One American's response to Speaker Pelosi's charge that the citizens at the Town Halls and Tea Parties are "not really a grass-roots movement. It's AstroTurf by some of the wealthiest people in America to keep the focus on tax cuts for the rich instead of for the great middle class." In plain terms, who we are and who we are not.

Opinion: A Grassroots View of the Tea Party Roy Nix

Special to AOL News (Feb. 21) -- Ever since the first Tea Party protest happened just over a year ago, the movement and its participants have endured any number of insults -- they're extremists, racists, etc. My favorite, though, was House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who dismissed the entire phenomenon last year by saying that "it's not really a grass-roots movement. It's AstroTurf by some of the wealthiest people in America to keep the focus on tax cuts for the rich instead of for the great middle class."

I haven't participated in any Tea Party events, but I am sympathetic to their cause. And if I had the opportunity to respond to Pelosi, here's what I would say:

Madam Speaker, it isn't the Tea Party that's AstroTurf, but both political parties in Washington.

Think about it. Unlike the Democrat and the Republican parties -- which listen to the chattering class inside the Beltway to determine what the people supposedly want -- the Tea Party movement is made up of real American citizens in real American neighborhoods with real American lives. They don't eat, drink and sleep politics 24/7/365 as you do. They actually do know what they want.

The Tea Party movement consists of those poor dumb bastards who get up every morning and go to a real American job to earn real American money to pay their real American bills and raise their real American kids. They pay taxes that you waste on things they neither desire nor need. They worship each week and take their kids to school and to soccer, football, baseball, dancing lessons or wherever their kids need to go.

They are white, black, brown and yellow, and they get along fine as long as you are not stirring them up to get their vote.

They don't dream of power, and they don't dream of telling their neighbors how to worship, how to spend their money, what kind of car to buy, what kind of food to eat and how to save the environment. They expect their neighbors to decide all of those things for their own families.

They don't want big government, they don't want socialistic policies and they don't want to spend more money for things they don't need. They don't see Washington as Robin Hood, robbing the rich to help the poor, but as the Sheriff of Nottingham -- taking their tax money and giving it to big business while we starve.

They don't want to have to march in the streets, and they don't want to be "activists" in politics because they have lives to live.

They don't hate immigrants, but they don't like lawbreakers who come here illegally. They don't mind helping people, but they are out of money and want to help those closest to home first until their bills are paid off.

These real Americans vote for politicians who promise to let them live this way. But then they wake up to find that these same politicians ignore them once the election is over. And then they're told how stupid or uninformed they are when they tell their representatives how they should vote.

These lawmakers have forgotten what "representative" means, and they end up in Washington doing what their party tells them to do, rather than what their constituents tell them to do. That's the real AstroTurf. And that's what's motivating so many who've joined the Tea Party movement.

The Tea Party is sending a genuine grass-roots message to both Democrats and Republicans. And they'd better listen up and learn fast.

Roy Nix is a golf professional and club fitting professional in Columbus, Ga.

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