My Letter to the IRS

11/30/2023  01/06/2026

Office of the IRS

I have been trying to write this letter for the better part of a year  two and a half years. I have spent that time nearly daily reaching out to my elected representatives through multiple channels; while receiving less than a dozen form letter responses, clearly copy-pasted between the offices of separate representatives. This inspires no faith whatsoever in the idea that we the populace are in fact represented in any way by our so-called elected officials—not the responses that I have received, as I expected no different; the fact that Everyone I’ve spoken to has received the same response—rather a lack of any response at all. Just recently a bill went forward to send even more money to the illegal settler colony of Israel, with a pittance also being allocated to the people of Palestine who, besides experiencing a literal genocide are also being forced to endure a man-made famine of Israel and the United States’ creation and continuation. It is barbaric.

As we pass day 200 365 700+ of the current violent Israeli aggression towards the people of Palestine, I find that I cannot in good conscience continue to contribute in any way financially to the upwards of 260 billion+ dollars in “foreign assistance” that the United States government has seen appropriate to send to an illegal settler colony who have committed on going and extreme acts of ethnic cleansing and genocide against the Palestinian people since 1948.

I have seen things I will never unsee, we all have. I now know what the aftermath of a man being run over by a tank looks like, what the dismembered bodies of babies and children disemboweled and hanging from walls look like, what it looks like to see people in pajamas and flip flops dig through the rubble of bombed concrete buildings with their bare hands to dig out their loved ones, their community members, perfect strangers. What it looks like to watch as hospital after hospital is ransacked and bombed. A mass grave was found in the courtyard of a hospital: and I had to ask which hospital it was, because it isn’t the first and it won’t be the last and every second of it funded by United States citizens’ taxpayer dollars. Flint Michigan hasn’t had clean water in over a decade.

It looks like a Rorschach test, by the way—the kind of thing you only see in horror films—and the thing that snapped it into focus for me was the remains of the white cast on his leg. A man, injured and starved and fleeing from a hospital where he should have been able to receive treatment, with a plaster cast on his leg. The bodies of pregnant women, of small children, of the elderly, doctors, journalists, educators and poets, slaughtered and left in mass graves.

I don’t write any of this because I’m trying to appeal to the humanity of the system in power who green lit and funded this atrocity—but if I end up in court over this someday, I want someone to have to read these words, out loud to a jury of my peers, I want them have to stand in front of people and tell them what we did. What American taxpayers have been forced to pay for. And I dare you to tell me in front of that jury that you, lawyer who could someday read this—I want you to say out loud that you are comfortable with your tax dollars funding the indiscriminate slaughter of a nation.

I suppose we should be used to it by now though, watching children die. You have been forcing us to accept the death of children at the hands of deranged people with access to weapons they don’t need since Columbine. Our government can move to ban and silence an avenue of the people’s expression of free speech—a First Amendment protected right; but they can’t agree on the fact that children deserve to survive their school day, their trip to the mall, their day at church, more than the archaic misinterpretation of the Second Amendment and the pedantic hangers on there-to. Nothing conditions a population faster than forcing them to accept that their children could be murdered, and the state would do little to nothing about it. It took a group of armed officers over an hour to enter Uvalde, but students peacefully protesting on college campuses nationwide are being attacked and arrested by officers in riot gear, disproportionate to the actions of the protestors. Nothing will make you accept the death of someone else’s children faster than being forced to accept the death of your own, it seems.

I will repeat that I don’t write any of this to appeal to your humanity. I know this is not the first horror that has been funded by taxpayer dollars, and unfortunately it probably won’t be the last before the system finally is forced to heal. I want the system to heal, and it won’t if we all just keep doing the same things we’ve always done and expecting to get new results. I will continue to redistribute the funds I would allocate to tax payments directly into my community. I will continue to contribute directly to the people this system won’t help. I do this small thing, because there are so many things I can not change alone; but in this way I can remind myself of my humanity, of my intrinsic connection to the people in my community, to the people in Gaza, to you, even. There is no such thing as other people’s children. If we want the next generation to grow to be greater and brighter and healthier than we have been allowed to be, and I do, we have to stop paying to watch them die.

Knowing as the American public now does that those funds sent to Israel have allowed for the provision of universal healthcare and universal access to higher education to Israeli citizens—benefits courtesy of tax-paying Americans that we as citizens here in the US do not have access to; it seems unconscionable to ask the American public to continue to shoulder this financial burden. You tax people as if they are corporations and treat corporations as if they are people; and despite the active protest of tens of thousands—continue to call for increased funding and the lifting the prohibitions of access to US military arms to increase their level of violence and ongoing genocide and ethnic cleansing against the Palestinian people.

Conscientious objection to the payment of taxes and the redistribution of such funds to humane alternatives represents a longstanding nonviolence tradition. Tax resisters choose different methods. For example, some file tax forms while withholding payment, some don’t file at all, and some live below the taxable income level. Some are content with resisting quietly as a personal practice, while others resist in a public way to raise awareness about our government’s misuse of tax income and to outwardly demonstrate the moral power of civil disobedience. I send this letter with all due respect for the individuals who work at the IRS. My objections to the role your agency plays do not obstruct my care for you as human beings.

Thank you for your consideration,

Gretchen Wolger