Seriously..Tea?

[ejohnson]

So reading about the Boston Tea Party all I can do is laugh. Americans dressed up like Mohawks Go and dump all the tea on an English ship into the ocean? Really? Then the English go and make another act (because we don’t already have enough to remember) saying that the Americans can’t buy their own tea anymore but only the English. I have never seen grandma’s fight but I imagine this is pretty much how it goes. A grandma gets mad dresses up like a ninja and goes to another grandma and takes all her tea and dumps it in the toilet (she doesn’t even take it for herself, she throws it away so that no one can use it now). Then the other grandma gets mad and tells all her granny friends to not lend any tea to the first grandma! Na na na na na! The moral of this story is that war makes idiot out of you and me. Looking back they seriously spent the time to fight of tea?

[Mr. Delainey]

It's not a conflict over "tea" but over a principle, i.e. Who has decision-making power and/or who should ultimately have it?

The British wanted to preserve a monopoly for the East Indian Tea Company. This meant that the Americans had to purchase tea from this British company at extra expense (instead of purchasing cheaper tea from elsewhere, i.e. another American colony or from another European country). The Americans simply protested the fact that England was imposing its will on the Thirteen Colonies arbitrarily. E.g. The English were driven by a profit motive and the Americans basically took a principled stand saying, "We'll buy and sell our tea where we bloody well feel like it."

These skirmishes and conflicts are fights over principles.