Tax Resistance: Non-Cooperation

Gandhi wrote: "When a government becomes lawless in an organized manner, civil disobedience becomes a sacred duty and is the only remedy open specially to those who had no hand in the making of the Government or its laws. Another remedy there certainly is, and that is armed revolt. Civil Disobedience is a complete, effectives and bloodless substitute."

I believe our government, "the greatest purveyor of violence" in the world, to borrow some words from another prophetic advocate of nonviolence, refuses to be accountable to the people it is supposed to represent. When Dr. King spoke these words, he was assaulted by many people. People he thought were friends accused him of betrayal for expressing his non-consent for the war in Vietnam. "Injustice somewhere is a threat to justice everywhere."

Because my voice is not being heard when I contact my "leaders" or large, public actions such as protests are, at best, glazed over by mainstream media, the only way this renegade war, started and continued with very little support of the the people, is to stop giving the government the money to fund the war. Over 50% of our income tax pays for military expenditures, past and current. The war in Iraq has cost, in the past 5 years, $600 billion. Joseph Stiglitz, Nobel Prize winning economist, estimates the real cost of this war to be $3 trillion, when we consider all the factors of war (Veteran's Healthcare, Rebuilding, Reparations, etc.)

I will not fund that. The money I would have paid the government has gone to the Chicago Anti-Hunger Foundation. When votes no longer matter we vote with our dollars. I vote for the works of mercy and feeding the hungry. And if it means the IRS is gonna come knocking on my door for $119, I will offer them some food too. And if they ask for a check, I'll go with them to jail. That's another work of mercy, visit the imprisoned. If we took the works of mercy as seriously as we took our 1040s and economic stimulus package, the Kingdom of God would be at hand.

Nonviolence is a way of life, it is the way of the cross, the way of truth. There is too much suffering in the world right now. Just imagine, if all of us who profess a faith in Jesus, the man who said "pick up your cross and follow me," such great suffering would redeem us.

a way?

How tedious we have become. Grasping blindly into the dark for something to hold on to, something that will resist and hold strong as the current beats endlessly against us. We are lost, we cannot find our way.

We turn to...the church? Far off realities echo in the complacency of vast pulpits that (at one time?) were reserved for those who spoke words of peace and truth.

We turn to...the law? We urge the political machine to be wary of where they tread, but our appeals to torture and war as illegal and immoral fall on the deaf ears of the proud.

We turn to...the teachers? Words escape those who used to guide us and walk with us as we lit our own lights in the world, but now fear and insecurity lay waste to projects of the mind and freedom of discourse.

We turn to...the family? Disintegrated by a racist, sexist system of injustice that turns mother against son, father against daughter, sister against brother.

We turn to...the community? What are my neighbors names?

We turn to...ourselves? Our minds have been stolen from us and imaginations killed by drugs: those prescribed for the symptoms of a culture of death and those enjoyed by self-professed enlightened ones.

We turn to...violence? Brief sentiments of security, a sense of peace (absence of war) brought because our bombs and guns are bigger: how do we stay safe once we've killed all our enemies?

We turn to...God? An abandonment to something worse than all we have ever known: for it asks, no demands, of us a humility to the truth that we so desperately seek to hide. God, we turn to you.