Remarks to
the 29th Annual Gathering of New England War Tax Resisters &
Supporters Oct 4, 2014 The New School Kennebunk, Maine
The title of
my talk today is: How a nice, middle class girl become a war tax resister,
and my choice of words is deliberate.
As a
privileged member of the ruling class in the empire of the United States, I was
brought up to be nice. My New England grandmother told me a few things that
stayed with me: Fools’ names and fools’ faces are often seen in public places.
And, pretty is as pretty does. These things were meant to elaborate the concept
of nice behavior: don’t call attention to yourself, be discreet in word and
deed, and know that your actions speak louder than your hairstyle or grooming
or attire. Although those things should also be nice.
My
grandparents voted Republican and went to church on Sundays. At home they might
drink and even curse, but in public they were pillars of the community: she on
the public library board of directors, he in Augusta at the state house,
representing. My father, their only child, was a little less nice, a little
more rowdy. But he passed on the wise words of his father, a World War I vet who
walked with a limp and died young of heart failure after being gassed while
laying in killing field in France, wounded at 19. My grandfather told his son, No
war is a good war. Don’t believe them when they tell you the next war is a good
war. There is no such thing. But he paid his taxes. As did my grandmother after he died.
My other
grandparents were very poor, migrant farm workers out of Oklahoma. They
nurtured a deep distrust of all forms of government. But my grandmother was in
thrall to the authority of evangelical preachers, and both she and her husband understood
that to render unto Caesar’s what is Caesar’s was a necessity of living in this
country. My California grandfather was drafted into WWII, leaving two children
and a wife to fight in the Pacific theater. He was among the first troops sent
into Nagasaki after it was destroyed by an atomic bomb. When he returned home
he never spoke of it. He never spoke of much of anything in my experience. My
California grandparents both worked hard, bought land and built a home, though my
grandfather refused his GI bill benefits. But he paid his taxes. As did his
widow after him.
My father
and mother debated politics at the dinner table, and for years they were
Republicans. Mostly because they thought of the Democratic Party as racist. They voted
for Richard Nixon twice, and defended the Vietnam war – for a while. In the
end, the civil rights movement changed their thinking. My father warned me that
the US would become a police state in my lifetime. He ran for city council in our small town in California, and after he retired to Maine he ran for the state
legislature. He probably cheated a little on his federal income taxes, but he
paid them. After he died, my mother had a tax accountant help her pay her
taxes. She had lost any scrap of faith she might have once held in the federal
government, but she was afraid of authority. She didn’t actually care all that
much about being nice. She had survived the Dust Bowl and the Great Depression,
gotten a college education as an adult, and lived the middle class life in a split level with a view of the Pacific Ocean and four rebellious
children. She wasn’t going to rock the boat.
When my
middle son was a college student we visited him together, my mother and I. He
was reading Hegemony or
Survival: America's Quest for Global Dominance by Noam Chomsky, and we both wanted
to read it after he was finished. My mother took it home with her and for
months I would ask if she had finished it yet so that I could have my turn. She
was a voracious reader, and it was a slim volume. Eventually she sent it along
with the confession: It was very difficult to read this book, because I was
overwhelmed by feelings of shame on every page. While I was busy raising kids
and paying the mortgage and getting supper on the table, this was being done in
my name. And, I looked the other way.
I, too,
looked the other way when Reagan used my tax dollars to terrorize our neighbors
in Central America. I filed a 1040 form year after year as I worked to keep bread
on the table and a roof over our heads, while the US toppled democratically
elected governments around the globe, installing friendly dictators instead. I
paid state and local taxes in Los Angeles as the LAPD, a notoriously racist
policing organization, beat up Rodney King and countless others like him. I
paid a lot of taxes the year 9/11 was allowed to happen and Bush Jr. announced
that we would retaliate against a country whose harbors would no longer be
safe. Didn’t he know that Afghanistan, which we invaded and bombed and have
been occupying ever since, was a landlocked country? Ok, maybe Bush didn’t know.
But surely his speechwriters did?
I was a history
major at Bowdoin, a scholarship student. I studied the tax revolt that become
the war for independence from the empire of Great Britain. I now see that we
are the inheritors of their imperial mantle, an upstart colony with mad natural
resources that, like Carthage, grew up to eclipse the mother country. The
British Parliament and Crown made the mistake of overtaxing their colonial
subjects to pay for wars that started on one continent and finished on another.
In college I also studied the revolutions of Europe, people rising up against
the French monarchy which had bankrupted the nation waging wars, against the
Austro-Hungarian Empire with its boot on their necks. I studied how the Ottoman
Empire bankrupted itself piling up debt to wage wars defending its far flung
colonies, and how Europe and the US scrambling to grab those colonies led to
the war my Maine grandfather suffered in. I studied how the people of India
used creative nonviolent methods to kick out the British, and how much violence
they endured as the price of freedom. I studied how the civil rights movement
in this country organized to struggle together to achieve their ideals, making
history when a teenaged girl and then a grown woman refused to give in to
apartheid on the bus.
 |
| Rosa Parks, arrested for a second time and charged with violating a law against boycotts. |
But I still
went to work – as a journalist, an arbitration administrator, an advertising
executive, and then as a small business owner – and I still paid my taxes.
In
1994, I left the business world and became a public school teacher. It was a
great job for me because I’ve always been fascinated by learning and I enjoy
working in a field that allows me to be creative. Surviving the bureaucracy
became my challenge and, so far, I have. But there was a major bump in the
road, a bump which educated me mightily. And I believe it led, indirectly, to
my becoming a war tax resister.
In 2000 the
state of Maine decided that in order to continue working as a public school
employee I would need to give my fingerprints to the FBI database. It was not
that I or other employees had been accused of a crime – in this case, child
molestation – but we were to be deemed guilty until proven innocent.
This seemed
to me and to many others a clear violation of the Constitution, and a struggle
ensued. The Maine legislature twice rescinded the law, but the governor twice
vetoed their legislation. I learned about organizing and resistance from my children’s
teacher, Bernie Huebner, who resigned from teaching the gifted and talented
students of our district, a job he loved. Eventually I, too, resigned from my
job in protest of this gross violation of privacy and the rule of law. But after
a year working in the private sector a family health crisis sent me back to
public education. With inky fingers I again filled out a W-4 form claiming my allowances for dependents and rendering up a hefty portion of every paycheck to Uncle Sam, who
was bombing any number of civilians and funding any number of warlords on any
given day with my hard earned money.
I had
protested the first Gulf War with an infant in my arms, astonished at how
quickly sabre rattling and chauvinism swept through my community in central
Maine. As the second round of fighting Saddam Hussein for control of Iraq’s oil
fields approached, I found myself one evening clutching a candle on the
Margaret Chase Smith Bridge in Skowhegan, shivering in the chilly March
twilight. I’d been joining a group standing each Sunday afternoon with signs
against the impending shock and awe campaign being pushed through Congress and
the United Nations. That particular Sunday the US was very close to concluding
a decade of sanctions against Iraq that had killed thousands of innocent
children. The bombs would begin falling on Baghdad quite soon.
A nice man
stood beside me on the bridge and saw that my sign was about to blow away in
the wind. He grabbed it and held it, a plastic lid with NO WAR rendered in duct
tape, and we talked. A young man driving by parked his car and came back on
foot to ask why we were standing there. He had a cousin in the Army, and a
friend about to ship out for Kuwait. Why were we against this war against a
vicious dictator who gassed his own people?
My husband
to be, Mark Roman, whom I had just met told the young man: When I was your age
the government was trying to draft me to fight in Vietnam. I watched the Bay of
Tonkin coverage on tv and I became aware that the government was lying to me.
That’s what it feels like now, too. The government is pushing to go to war
based on lies. It sounds the same now as it did back then.
Mark and I
have been together now for 11 years. We’re married and we file a joint tax
return. For the first several years together we filed our 1040 and we protested
Bush’s, then Obama’s, wars. We stood on bridges and marched down highways. Along
with many others here in Maine we waged the Bring Our War $$ Home campaign.
Responding to the economic downturn in 2008, we pointed out that domestic
budgets were being slashed to pay for a few hours or days of US military action
in Afghanistan and Iraq. We helped pass resolutions at the local and state
level calling on Congress to stop spending 51%, then 54%, then 57% of its
annual allowance on the Pentagon and its greedy contractors, so wealthy they
are statistically the .001% income bracket. We visited our so-called
representatives with our demand to fund butter, not guns. We wrote about it in
the newspaper, talked about it on local access tv, and spoke about it in public
squares. I began to get involved with Codepink when I saw women like me
confronting war criminals like Condoleeza Rice and Donald Rumsfeld in
Congressional hearings broadcast on C-SPAN.
We stopped
being nice. On one of the anniversaries of shock & awe Mark and I got arrested at the White House for failure to disperse. I hovered behind Treasury Secretary
Timothy Geithner with a pink sign that said GIVE US OUR $$$$$ BACK as he testified
about where the taxpayers’ bailout of his Wall St. buddies had gone. I crashed
Chellie Pingree’s posh fundraiser in a towering pink wig, and handed out Bring Our War $$ Home leaflets to her supporters. I helped organize Draw-a-thons and
printed posters and t-shirts and learned to make videos and speeches and how to
manage email listservs.
But I still
paid my taxes.
It was
during Obama’s first administration that my husband and I decided to heed the
call of war tax resisters like Larry Dansinger, and take the risk of putting –
or not putting, as the case may be – our money where our mouth is. Showing no
taxable income isn’t an option for us because I still want to work as a school
teacher. Mark is self-employed and each April 15 we usually wrote a hefty check
for the amount of federal income taxes owed in addition to what has already been
withheld from my paychecks all year. Writing that check is what we stopped
doing. Larry’s advice was to keep it all above board, to let the IRS know what
we were doing and why, and in his words “make them come after it.” That they
have done, twice garnishing Mark’s social security benefits and sending innumerable
threatening letters. We have piled up fines and interest, and I’m sure there
will be more fun to come. I worry about leaving this as a giant problem for my
heirs when I’m gone. As we “know” there are only two sure things in this life:
death, and taxes.
Before Mark
shares the letter we send the IRS along with our 1040 form each year, I’ll
leave you with one last family story. Last summer I visited my uncle in Australia,
they first time I had made that journey since he emigrated when I was a kid. He
and his wife are folkies, musicians with a wide circle of friends who emigrated
from various parts of the British Isles, mostly, and are lefty leaning. One of
their friends asked me tentatively if I would be offended by the Australian
perception that I live in something approaching a totalitarian state. I said
that I would not take offense, and that I spent a good part of my spare time
agitating against military spending. Also that my husband and I are war tax
resisters. This news frightened them. They reacted with shock. How could I get
away with that? Wasn’t it dangerous? Why didn’t we end up in federal prison?
I
acknowledged that it’s not without risks but that it goes at least partway to
settling the moral queasiness of being a tax paying citizen of the US empire. I
like to think the taxes that I do pay go to education and health care, housing
and job training, environmental protection and sustainable energy development –
not to revenue for General Dynamics,
Halliburton, Blackwater and the rest of the war profiteers. I know the real
portion of the federal budget spent on nuclear weapons research plus the Pentagon
(including the NSA) plus caring poorly for veterans is way more than 50% --
probably more like 2/3. But I take comfort in knowing that I take a stand and
insist that this could be, and should be, a republic and a democracy, as
promised.
Because
right now what we have is taxation without representation. And you know where
that kind of thing leads.
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