My Letter to the IRS Copyright 2014 by Alice Walker Attention: The Internal Revenue Service Re: Withholding of partial payment of taxes in protest of Wars funded by American taxpayers From: Alice Walker April 15, 2014 Dear Persons of the Internal Revenue Service, This letter is to inform you that I have decided to withhold $1.00 from my income tax payment as a token of my resistance to the wars the United States is engaged in, which are supported by the taxes paid to the government by ordinary Americans. I am attaching a letter to other American taxpayers which explains more fully my reasons for doing this. Sincerely, Alice Walker To the American Taxpayers Giving money to our government each year that maims and kills thousands, even hundreds of thousands of children, their mothers, fathers, brothers and sisters, their grandparents, is part of why we suffer, in all the ways we do suffer, in the United States. Each year I feel the nausea of complicity, the sorrow in my heart, that sending money to buy bullets and bombs brings to me, or to anyone who believes it is wrong to harm, to injure, to kill another human being, who is, in truth, a part of ourselves. The reality that we are killing our own selves- our conscience perhaps the first part of us to atrophy – is why we feel so sick. What to do about it? In 2003 along with two dozen other women I was arrested in front of the White House for protesting the imminent start of the war against the people of Iraq. Earlier I had marched with hundreds of thousands of people around the world against this pending war. Everyone understood what it was about, from the beginning. In fact, in the San Francisco march a young woman’s satirical banner read: What is my oil doing under your sand? Which certainly captured the attitude of our “leaders.” Leaders who completely ignored us. Later I would go to Palestine and see huge spent shells whose rockets had demolished homes and schools, hospitals and yes, hundreds of grownups and children, and there was the imprint MADE IN USA on them. I sat in the rubble of The American School in Palestine that had been completely demolished. Then there was the attempt to take food and medicine to people who were starving in Gaza and the fact of being turned back, though my companions and I were begging to be of service to humans who desperately needed us. Where was our country? Did it say, as it might have done, Let them, and the food and medicine they are bringing, through? No. We were seen as the troublemakers, not those causing the disaster. Another effort to reach Gaza had us appealing to our government to protect our small boat as we attempted to sail in and deliver hope in the form of letters, mainly to the children who, by now, must think all grown-ups outside of Gaza are deaf. Our Secretary of State informed us we were the threat, not the people who waited with guns to stop us. And so on. When my Civil Rights lawyer husband and I lived in Mississippi in the Sixties and early Seventies we were audited by the IRS. A few years later (in San Francisco) I was audited again. Nothing was amiss, and it seemed to me the IRS was used, perhaps by COINTELPRO, a project of the FBI, to harass all of us who were active in the black liberation movement. What I remember about the audits was how insulting it felt that we, who had amassed nothing beyond what was required to one day own a modest home, were considered people who would cheat. It was a definite stress to our already strained lives, living under apartheid laws in Mississippi, working to dismantle them, and in an “illegal” interracial marriage to boot. We also knew my husband might be drafted to fight in a criminal war against the people of Vietnam at any time. Which is to say, I thought very carefully about what more I could do to show my horror and disgust at the slaughter of people around the globe that a greedy American Empire appears to require. Grandmothers pulverized in their okra fields, children bombed in their beds, wedding parties obliterated in the road. Roaming the internet for help, I found The War Resister’s League website and there learned some of the ways the IRS can make your life miserable if you refuse to be a war criminal and withhold all the taxes you would like to withhold. I am sorry to say I don’t wish to go through the tension of IRS harassment again. I learned, though, that I can withhold a single dollar, as a token of my resistance to the murder of innocents. (I don’t even believe in the murder of the guilty. I think all prisons should be turned into secular monasteries with the teaching of meditation a mainstay.) Though I will be taxed on this one dollar into infinity, I should be able, if forced, to pay. What, in an endless war that spends trillions each year can a single dollar buy? (Two first class stamps?) I asked myself, gloomily. But then, lucky for me, I was inspired by one of my favorite people-helping organizations: Heifer International. Each year I receive one of their catalogs and am able to choose an animal, or several animals, to be sent to needy families sometimes in the US, sometimes worlds away. Realizing that not everyone can afford a water buffalo, for instance, or a goat, or a cow, this catalog allows one to purchase a part of one. So that, joining one’s donation of 1/4 of a water buffalo to three other people’s 1/4 of a water buffalo permits a whole water buffalo to be delivered to (for instance) Southeast Asia, where the water buffalo is revered for its work in sustaining the life of a family; the same for a goat, or a cow that might be sent to other parts of the world. My single dollar is almost nothing, but what if millions of people, ten million people, also withhold one dollar? What might we prevent the government from buying? Half of a drone? The propellers of a helicopter? A whole drone? A tank? The wheels of many tanks? A rocket? Those goggles that let you see at night? Part of a computer system that allows anonymous Americans, while chatting or eating their lunch, to murder children and their families sitting far away in their living rooms? We must not let frustration at our smallness unnerve us. Perhaps it is time to learn not only from Heifer International, but to remember the ants. They too are small, yet they are persistent in everything they do; they never stop. There are brave women and men standing, and have always stood, against the wars our country wages, wars that intensify climate change, destroy histories, cultures and identities, animals, trees, water and land; mutilate, main and kill some of the most astonishing people on earth. Young women and men we would love to know. Elders who could teach and guide us. Farmers who could show us how to cultivate the soil. Musicians, poets, writers, doctors, scientists, who could inspire us to dream. Children who could remind us of youth with their unrestrained affection for skateboards and bicycles. We are impoverished, weakened, fatally disoriented by this loss. Shot through the heart is what it feels like. Together we must find a way to keep them, our other selves, safe. And make the step, whether large or small, we are able to make. In my experience, Life frequently reveals the footpath before we are permitted a glimpse at the road. “Walk together, children, don’t you get weary,” is from one of many medicine songs from my own black Southern tradition of endless struggle, a necessary counterpart to the endless war against black people. I understand it better now than when I was a child. Now I know, from experience, that one of the hardest things to do is walk together; and that in fact we can get weary enough – forget about walking – to crawl. But in a way the ancestors were seeing life, and the overcoming of obstacles – brutal enslavement and other abuse in their case- with the comprehension and steadfastness of ants: togetherness is essential, being tired is not an excuse. If not stopped, the makers of war will continue to kill the planet until it is dead. There is no separation between it and us. In Peace, Alice Walker Please feel free to Google “Pictures of Children in War: Iraq, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Libya, Etc.” in order to meditate on this human tragedy in which all American taxpayers are playing a crucial if unwilling part.
Posted on: Wed, 09 Apr 2014 17:36:45 +0000
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