This year’s festival kickoff on Saturday was notable for an incessantly strong wind, like an omnipresent bully shoving you, hard, for hours on end.

And yet they came in droves. Organizers expected especially high numbers this year, with people in search of cost-free diversions in a season of fiscal belt-tightening. It seemed, to your humble correspondent, a most heart-warming protest.

A troop of Boy Scouts sat under the pink trees in the shadow of the Capitol building and learned about their government. Kite-flyers took full advantage of the squall on the mall. More languages were represented than I could count.

This festival is different from others, in that there are few vendors and the actual goings-on are a side-show to the main event. People come to the Cherry Blossom Festival, ultimately, because we agree, as a people, that on this day in April we will gather in the park to play in the sun and look at flowers together.

Amid two stubborn wars and an economic crisis of generational proportions, Americans and earthlings from far and wide still found cause to celebrate.  It was as if, in one gentle pink voice, we said, “Governments, you can keep your crisis, thank you. Do what we pay you for, and don’t expect us to consume our way out of this mess you created. We’ll be at the park, enjoying the company of one another and the sway of the flowers in the breeze – both of which, mind you, are free.”

Washingtonians turned over their hard-earned treasure to Uncle Sam on this gloomy tax day. And some joined groups across America in the unfortunately named “teabag” movement, using the symbolism of tax day to protest record-breaking government spending.

Like the weather, the protests in D.C. were dampened. Their teabags as soggy as the grass, the underwhelming crowd was dispersed early by the Secret Service after one protestor mistook the White House lawn for Boston Harbor and hurled a box of tea over the fence, initiating a post 9-11 style bomb scare.  Initial plans to dump tea in Lafayette Park, also not Boston Harbor, were thwarted for want of a permit.

Outside the beltway, similar protests apparently went better. “Tea Parties” around the country, including one particularly well-attended event in Tulsa, drew thousands to the streets.

Parallels to the revolutionary gentry of 1773 are strained at best. Just six months out of an election, this is certainly taxation with representation.

Establishment politicians have already co-opted the movement, Republicans clinging to any groundswell that might propel them out of the political wilderness.

Yet the teabaggers retain a certain independence. Politicians still feel like half-welcome visitors. RNC Chairman Michael Steele was denied outright in his request to speak at one event.

Could this be a nascent third party?

Will citizens of the future be voting Tea?

One hopes for tall glass of ice and a healthy serving of sugar if the Tea Party is featured on any future political menus. Our politics is already burdened by fiery rhetoric and smoldering anger. It couldn’t hurt to inject a little sweetness into the mix.

Ayn Rand, left, and Alan Greenspan, right.

WASHINGTON, DC – With the world in the throes of economic upheaval, the work of one long-dead writer is coming back into vogue. The timing could not be worse.

Sales of Ayn Rand’s 1957 novel Atlas Shrugged have reportedly soared since this latest dizzying round of government bailouts began in October 2008.

Rand’s dystopian opus is, at its essence, an attack on all that hinders the advancement of society’s achievers, including government regulation, the altruistic impulse and public parks. Rand, a Soviet refugee, believed government intervention in the economy to be a crime against humanity.

Leaving a tedious philosophical debate for another day, the resurgence of Rand is nonetheless disturbing.

Among Rand’s most devoted disciples was Alan Greenspan, the chairman of the Federal Reserve from 1987 to 2006. Greenspan, who Rand herself affectionately called “the Undertaker,” steered the American economy through over a decade of spectacular growth by steering as little as possible. Following Rand’s advice to deregulate, Greenspan slashed interest rates and eschewed government oversight of the financial industry, notably resisting calls to more closely regulate little understood financial instruments with the obtuse and now infamous moniker, derivatives.

After years of feverish economic expansion, the Undertaker took us under, steering the economy into the financial hole in which we find ourselves today. “Yes, I found a flaw,” Greenspan said of his free-market ideology, 20 years too late.

The greatest problem with Ayn Rand’s radical free-market ideology is the same problem with the Socialism that Rand, Greenspan and the recent tea-party enthusiasts are so averse to: its ideological rigidity.

We’ve seen the pitfalls of deregulation time and again – the market crashes of 1873, 1893, 1907, 1929, 1987, the Savings and Loan Crisis, and the current debacle – and once again some are confusing the cause with the cure. What we need is not fanatical adherence to any ideology, but a pragmatic approach to a stable, robust economy.

If Ayn Rand’s free-market fanaticism is resurrected from the grave, I’m afraid we’ll find the Undertaker has led us all the way to the graveyard.

A typical low-income neighborhood in DC.

WASHINGTON, DC – What I needed was a little yeast. My roommate had come home with a bread making machine – frustrated that he had succeeded only in making a giant crouton, someone donated the machine to the charity where she works – and I was determined, on this Saturday afternoon, to bake my first loaf of bread. Most ingredients were already around the kitchen. What I needed was a little yeast.

In my blighted Washington, D.C. neighborhood locating yeast is not a simple proposition. I went first to the “grocery store” a few blocks away. I scoured the dusty aisles of knock-off cereal, juice mix and canned pseudo-vegetables like collard greens and baked beans, to find, as I expected, that there was no yeast to be found.

As I crossed the street a young man, 20ish, approached me. Clearly nervous, he asked where Metro Center was.

“It’s around here, right?” he snorted.

“No.” I said, hardly suppressing a laugh. Not even close.

When this kid wandered onto my street he doubled the white population in the immediate vicinity at that moment. It wasn’t an accident that he picked me among the 50 or so people standing around to ask for directions.

I remember that sensation, the shame of feeling insecure in an almost exclusively black, economically depressed neighborhood. I gave him directions for riding the bus to the nearest metro stop, from where he could get to Metro Center. He opted to walk, a familiar distaste for riding the public bus betrayed by his nervous eyes.

Continuing in my yeast search, I made the rounds of all the convenience stores in my area, where clerks shrouded in bulletproof Plexiglass peddle beer and cheetos, and things related thereto (cigarettes, paper towels, tums, etc.). No dice.

Discouraged but not defeated, I set out for the new grocery store a mile down the road. Days ago a Metro-Transit Authority worker was shot and killed in the area. A mile in the other direction a woman heading home from cleaning houses all day was stabbed to death at a bus stop.

When I finally reached the Safeway I had to check my pulse – had I died and gone to heaven? Rows of fresh produce glistened under mood lights, water droplets like tiny stars flickering in a universe of green. Tomatoes, sweet potatoes, fruit from around the world, and there it all was, liberated; these veggies would never see the inside of a can.

I retrieved my yeast, and about 10 other items I suddenly decided I needed, paid up, returned home, and baked a marginally successful load of bread.

If what I needed to get my bread growing was a little yeast then my neighborhood needs another class of growth agent: pork.

When the those esteemed white men wrote the constitution they could never have foreseen that Foggy Bottom, the swamp on the Potomac where General Washington chose to make his capitol, would one day become a bustling metropolis with a culture and a pulse all its own. Administration of this unhappy federal district was the province of Congress. There would be no Congressman or Senator from the seat of the federal government.

Over the next two centuries the population of the capitol grew dramatically, and in 1961 residents were finally given three votes in the Electoral College. In 1975, Washingtonians were allowed to elect their first-ever mayor and city council. Yet D.C., with a population greater than Wyoming’s and roughly equal to Vermont’s, has no voting representation in the U.S. House or the Senate.

Pork barrel spending gets a bad rap, considered by many the paragon of government waste and special interest influence. It’s an easy gripe to make when your congressman is bringing home the bacon.

While Washingtonians pay District of Columbia taxes, they, unlike residents of American colonies like Puerto Rico, Guam and American Samoa, who also lack a vote in Congress, are subject to all federal taxes. A line on the license plate issued by the District of Columbia rightly echoes the cry of our founding patriots: “TAXATION WITHOUT REPRESENTATION.”

It shouldn’t be hard to come up with a little yeast in any major American city – while a mile to the nearest grocery store is no problem for a strapping lad like myself, the same distance is considerably more formidable for the elderly and disabled in the mostly-carless urban landscape. Maybe what’s been missing from D.C., what has kept swaths of our capitol low on economy and high on crime, has been the absence of a representative with proverbial teeth in the legislature.  After all, even with a seat at the table, it’s impossible to digest any pork without the teeth to take a bite.