I filed my taxes and waited to learn whether a civilization would be destroyed in my name
Connection/complicity
Last week, my family took the train to visit my parents in Montana. It was a lovely trip. Amtrak has long been crippled by austerity, and never truly allowed to reach its potential, but it’s not without its charms. An American story, if ever there was one. The train I rode is called the Empire Builder. Another American story. Better not to dwell too long on that name and instead marvel at how a single vehicle connects my home in Milwaukee with the skateboard toting rez kids in Wolf Point and the cowboy/cowgirl sweethearts, in matching boots, kissing on the platform in Williston. Also along for the ride: A pair of twenty-something guys from Haiti, traveling for work. A multi-generational family on vacation, actively planning an upcoming quinceañera in the observation car. A retired couple who met decades ago, as young people working the tourist kitchens in Yellowstone. When I talk about being tethered to other people, this is what I prefer to imagine.
The day after we returned home I sat down to work on our taxes, my annual exercise in magical thinking. It’s a load bearing story, the one I tell myself every April. I’ve grown up in a post Chicago School world, so I know the damage wrought by the taxation is theft crowd. I flinch every time I hear the phrase “my tax dollars,” that righteous proclamation of entitlement and isolation. Like everything about my life, my family’s income doesn’t appear out of thin air. I walk on sidewalks, ride the city bus and send my kids to public schools. I receive mail at my home, drink relatively clean water, and can trust that the money I put in the bank won’t disappear tomorrow. I am blessedly reliant on this imperfect, maddening, and deeply essential project that we call government.
The story I tell myself, when I pay my taxes, isn’t wholly untrue. But it relies, even in better years, on heavy redactions. I file my return and picture it funding libraries and food for hungry families. I think about social security and subsidized housing. I imagine the train, a future version of it, connecting even more communities than it does today. I do not picture bombs falling on schools and bridges in Tehran. I give as little thought as possible to genocide. I lie by omission. I sand down culpability and buff up benevolence. I do so to rob the welfare state-destroying cretins of one more psychic victory. They’ve taken everything, and if the cost of keeping them from stealing my heart is a bit of fantastical storytelling, so be it.
The story works, most years. This year is rougher. It’s widening gyre season. We’re hearing about it more and more, aren’t we folks? Falcons and falconers, they can’t understand each other. Rough beasts. So much slouching. Not a good situation.
This is not the first year that I have filed my taxes while U.S. bombs fall on other people’s homes. It is not the first year that government agents have murdered civilians in our own streets. That empire, the one memorialized on the train I just rode, didn’t build itself.
But it is the first year that I have sent money to the federal government at the exact moment that the President of the United States ranted and raved about using those funds to destroy an entire civilization. This will always will be Trump’s most enduring legacy– taking the plausible deniability that propped up past U.S. regimes and ripping it up for the cameras.
I am fully aware that there are oppositional paths that I haven’t taken. I have deep respect for the war tax resistance movement, and considered joining it myself, but it’s never felt quite right. Partly, I always want to be directly connected to the limited government programs I adore. But also, I don’t actually believe that I can divorce myself from the most heinous chapters in the American story. That’s true, to a certain extent, for all of us, but especially for those, like me, who have long been cocooned at the top of this country’s multiple caste systems.
Whenever I protest war (and I have protested so many) I see signs about how this one too isn’t “in our name.” And I believe it, to a point. I get there’s no false equivalency. I am not as culpable in this latest American travesty as, say, Pete Hegseth. But as long as I am a citizen of the U.S.A., and as long as my country attacks other countries, a piece of every one of these wars, including this one, belongs to me.
I am tethered, not just by romance and hope, but in a global web of heartache and loss. If I get to claim the connective power of the train, I have to also accept the connective horror of the bomb. I have to accept that the parent who clutches their child in Tehran is both terrified of what my country might do, and already reeling from my country has already done. And no doubt that parent, who likely has complicated feelings about their own regime, understands that I am not my government. But I also don’t want them to let me off the hook. My country is run by a mad king, but it is too easy to simply say not my America. The same country that produced him produced me.
We don’t get to pick and choose when we are and aren’t connected to one another. I couldn’t do anything to prevent this war. I know that logically. But it is my war. And I need to act– in a million Sisyphean ways– in the spirit of heartbreak and repair demanded by that truth. I need to make my silly little calls to Congresspeople who will assure me, unconvincingly, that there is nothing they can do. I need to march around in circle with the same collection of bleeding hearts that I’ve been marching alongside my entire life. I need to continue launching tiny projects that seek to remind us that we depend on one another. I need to do more, because the warmongers will always do more. I need to feel in my bones that it is not enough, and keep at it anyway.
I paid my taxes yesterday. Right before I finished, I was given a new option, one never available to me before. If I wanted, I could sign my children up for Trump Accounts. I shuddered, visibly. One connection to that man, at least for now, that I could still reject. I tidied up my tax paperwork and checked the news. Trump still hadn’t backed down. I started writing this essay, feverishly refreshing headlines. By the time I finished, it was official, for now. A two week ceasefire. Who knows what that will mean, or what relief it will bring to those already killed. But a better headline, for now, than the hellfire that had been promised.
It was only in that moment that I realized why I had been physically uncomfortable in my body all day. I had been clenching my heart.
I don’t know what comes next, but I am caught up in it. We all are. The man who threatened war crimes is still in power, in my country. Yesterday, I gifted him more money.
We are bombed and we are bombers. Oh God, in whatever combination of devastation and relief comes next, let us never forget each other. Inshallah, let us never believe the lie of separation. Let us act as if all wars are our wars, and let that ache propel us to stop them in their tracks.
End notes:
A two week ceasefire is not the same as the end of a war. Calling Congresspeople may feel like a fool’s errand, but it keeps us connected. Keep doing it.
I’m giving some money to Doctors Without Borders, currently active in Iran, Lebanon and Gaza (and so many other places). Maybe you could too?
Speaking of tiny projects that remind us we are connected to one another, I am excited to announce the Interdependence Relay’s FIRST DATES. These are all public, and you are welcome and encouraged to come. More details coming soon, and further updates can be found at our website, but YOU ALL! IT’S REAL!
WASHINGTON STATE: April 22nd with the Columbia City Neighbors Club in Seattle. 6:00 PM at Southside Commons (3518 S. Edmunds). They’re both celebrating their neighborhood and are excited to connect with both existing and nascent neighborhood gatherers in other parts of the region. It’s a potluck AND I WILL BE THERE! [Stay tuned for another opportunity to hang out, Seattleites, while I’m in town]. Info here.
OREGON: May 3rd at Reedwood Friends (2901 S. Steele Street, Portland). More info coming soon.
CALIFORNIA: May 14th at Fog City Community Fitness (1649 Valencia, SF). Details coming soon BUT I WILL BE AT THIS ONE!
HAWAII: May 16th. A food truck party (with fire dance lessons) at Yellow House Kalaheo (corner of Papalina and Alelo, Kalaheo, Kauai). 4:00 PM. I’LL BE AT THIS ONE TOO!
A reminder: We’re currently reviewing applications for our hosts in COLORADO, IDAHO, UTAH, NEVADA, ARIZONA, AND NEW MEXICO. Due date May 1st. Definitely reach out with questions. Also remember that we’re looking for a wide variety of groups, of all sorts of sizes, from living room gatherings to more established spaces. Maybe you’re a middle school teacher who wants to bring the relay to your class? Or you’ve got a cool block club and you’d like to host us on your front porch? Never hurts to toss your name in the ring!
Like all of us, I’m trying. And I hope this space (and all the organizing and connecting I do around it) helps you to keep trying too. If you value this work, I’d love for you to consider supporting it. We’re a tiny shop, just me and Carly, my professional partner in crime, and we can only keep this space running thanks to readers like you. Would you be down to chip in? We’d appreciate it so much.
I’ve been lucky, recently, to be a guest on a number of podcasts, all of them quite fun. I joined my Milwaukee friend Meagan Schultz for her Gather, Connect, Create pod (we talked about the relay) had a bunch of fun with Claire Zulkey and Quinn Emmett on their Not Right Now show (the topic: parenting as an activist) and then had a lovely talk about bagel flags and potlucks with Jen Rubin and Jessica Becker on the Human Powered podcast. [Italian chef voice: That’sa lotta podcasts!].
I spent my childhood being raised by Quaker parents whose testimony of simplicity, in part, seemed to translate as "never having any money" because they were oriented toward service instead of accumulating wealth. Fair enough, but stressful. For them, I'm sure, but also for me. It imprinted, though, and my adult work life has also been oriented toward service offering little money, which is still (very) stressful. But it does mean I always get a refund at tax time.
They still keep some, and so the joy of supporting what I love and the complicity of supporting what I deplore still exists, as you illuminate here beautifully. But I do take some weird pleasure in reclaiming some small amount from the jaws of empire every year.
Sometimes I wish I wasn't so close to the edge financially all the time, but then I remember my hand slipping through the empire's teeth every year and I think, okay. I'd rather this, given the current options.
For most of my adult life, I have wished that there were polls attached to our tax forms that let us indicate which programs we want to support - maybe not ones that immediately dictate how the money is spent, but at least a way for folks like me to to say that I want my tax dollars to go toward schools, clean water, libraries, mass transportation, clean energy, etc. rather than politicians' pet projects and war war war. In my frustration, I have worked closely with my financial advisor and accountant over the years to craft a delicate line of working and getting paid just enough and then giving the rest of my work away to lose enough money so that my tax burden is nearly zero every year. Maybe that's chicken shit, but I still engage in voting and community building and showing up to comment at the city council when I can, and I know that I'm not unnecessarily padding the efforts of the warmongers. For now, it gives me peace.
And if folks are looking for ways other than the ones you suggested to feel good about spending their money, I'm currently raising money to help my friend Ahmed and his family purchase used solar panels for their tents in Gaza. Electricity would be a game-changer for them and since they will be trapped in Gaza for the foreseeable future, I'd like to be able to continue sending them money to keep them as comfortable as possible. I've been in relationship with his entire extended family (half of them safely in Cairo and the other half in Gaza) for three years now and boy, would it be lovely for them to know that we haven't forgotten them.