Tax Day is like a dead dog

Written to a friend preparing for an Evanston Tax Day Action.
Dear Rosalie,

Tax Day is like a dead dog in the middle of the road. We had better avoid it.

I consider myself a tax resister. Some could call me an evader, and that would be fine. I joined a community to evade the miserable, just as I think we should. The concrete practice of tax resistance seems to only come once a year. However today I came upon a sudden and eery alternative tax-evasion moment.

I was nearing campus on my usual path when I saw a young woman stood aghast looking at the road with her hands holding her cheeks. She had big sunglasses on and I would soon wonder weather she had eyes of strength or not. For the moment, she looked at me obviously paralyzed. But then she asked me to take the dog, to get it out of the way.

I did what a good decent revolutionary does in such circumstances. I studied my prey. It lay morbid, the red guts began to spill as I lifted it the way a mother gruffly grabs her pup's back of the neck. This kind of study can only happen by way of action. I took the transformative action of a revolutionary clearing the road.

Every April 15th we take a look at the road and stop along our usual paths. We sympathize with the victims and take our study of nonviolence with us into action.

No ordinary runner defines the run by such a slow pace. No country that calls itself a peacemaker defines itself for liberty by such ongoing wars. If we call ourselves patrons of warmongers, we only steer straight over the corpses and carcasses lying there, to do second what once was enough. When we cry "Enough" we halt, we empathize with the bereft, the widows, the shocked owners who have never before known death. This is our peace to be made, for we call ourselves Christians.

Keep on keeping on.