Jesus and the Tax Man

It is entirely fitting that Easter should come this year a scant three days before tax day. The holiest day for our primary religion followed closely by the holiest day for those secular religionists who pray at the alter of big government. On Easter, the magical Jesus Christ allegedly rose from the dead after supposedly dying for all of our sins. On tax day, our newly anointed president gets to spend our hard-earned wealth for all of our sins. Christians just tithed 10% or more to a magical, supposedly all powerful God on Sunday, and on Wednesday we all get to be forced to tithe another 30% or so to an allegedly magical, all powerful government. Hallelujah! We are saved.

I spent Easter weekend with my family being productive. When the weather warms, the grass begins to green, and the trees and flowers bloom, I am moved to get my hands dirty, not my nose. No prostrators we, the ground of liberty family kept our heads in the air, albeit at times with our knees on the floor (mimicking the pious in form only, but, I assure you, entirely for practical purposes; to clean a child's room, sometimes one must assume the perspective of the very short), and cleaned house, performing the amazing logistical feat of switching two little girls' bedrooms, and managing to clean and reorganize those two and a third. The weekend began with the house in that precarious state of barely controlled chaos, roughly the equivalent of a Jenga tower in a late state of play, and ended in a slightly more controlled state of chaos, with lots of toys and books and mysterious plastic thingies stowed in bags and boxes for sale, storage or donation (once again, an entirely pragmatic nod to the pious, Caesar being good enough to allow a tax deduction for things given away that cannot be sold). We celebrated the conclusion of our productive weekend in that distinctly American way--hiding, finding, and then eating chocolate eggs and other sweet, yummy goodies.

The kids loved their new rooms, especially the youngest, who just turned four and is now the proud mistress of her own bedroom, no longer forced to share a corner in the family office and guestroom. Most importantly, she has graduated from the converted crib to a full-fledged big girl bed with a pink lace canopy above it. There she sat, at the end of the day, playing and singing softly to herself, alone and very, very happy. Her very own space in her very own room. We adults call it private property; kids call it "mine." The level of understanding is vastly different, but the pride and contentment at having a space of one's own is very similar.

It is hard to allow the concept of "sin" into the same universe in which that little girl--indeed, this entire family--exists, and yet both the religious and the secular altruists would heap sin upon our entire weekend. We are atheists, for starters; we did not attend church, and, indeed, spend a good part of the weekend amusing ourselves by making fun of Jesus (Dad even proposed renaming Easter "make fun of Jesus day" but Mom was not a big fan of focusing on the negative, and preferred instead to mark the holiday as one standing for productivity). Some religious sects would stone us just for that. We decided to spend the weekend selfishly enjoying life instead of prostrating ourselves before some magical being in the sky and his tiresome, preachy son. We worked entirely for ourselves and felt enormous pride, a cardinal sin according to the religious and the secular alike. We hope to profit from the eventual sale of the items we've decided to discard, and if we donate anything, it will be for the express purpose of obtaining a tax write off, not to help the poor or the homeless or fat people or stupid people or people who can't pay their mortgages or the auto industry or animals or any of the other millions of "brothers" whose keepers we are supposed to be. We enjoyed yummy chocolate. We threw lots of things in the garbage and didn't recycle anything.

Fortunately for the altruists, tax day approacheth. Today, I experienced a few moments of darkness while contemplating the many hundreds of thousands of dollars I have been forced to pay to governments at all levels, the hours, days, and months of my life that I have been forced to work for the benefit of others, all for the privilege of having them throw up obstacles to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, erect a multitude of new offices and send hither swarms of officers to harass us and eat out our substance, and generally work hard to ruin the government we have instituted among men, and the civilized society that it sustains.

Then I returned home to find my four girls happily going about their lives, as if to say we never had to take any of it seriously did we. My family, in my home, on my property. My life. Those are ideas, ultimately, and they will survive their material expressions no matter how hard those who tax us try to take them away, provided we don't give them up willingly. They can tax the home, the property, the income, the belongings. But they cannot tax my soul unless I let them. And I don't.