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I don't normally do this, but in the context of TomDispatch regular Rebecca Gordon's latest all-too-well-timed piece on paying (or rather not paying) one's taxes, let me quote a couple of paragraphs I once wrote for this site about my own distant past and then briefly explain why:
"And here's a little story from the Neolithic age we now call 'the Sixties' about that moment when the U.S. military was still a citizen's army with a draft (even if plenty of people figured out how to get exemptions). At a large demonstration, I turned in my draft card to protest the war. Not long after, my draft board summoned me. I knew when I got there that I had a right to look at my draft file, so I asked to see it. I have no idea what I thought I would find in it, but at 25, despite my antiwar activism, I still retained a curiously deep and abiding faith in my government. When I opened that file and found various documents from the FBI, I was deeply shocked. The Bureau, it turned out, had its eyes on me. Anxious about the confrontation to come - the members of my draft board would, in fact, soon quite literally be shouting at me and threatening to call me up essentially instantaneously - I remember touching one of those FBI documents and it was as if an electric current had run directly through my body. I couldn't shake the Big Brotherness of it all, though undoubtedly my draft card had gone more or less directly from that demonstration to the Bureau.
"As it happened, my draft board's threats put me among the delinquent 1-A files to be called up next. Not long after, in July 1970 - I would read about it on the front page of the New York Times - a group of five antiwar activists, calling themselves Women Against Daddy Warbucks, broke into that very draft board, located in Rockefeller Center in New York City, took the 1-A files, shredded them, and tossed them like confetti around that tourist spot. And I never heard from my draft board again. Lucky me at that time. Of course, so many young, draftable American men had no such luck. They were indeed sent to Vietnam to fight and suffer, sometimes to be wounded or killed, or (as surprising numbers of them did) join the antiwar movement of that moment."
Those paragraphs came to mind because of the story Rebecca Gordon tells today about her own urge to resist America's wars and the moment when she could personally go no further. It made me realize that, in some sense, thanks to those five women long ago, I was relieved of a decision I have no idea how I would have dealt with in the end. At that time, many young men like me were going to Canada rather than be drafted into the military and risking deployment to Vietnam. But I actually visited Canada soon after I turned in my draft card and, much as I liked the neighborhoods in Toronto where I spent time, I found I simply couldn't imagine leaving my country, no matter what. It just wasn't me. And that meant, when I was called up again, choosing either jail or the military. It was my luck, I suppose, that I never had to make that decision, which undoubtedly would have led to a very different life than the one I've had.
Other people, Gordon included, then and since, weren't so lucky. No group called Five Women Against Uncle Sam destroyed her tax records in 1992 and so, today, she can tell you her antiwar story and remind us that we all have limits when it comes to our moments of decision. Tom
"Too Distraught"
Confessions of a Failed Tax Resister
Every April, as income-tax returns come due, I think about the day 30 years ago when I opened my rented mailbox and saw a business card resting inside. Its first line read, innocently enough, "United States Treasury." It was the second line - "Internal Revenue Service" - that took my breath away. That card belonged to an IRS revenue agent and scrawled across it in blue ink was the message: "Call me."
I'd used that mailbox as my address on the last tax return I'd filed, eight years earlier. Presumably, the agent thought she'd be visiting my home when she appeared at the place where I rented a mailbox, which, as I would discover, was the agency's usual first step in running down errant taxpayers. Hands shaking, I put a quarter in a pay phone and called my partner. "What's going to happen to us?" I asked her.
Resisting War Taxes
I knew that the IRS wasn't visiting me as part of an audit of my returns, since I hadn't filed any for eight years. My partner and I were both informal tax resisters - she, ever since joining the pacifist Catholic Worker organization; and I, ever since I'd returned from Nicaragua in 1984. I'd spent six months traveling that country's war zones as a volunteer with Witness for Peace. My work involved recording the testimony of people who had survived attacks by the "Contras," the counterrevolutionary forces opposing the leftist Sandinista government then in power (after a popular uprising deposed the U.S.-backed dictator, Anastasio Somoza). At the time, the Contras were being illegally supported by the administration of President Ronald Reagan.
With training and guidance from the CIA, they were using a military strategy based on terrorizing civilians in the Nicaraguan countryside. Their targets included newly built schools, clinics, roads, and phone lines - anything the revolutionary government had, in fact, achieved - along with the campesinos (the families of subsistence farmers) who used such things. Contra attacks very often involved torture: flaying people alive, severing body parts, cutting open the wombs of pregnant women. Nor were such acts mere aberrations. They were strategic choices made by a force backed and directed by the United States.
When I got back to the United States, I simply couldn't imagine paying taxes to subsidize the murder of people in another country, some of whom I knew personally. I continued working, first as a bookkeeper, then at a feminist bookstore, and eventually at a foundation. But with each new employer, on my W-4 form I would claim that I expected to owe no taxes that year, so the IRS wouldn't take money out of my paycheck. And I stopped filing tax returns.
Not paying taxes for unjust wars has a long history in this country. It goes back at least to Henry David Thoreau's refusal to pay them to support the Mexican-American War (1846-1848). His act of resistance landed him in jail for a night and led him to write On the Duty of Civil Disobedience, dooming generations of high-school students to reading the ruminations of a somewhat self-satisfied tax resister. Almost a century later, labor leader and pacifist A.J. Muste revived Thoreau's tradition, once even filing a copy of the Duty of Civil Disobedience in place of his Form 1040. After supporting textile factory workers in their famous 1919 strike in Lowell, Massachusetts, and some 20 years later helping form and run the Amalgamated Textile Workers of America (where my mother once worked as a labor organizer), Muste eventually came to serve on the board of the War Resisters League (WRL).
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