LETTER: Don't pay tax for Iraq war; practice civil disobedience
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"If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face - forever."
George Orwell might well be considered a prophet, given our current state in this nation. America was once the Land of the Free; it is no longer so.
Every April Americans are forced by threat of jail or penalty (such as liens on property) to pay taxes to the IRS. If this were any other organization, we'd see this for the theft that it is. If you forcefully take money from someone else, that is theft. What is left from this is a nation of neutered and spayed civilians without any real backbone or constituency to stand up to these crooks, extortionists, thieves.
What I see every day around campus is fear and frustration masked behind a thin facade of stoicism. I know it hurts to live in a country slouching toward neo-fascism with each passing day, and feeling powerless to stop it. "The End of America" by Naomi Wolf details our downward spiral, if any reader is unconvinced by the atrocities perpetrated by our own government.
According to an offhand remark made by our current president, the "Constitution is just a [expletive] piece of paper." He proves every day that he lives by that pathetic, selfish credo. Had he not the privilege of a rich, politically influential father, he'd be lying in the gutter of a street begging for change.
And we as American citizens have to live with the shame of having elected this piece of garbage as president. Shame on us for having made such a mistake, and may we never make it again.
The days of getting an angry mob of students stirred up into a frothing rage (e.g. circa 1960s with the Students for a Democratic Society) is over. I don't like tear gas and I distrust mobs of any sort. Instead, I propose a method of subversion coined by Martin Luther King Jr., in his letter from the Birmingham jail: "One has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws."
Regarding my initial mentioning of the IRS, it is interesting to me to find that the disapproval of the war in Iraq is so astonishingly high, and yet the government still receives adequate income from civilians dutifully paying their taxes to continue to fund it. We're setting up the largest U.S. embassy in the entire world - larger than Vatican City - and all the while the civilian population seems not to put two and two together to see that we are the ones who fund this operation.
If you don't support the war, don't pay for it . or pay the IRS with a check written on a toilet seat, or entirely in pennies. With that said, you may not hear or see me for a while, as I've already gotten my bags packed for a long vacation to somewhere in Cuba.
The bottom line is to not be herded like cattle led to slaughter by the prods of anyone who claims to know what's best for you; I can assure you that authority figures have little more than their own interests in mind when they order us around like automatons. Embody the personality of a feline; as any cat owner knows, no one owns a cat. Own yourself, or the world will dictate the terms of what could have been your life.
Matthew Bachman
Senior
Philosophy
George Orwell might well be considered a prophet, given our current state in this nation. America was once the Land of the Free; it is no longer so.
Every April Americans are forced by threat of jail or penalty (such as liens on property) to pay taxes to the IRS. If this were any other organization, we'd see this for the theft that it is. If you forcefully take money from someone else, that is theft. What is left from this is a nation of neutered and spayed civilians without any real backbone or constituency to stand up to these crooks, extortionists, thieves.
What I see every day around campus is fear and frustration masked behind a thin facade of stoicism. I know it hurts to live in a country slouching toward neo-fascism with each passing day, and feeling powerless to stop it. "The End of America" by Naomi Wolf details our downward spiral, if any reader is unconvinced by the atrocities perpetrated by our own government.
According to an offhand remark made by our current president, the "Constitution is just a [expletive] piece of paper." He proves every day that he lives by that pathetic, selfish credo. Had he not the privilege of a rich, politically influential father, he'd be lying in the gutter of a street begging for change.
And we as American citizens have to live with the shame of having elected this piece of garbage as president. Shame on us for having made such a mistake, and may we never make it again.
The days of getting an angry mob of students stirred up into a frothing rage (e.g. circa 1960s with the Students for a Democratic Society) is over. I don't like tear gas and I distrust mobs of any sort. Instead, I propose a method of subversion coined by Martin Luther King Jr., in his letter from the Birmingham jail: "One has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws."
Regarding my initial mentioning of the IRS, it is interesting to me to find that the disapproval of the war in Iraq is so astonishingly high, and yet the government still receives adequate income from civilians dutifully paying their taxes to continue to fund it. We're setting up the largest U.S. embassy in the entire world - larger than Vatican City - and all the while the civilian population seems not to put two and two together to see that we are the ones who fund this operation.
If you don't support the war, don't pay for it . or pay the IRS with a check written on a toilet seat, or entirely in pennies. With that said, you may not hear or see me for a while, as I've already gotten my bags packed for a long vacation to somewhere in Cuba.
The bottom line is to not be herded like cattle led to slaughter by the prods of anyone who claims to know what's best for you; I can assure you that authority figures have little more than their own interests in mind when they order us around like automatons. Embody the personality of a feline; as any cat owner knows, no one owns a cat. Own yourself, or the world will dictate the terms of what could have been your life.
Matthew Bachman
Senior
Philosophy
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