Tax Day USA 1996

Pacifists and war tax protesters--many "armed" with the WRL pie char--converged on post offices and other public spaces across the country April 15 to let taxpayers know how much they're paying for the war machine. (In Massachusetts, where post offices are closed April 15 for Patriot's Day, Tax Day for taxpayers and protesters alike is April 16.) Actions ranged from leafletting and guerrilla theatre to making grants of tax-resisted monies and "penny polls"; in Eugene, OR., alone, there were eight separate coordinated events involving all the above and more. One action was national: Last year, Root and Branch Collective, the WRL local in Ridgewood, NJ, initiated a cross-country chain fast beginning on Tax Day 1995 and ending on Tax Day 1996. Throughout the year, on any given day, at least one of the 90-plus participants nationwide was fasting as part of a spiritual representation of how the military literally removes food from people's mouths. A number of participants across the country fasted together (a juice fast, in which they ate no food but did drink fruit juices) for the last two weeks before April 15. Below is a small sampling of Tax Day, '96.

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Chain Fasting with Root and Branch
A few days before Tax Day, we gathered outside the Hackensack Post Office, our giant 1040 form with its pacifist slogan unfurled, our eyes on the watch for police and press.

More than in other years, people eagerly took our fliers. Some of us bellowed songs of tax resistance, and, as the sun came out from the clouds of the gray morning, I was filled with excitement. Suddenly, our past year seemed to have tremendous form and organic harmony. Three of our number Melissa Jameson, Adam Weissman and myself were in our 13th day of a 15-day fast, and we knew that on April 15 more than 90 friends and associates of Root and Branch would be fasting, too, in protest against the outrageous military budget ad the cruel cuts in human services.

This chain fast, publicized as widely as possible, has been a very important event. Many participants have been the people who greet you on the street, whose names you rarely know people with whom you wait for a bus, but whom you will not find at a peace rally. For many this was the first social action they have ever taken; fasting, even for a day or less, was an exercise in personal sacrifice, all the more moving and powerful because they do not consider themselves "activists" in any sense, but they know that they are hurting under the budget cuts and that a Trident submarine is not legal tender for the poor.

--Oliver Hydon

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Tireless in Seattle
April 15 was "Adopt-a-Post-Office" Day for a broad coalition of Seattle activists: Nonviolent Action Community of Cascadia (the WRL local), Gray Panthers, Seattle Alliance, FSC, FOR, WILPF, Jobs With Justice, WashPIRG, CISPES, and the Pacific Crest Biodiversity Project. Each group picked a post office to leaflet at lunchtime; we gave out a total of 4,000 leaflets.

That evening we held a lively rally and spirited march to the main post office in downtown Seattle, where we leafletted, picketed and held an open mike with music.

All the groups reported back very positively about their lunchtime leafletting experience. "We felt like we reached a large number of people, many of whom don t go downtown, and because there s less going on at the outlying post offices, people were way more receptive to our flyers. Many people stopped to engage in dialogue," said Nan McMurry of the Fellowship of Reconciliation. The flyers we gave out compared the amount of taxes going to the Pentagon and to human services and gave contact information for the participating groups so that people who wished to help change distorted budget priorities could get more information and get involved.

NACC has already received calls from people who received the Tax Day flyer.

--Vivien Sharples

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Serious Fun in Eugene
Street theater, a chain fast, give-away of tax-resisted money, a penny poll and a bake sale those are just the highlights of the Eugene PeaceWorks Tax Day activities.

Every Tax Day, Eugene PeaceWorks (the WRL local in Eugene, Ore.) occupies most of the pavement in front of the main branch of the Eugene Post Office from 8:00 a.m. to midnight, engaging in various forms of creative nonviolent education around war tax issues and tax resistance. Our partner in this effort, for the second year in a row, was the Military Tax Resistance of Lane County, a fledgling local of National War Tax Resistance Coordinating Committee. (Eugene PeaceWorks staff and members are integral to Military Tax Resistance.)

Our traditional Tax Day activities include radio, TV and print media interviews; extensive dissemination of the WRL Pie Chart; a bake sale (as in, "It ll be a great day when the schools have all the money they need, and the army has to hold a bake sale to buy a bomber"); rubber-stamping taxpayers envelopes (if they want us to) with "Warning! Over half your taxes go to war!" and "These taxes paid in protest!"; counseling interested people about legal and not-so-legal options for tax resisters and about tax amnesty; plastering the area around the post office with large, laminated educational posters about tax issues, pacifism and the impact of cuts in social services; having Food Not Bombs (the local chapter of which was founded by PeaceWorks in 1992) serve a free, hot, vegan meal on-location; and conducting our annual "penny poll" [see Washington, DC, story, opp. page]. This year s penny poll results were: Military, 2.64 percent; General Government, 6.12 percent; Interest on the National Debt, 6.99 percent; Physical Resources, 31.09 percent; and Human Resources, 53.15 percent, with 265 participants.

We did all of those this year and more. We participated in the chain fast organized by Root and Branch [page 11], performed some serious street theater, and gave away some $400 in tax-resisted money. (Also new this year was our use of the Internet to advance our Tax Day message.)

Picture this: two rows of people, a dozen women and men, aged 10 to 60, standing facing the post office and substantially blocking access to it at 4:00 p.m. on the busiest day of the year. In random order, one after another, the members of the group chant dirge-like litanies of reasons to distrust the government and dismantle present systems: "For the 10,000 ways in which the government humiliates the poor; for the 10,000 ways in which the government rapes our Mother; for the 10,000 ways in which the government incarcerates people for the purported crime of having nowhere to sleep " Each ends with: " We prostrate ourselves."

We move from standing, to kneeling with eyes closed and hands raised in prayer, to lying completely face down on the pavement, hands clasped over the backs of our heads as if we were victims of a gangland shooting.

The cycle repeats, until finally the prostration stops; it is time to stand. We turn our backs to the post office and face the crowd. We slowly approach, arms outstretched, holding dollar bills from the bake sale. And intone: "We would rather just drop our money in the street, in hopes that someone who really needs it will pick it up, thn continue to give it to the federal government who uses it to perpetrate such atrocities." And we do just that: We drop the money in the street.

But then we reclaimed it and, en masse, gave it to a woman who had been panhandling at our event. She cried and we embraced her.

We then moved immediately into the presentation of $300 in federal income tax-resisted money and $100 in telephone tax-resisted money from MTR members. We donated $100 each to: Cascadia Fire Ecology Education Project and Witness Against Lawless Logging, which engage in nonviolent direct action to try to save ancient forests; Food Not Bombs; and Icky s Teahouse, an organic coffeehouse/unofficial homeless drop-in and empowerment center/anarchist coop that provides an accepting, alcohol-, drug-, and weapon-free space for networking and socializing.

Contact Eugene PeaceWorks at 454 Willamette, Eugene, OR 97401; (541)343-8548 or (541) 484-4390,
eugpeace@efn.org. Contact Military Tax Resistance of Lane County at 541-342-2914. Contact Icky s Teahouse at westside@efn.org.

--Ellen Klowden

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