attend. Get on local mailing lists, stay in touch with people, and start thinking about other ways we can take action at the local level, whether swarming your Representative’s Town Hall meetings and putting him on the spot with awkward questions about this vote or that pork project, or connecting with your state-level representation to talk about ways to minimize federal interference. And hang onto your sign; you might need it again in July – on Independence Day.