

'Firing range epiphany'

A volunteer in Vietnam becomes a war tax resister.

8:17 PM, May 7, 2007  |  Comments
John Chisholm is a war tax resister. He works to redirect the amount of income tax he would have to pay that would go to support the military.
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I am not going to pay for your war.

Read that sentence again aloud.

I am not going to pay for your war.

That's a statement of power, self-determination.

That's the statement that John Chisholm started making in 2002.

That's the year he became a war tax resister, someone who refuses to pay a portion of his taxes that would go to support wars.

Congress is debating whether to withhold money from funding the war in Iraq. Chisholm has taken a different, more personal approach.

For the last several years, he's attempted to redirect $911.01 of his tax liability.

Chisholm recently moved to Springfield from Washington state to be near grandchildren. He has sent letters to his representatives in Washington explaining his stand and the symbolic figure that he doesn't pay to the Internal Revenue Service for the war effort.

"This is symbolic, for me, of 9/11/01, the year that the United States felt the brunt of its international politics," he wrote in the letter he sent this year to Sens. Christopher Bond (R-Mo.) and Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.) and Rep. Roy Blunt (R-7th District). "It symbolizes our having chosen, on the heels of that horrible attack, to perpetuate violence on the planet rather than reconsider our profit-driven actions planet wide and adjust to our own enemy generating behavior."

Chisholm's beliefs, like most people's, are complicated.

He is not a pacifist. He wishes his motivations could be that pure, but they are not. And likely, in this life, won't be. If he saw someone being threatened, he would act to protect them and use force if necessary.

He volunteered for the military during the Vietnam War. Chisholm was a gung ho recruit. He wanted to be a part of the honor and tradition that was the United States military.

He qualified as an expert with every weapon they gave him in basic training. Then when he progressed to advanced infantry training, he had what he calls a "firing range epiphany."

He was no longer shooting at round targets, but human-shaped cut-outs.

"The target going down like a dying human being was like an awakening for me," he said.

Chisholm wrote a conscientious objector paper that was about 40 pages long. Forty pages.

It was important, he said, to say exactly what he meant. Important not to belittle or demean the service of the men who served before him, alongside him and who would follow him.

If they did not defend his right to object, he likely would not have that freedom, he said.

That planted the seed of war tax resistance.

But he got caught up in pursuing the American dream. Nice house, kids and a family.

But he got divorced. The dream wasn't going to happen like he'd imagined.

He thought about where he was in the world and what he wanted to be.

Chisholm decided he needed to be working for peace.

But not paying war taxes? He wasn't motivated to do that until after our country bungled the response to Sept. 11.

He's not the only one.

The web site of the National War Tax Resistance Coordinating Committee got about 100 hits a day a few years ago. Now, it's 500, said Ruth Benn, a consultant the group.

She estimates that about 8,000-10,000 Americans consider themselves war tax resisters.

For some, it means a small act of token resistance, such as not paying the excise tax on a local phone bill.

Others go to the extreme of refusing to pay all of their income taxes. Some figure that half of their money goes to the military so they cut out that amount.

Then there are those who make so little money, that they don't owe anything to the government.

That's doable if you can get by on $8,700 a year.

Right now, that's Chisholm's goal. Not only do you have less money to be taxed, but have less need for the things that people go to war for.

The less you make, the less you spend, the less you lose control of where your money goes.

Chisholm never made much money anyway. He's worked as a school counselor and more recently failed financially in business as a mental health therapist. He's currently helping his son-in-law on a family farm.

His first couple of years as a tax resister weren't entirely successful. He was due a refund so he wrote a letter to the government and asked them to redirect funds away from the military. He assumes they simply threw it away. Now that he's gotten better control of his withholdings, he's started to receive automated letters from the IRS. Nothing personal yet.

It's extremely rare for a war tax resister to go to jail or even to get a personal response from the government.

And that's fine with Chisholm. He wants to share his message with people who are interested.

But he also thinks that once he gets his income low enough that he won't have to redirect his money, he'll likely stop sending the protest letters to his representatives. After all, that's not a very peaceful thing to do.


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