Thanks to the Union Leader’s Melanie Plenda for the Free Keene mention in her article about this weekend’s Live Free or Die Festival:
JAFFREY – Call them liberty lovers, Libertarians, radicals or rogues — just don’t call them Tea Partiers.
Those are fighting words — metaphorically speaking — for the peace-loving folk who came out to rally for four days in a field at the 5th annual Live Free or Die Rally this weekend.
Rally organizers and the group that helps sponsor the event — The Citizens Alliance Against Creepy Politics — describe themselves as a non-profit, non-aligned, pro-freedom organization that addresses a wide range of political issues.
Those in attendance may not agree on everything, but the one area there’s consensus: They are not the Tea Party.
“I agree with some of it,” said Stacy Coutu, of Jaffrey, of the Tea Party movement. “But I think with them, if you don’t think just like them, you become an outcast. With us, it’s just the opposite.”
The rally is meant for everyone, said Tiffany Marler of North Conway.
“The tea parties have been hijacked by the more neo con Republicans,” said Marler. “Personally, I’m an anarchist.”
Marler and others maintained the event is somewhat apolitical. They said it was simply an event to speak one’s mind and enjoy the right to peaceably assemble and openly carry firearms just because they could.
Other rally goers echoed the sentiment. Joan Bastek of Manchester said she’s part of the 9/12 party, but that she likes coming to the rallies to mix with Free Staters, Keeniacs (members of the Free Keene movement) and others who may not think exactly as she does.
Participants stressed a big-tent philosophy, saying “even leftists like liberty.”
Not to mention, they said, Live Free or Die has been around for years before the Tea Party movement started grabbing headlines.
Coutu’s husband, local handyman Jean Coutu, started the Live Free or Die Rally. About five years ago he had become disenchanted with what he was hearing when it came to free speech and liberty.
“He just came home one day and out of nowhere he said ‘I think I want to have a rally,'” she said. “At first I was like, ‘A rally? What do you mean a rally? . . . But I was like, ‘Great. Who doesn’t love a party?'”
The first year was anything but a party. Some people in Jaffrey dismissed the event as racist and anti-Semitic and tried to stop it from happening.
“Nothing could be further from the truth,” Coutu said. “None of us are racist, everybody is welcome . . . But it was new, and that scared people.”
Picketers protested the event.
“But I watched them,” Coutu said. “And the more they saw what was going on and what people were actually saying and that no one was hating anybody, by the end of the day, those people with the signs were walking around with us eating hot dogs.”
Coutu said that’s the biggest difference between their event and Tea Party rallies.
“I want people to feel free to come here to say what’s on their minds,” she said. “And we are not going to hate you for what you think. We aren’t going to hate you if your views are outside of the box of what we think. You are still welcome at the rally.”
After all, she said, that’s what America is about.
“The people who built this country did so by standing on a stump and shouting their ideas,” Coutu said.
“This is grassroots. This country is made up of us. We are the ones who will make change.”
