I was fascinated by the parallels between my own experience and the experiences of this fellow Kevin Smith. Now, I think the Tea Party movement is full of destructive elements and is not well informed, but there is an element of their frustration with broken government that I agree with. I hope that people like Smith are able to clean up their movement, remove the crooks from positions of power, get their members informed about what really matters, and play a positive role. I have serious doubts he will succeed, but I wish him the best.

The parallels I found interesting were that Smith had an inside view of corrupt profit-takers, subverting the volunteer efforts and altruism of people like him for the personal profit of those who controlled the organization, and that he was of course in the South, where such corrupt practices seem commonplace. And that after Smith's whistleblowing, the corrupt enterprise was de-listed from its national association. They even had donations taken in on a personal PayPal account, an effective way to cover up all kinds of abuses.

Where the parallels end is where others followed Smith out the door from the corrupt enterprise, whereas in my own experience, there was no real allegiance to the organizations' purported principles by just about anyone else, so of course no one else was willing to sacrifice their social standing in order to take a principled stand. (At no time did I expect anyone else in my organization to take a stand, and of course they lived up to my lowest expectations.) The corrupt organization I poured my time into used a set of "principles" as a tool to deceive people like me into contributing my and others' efforts. This is fraud of the most cynical kind. There are also civil and criminal penalties associated with this kind of fraud.

Good luck, Kevin Smith, and please do what you can to rid your movement of fraudsters, best you can. Ultimately, you will fail to root them all out, but you will likely do some bit of good, and you can be happy that you did the right thing.

I found this Thomas Jefferson quote comforting as I had to endure my firestorm:

In matters of fashion, swim with the current. In matters of conscience, stand like a rock.