You Will Pay-With
The War Tax Resisters League In Mind
From The Pen Of Sam
Lowell
Steve Whipple and Brad Lucas had never had many arguments in their long
association together. That “association” business to not put a too formal spin
on the matter started long ago when they were first introduced at the
children’s session of the York Hill Friends’ Meeting in Salem. While Sam had
drifted away from the Quakerly ways in the late 1960s after many fitful nights
and more than a few “heated” arguments with his late parents who had, to use a
term of the times, freaked out, when he decided to quit the traditional
Friends’ Meeting House in Cambridge and join the break-away younger set who met
at the Harvard Divinity School and had never looked back they had remained
steadfast friends even though Brad still kept the faith at York Hill. Of course
brought up under the guidance of the “inner light” the tendency of the two men would
have been to reason things out and if things could not be reasoned out then
they would agree to disagree and let the matter rest or until the situation
changed enough to warrant a change of heart on one or the other’s part.
For the most part that is how they maintained their long-term friendship which
beyond the association business already mentioned which they had no say in
since their respective parents had belonged to the same York Hill Meeting had
survived relatively unscathed by modern standards. Brad had supported Steve
when he broke away from the Cambridge Meeting although he was not altogether
sure of why the young radical Quakers needed to seek another space except like
a lot of their generation one of the ways of expressing one’s independence was
to automatically do the opposite of what one’s parents were doing. Brad had
done the same when he decided to pursue an academic career rather than join his
father in his accounting business. Brad had also supported Steve when at the
height of the draft resistance despite the almost automatic military exemption
that young Quaker men were entitled to as a historically recognized pacifistic
religion he had refused to register in order to gain that exemption. As it
turned out the government despite threats over his failure to register never prosecuted
the case (probably assuming that some judge would throw the thing out for wasting
governmental resources when there were plenty of non-Quaker draft resisters
with no such history to fill the bastinado). And Steve in his turn had
supported Brad when he decided that he would do “alternative service” out among
the Puma Indians in Arizona rather than resist.
So just two gentle angry guys going about their respective businesses and
keeping some kind of connection to the peace movement that they were almost
from birth organically attached to. That is until the Iraq War blew up in their
faces back in 2003 (really as the war clouds were forming in 2002 since they
were among the first in Boston to publicly at Park Street Station, an historic
protest location on the Boston Common, come out of their shells in the
aftermath of 9/11 and say “no” to Bush 43’s damn war intentions). No, there had
been no question about the need to organize and protest to the high heavens
about the bogus reasons for the war but rather after the “slam-dunk victory”
what to do when the pre-war mass opposition had dissipated.
See Steve and Brad were if nothing else children of the 1960s anti-war
explosion in America as the senseless, merciless and bloody Vietnam War dragged
on devouring the flower of both American and Vietnamese youth for no known
purpose on the American side anyway (they were both somewhat sympathetic to the
national aspirations of the Vietnamese despite the blood spilled). They had
been as very young men (along with their respective parents) among the first
few thousands (maybe less) who had marched through Central Park in New York under
the auspices of the Fifth Avenue Peace Parade Committee calling for an
immediate American withdrawal from Vietnam to the hoots and catcalls of
“commie, reds, and traitors” by jeering passers-by. But they had also witnessed
the increasing opposition from the young, mainly students, mainly men subject
to draft induction and their friends and supporters, to the professors and
academics, to elements of the political leadership, to the working-class
people, and eventually to the housewives who stirred in righteous indignation.
Finally as well in a sign that the whole project was doomed the anti-war fever got
to the rank and file soldiers who had fought and bled in the war. So a growing
and massive opposition evolved over time, maybe too long a time but evolved.
Both men had been (have been) befuddled by the lack of opposition in the
streets (where such matters as war and peace are resolved one way or the other)
over time as the Afghan and Iraq debacles dragged on and on. It was almost in
exact inverse relationship to the build-up of opposition over Vietnam. And
hence Brad’s dilemma, or rather the government’s as he liked to put it.
Brad (Steve too but he would have taken a different tack) had frankly had
his fill over the previous several years of lonely small vigils on busy
intersections around Boston or on the Common, had had his fill of teach-ins and
shout-outs in university halls, had had his fill of arrests chained to the
fence in front of the White House on snowy December days and humid spring
nights in opposition to the various escalations and calls from troop withdrawal
from Iraq and Afghanistan (calls still necessary under the theory of endless
war by both the Bush and Obama administrations and probably the way things are
going the next one too). So in 2011 he decided on his own as a symbolic material
gesture of personal witness (which is the way the Quakerly like to put the
matter) to stop paying his federal taxes, his war taxes as he called them,
stopped being complicit with the war governments in the only real way that a
private citizen acting on his or her own could protest the endless wars.
The government, the IRS as the main collection agency of the government, is
very jealous of is prerogative as far as collecting dough to keep the
government running goes. So naturally when Brad had done the various maneuvers
necessary to perk the government’s interest as to why a single-tax payer guy
with a substantial income was not paying any taxes they went after him, tried
all the various means they had to tie up every resource they could of his in
order to get their blood money. The whole case is still in litigation and it
has been a see-saw battle between Brad and the IRS so we will not know the
final toll for a while. That part is not important, or of only lesser
importance, compared to Steve’s getting “mad,” angry or whatever word you want
to use to show that Steve though (thinks) that Brad’s actions were foolhardy
and in the language of their youth, “elitist” and off-the-charts.
See Steve when he moved away from Quakerly ways also moved away from that
“personal witness” business as a poor substitute for building mass actions (or
trying to which is as important to him). That is why for the first time in a
long time Steve and Brad have had an argument that has been brewing for a while
now. Maybe an argument which will last as long as the endless wars. Yeah, maybe
that long.
[The story of the brother in the leaflet above, Matthew Hoh, presents
another aspect of Brad Lucas’ argument. Personally I follow Joe Hill- Don’t
mourn, organize!]
