More from the swarm of tax resisters who came out to play on :
- Dave Ridley videoblogged his protest at the Manchester, New Hampshire post office.
- Next Left Notes has photos, video, and reporting from the protests in New York City.
Frida Berrigan said:
“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.
- Robert Randall tells how things went in Glynn County, Georgia
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 in Brunswick and on St. Simons at , just as I arrived to give Bill Jerome a stack of about 400 “Economic Costs of the War” flyers with info from the American Friends Service Committee. Milly Hastings reported later that when she & Steve Stevens finished their leafletting at , they had only 16 flyers left! Although our youth were ready to provide someone to take over on St. Simons, there weren’t flyers for them!
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 , 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.
- Ethan Vesely-Flad tells us how things went at the Rockland Coalition for Peace & Justice protest in New York, and notes:
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.
- Daily Californian reporter Jacqueline Johnston shares her reflections on going to cover the Berkeley, California “People’s Life Fund” granting ceremony.
- KLCC in Eugene, Oregon reported on the post office demonstration there:
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.
