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What Price Civilization? [1]

['View Profile', 'Greg Dworkin']

Date: 2026-04-15  

I don’t remember who was responsible for this old epigram, but it now seems trite, given the current state of the “leadership” in this country:

“Taxes are what people pay for the cost of civilization.”

At least that used to be true. As a kid growing up in the late 1950s I remember watching the heavy equipment and their operators labor at building what would later be named Interstate 64 through Virginia. I asked my father who was paying for all that concrete, steel and labor, and he answered, “Taxes”. The question came up again when we watched Huntley-Brinkley on the evening news reporting on the speech of President Kennedy when he announced his challenge to the country to put a man on the moon before the end of the decade. “Dad, that sounds awful ambitious! Who’s going to pay for that?” Dad replied with gritted teeth, “Taxes”. Dad was a Goldwater republican, and if he could have ridden a horse to work instead of driving a car, he’d likely would. (Note to conservatives: spurs don’t make your cars go faster…)

So all these decades later, retired after 43 years in the Tech Industry in a 30 year marriage to an incredible woman, we now find ourselves living the kind of life we worked so long and hard side by side to achieve the retirement we chose to pursue as a common, hard-fought goal. Each year we diligently collected the necessary documents required to accurately report our incomes to the State and Federal governments with the expectation that those monies would satisfy our contribution to the promise of sustaining and building on the civilization that had, up to that point, provided for our ability to live comfortably and under the protection of the country’s government.

This year, however, was different. As I electronically signed my name to the completed tax form and prepared to click on the “Send” button to the I.R.S., I got a knot in my stomach. It then hit me like a gut punch: By paying that money we earned through wise investments, savings and side jobs, we are now complicit in supporting a rogue gang of criminals committing war crimes and human rights violations, led by a convicted rapist and a sexual molester of children.

My god: so many agonizing questions… What part of my contribution to this evil enterprise will be used to bomb a children’s hospital in Lebanon? Or construct a concentration camp that ICE will use to warehouse people with brown skin, foreign accents or non-conforming sexual identities? Or divert to subsidize religious institutions that I have nothing to do with? Those horrible questions came vomiting out of my brain with the reality of the current state of the country, the insanely expensive useless wars, the foreign entanglements, the emasculated “justice” system – even the stark, dangerous prospect of a power-mad dictator cancelling our elections to circumvent his all but certain fate.

I felt dirty – the desperate need to scrub myself with a bristle brush and Fels-Naptha soap to rid myself of the stench of this country. But what about the consequences of what my heart was telling me to do? Federal prison for refusing to pay taxes? Hell, even if we abandoned our home and maxed out our credit cards seeking refuge in another country, it’s doubtful we would survive the trip and the resettlement expenses at our age. Intellectually we wasted our entire lives subsidizing a lie – and I wasted 6 years that I’ll never get back defending a country that venerated my uniform while not giving a flying fuck about who was inside it.

Our “State of the Union”: damned if we do- damned if we don’t.

In all my years I have never felt as filthy and cheap as when I finally clicked on that “Send” button. As we once again rapidly approach another Memorial Day, I couldn’t help but wonder how many more of those aluminum caskets my money was helping to send to Dover AFB.

Happy Tax Day, America.

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2026/4/15/800019981/community/what-price-civilization/

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