Tex refusal protest

Chris Hedges has decided that he can no longer in good conscience pay taxes that fund America's wars. This is a deeply admirable decision, defended with both clarity and passion. Why aren't we all tax refusers, or in jail for some form of civil disobedience?

PAF has been arrested for CD before, part of a protest against an earlier war. It made me feel a little better, kind of. Business as usual over our dead bodies, goddamit. For about 15 minutes, our protest action impeded the ability of federal civil servants to get to their offices through the front door of the building. Then we were politely arrested and taken in a police bus to be booked in the police department auditorium. Whether we liked it or not we got our names in the paper. A few people thought we were heros, we were villified by many more, but most ignored us. All of us took personal risks to do this. I truly believed my career was at risk. And what did we accomplish? We risked arrest for political reasons. We fucking courted arrest. We were arrested. The war went merrily on, and almost no one noticed or cared about what we had done.

Over the years I have come to think about this as a moral statement that I believed I needed to make at the time. We felt better about ourselves for having made the statement and for having taken some risks to do so. But it was certainly not politically effective in any way whatever. In short, it was as much about me and my fellow protesters as it was about the war.

I admire Chris Hedges for doing what he is doing. He is taking much more serious risks than I did, or than I would be willing to do, especially now that I am a parent. I wish him well. But I think these sorts of individually defiant gestures are unlikely to stop the war or change the direction of the country. Having said that, I must also confess that I have no better answer. Perhaps that makes me one of the Good Germans.