Let’s combine forces to form the Brownbagger Movement!

Here’s a suggestion for what we should call ourselves— us ordinary people, progressives, ethnic groups, students, labor unions, other workers, environmentalists, conservationists and poor and middle class people: “Brownbaggers.”

Many people, including David Swanson, at the Progressive Democrat event last night in Santa Rosa, CA, and Thom Hartmann on his radio/TV show, say we have a lot in common with the Teabaggers, but we should remember that even though they get a lot of press, they’re a fringe group of very few people.

But what’s the meaning of the proposed name? Well, we, the Brownbaggers, often make our own lunches. We put them in a brown bag when we go out. We carry them on buses when we go to school and work. We reuse our brown bags. Then we recycle them or repurpose them when they’ve outlived their purpose as lunch bags. And of course, we use brown ex-grocery bags as free filing cabinets and storage boxes. Kids make puppets out of lunch bags and masks out of grocery bags.

We, unlike the Teabaggers, represent a huge swath of the population and we should be able to make a lot of noise. Start bringing brown bags to our events and our rallies and demonstrations. We should wave them and decorate them and wear them. Brown bags are easier to see on TV. It’s hard to spot a tea bag in the crowd. And sometimes they’re hidden in places that don’t see the light of day.

Symbolic connotations: “Brown” is an ordinary folks color and “bagger” gets the attention of the press.

Teabaggers should just throw their tea bags into one of our brown bags so we can put them in the compost heap. Then they should join us to fight the good fight for what we can work on together.

A humble Brownbagger,
Rick Massell