“All I kept thinking about was just how many people oppose the war, wish
the war wasn’t happening and don’t really see a clear way of doing
anything about it. On tax day, everybody’s scrambling to pay the
government and feeling like their hard earned dollars are being sopped
up and wishing that that money went to roads and to schools and to
healthcare. We were able to interject some information about where that
money really goes — and to offer some alternatives… about how people can
withdraw their own complicity.”
The Makingpeace blog
has been covering war tax resistance actions in Austin, Texas and
elsewhere.
As best we can figure, we gave out about 2200 flyers on
at the Brunswick and
St. Simons Island
P.O.s. Amazing!
We started at with 500 War
Resisters League pie chart flyers at each
P.O. We ran
out of those at
On the Brunswick side, Cathy Browning brought us a couple of hundred of
the flyers addressed to Georgia taxpayers, giving figures from the
National Priorities Project on how much the war is costing us locally
and what else the money could have purchased in services and meeting
community needs. Those weren’t going to be enough, so she went back and
printed 600 more. These were all gone by
4:30
PM, a half-hour before the
P.O. closed.
Paul Sheldon reports on his many tax day (more like tax week) actions at
Paul’s Perambulations.
It will be difficult to keep up this witness — my wages at the Fellowship
of Reconciliation, as of yesterday, are now being levied by the
IRS — but we are going to try. The most encouraging thing is the powerfully
supportive response that we have received from so many people. Clearly,
our small action has struck a chord with others who similarly oppose
this war, and are unsure about what they can do to help stop it.
Eric Muller: “The paper tiger casts a shadow, but it’s a shadow of paper
and of enforcement. What can they take from us? They can take our money.
And that’s a very small damage compared to the damage we’re creating
throughout the world and particularly in Iraq right now, as we speak,
you know much more damage is being inflicted than will be on the tax
resisters who are working here today.”
Muller and others in the community have donated six thousand dollars to
local charities instead of paying their full taxes to the federal
government. The money will go to Food for Lane County, Shelter-care,
[and] peace groups, among others.
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