Spirit in Action

Paying for Peace/War Tax Resistance - Patricia Washburn and Perry Treadwell

A visit with 2 long-time war tax resisters. Patricia Washburn is a religious peace educator, a seminary graduate though never ordained. She testified to Congress for the Peace Tax Fund after the IRS took her house for taxes. Perry Treadwell got a special leading from a verse of Robert Frost when he was 42 and quit his tenured position in microbiology, and found a beautiful life of service. Both address the fears and gifts of decades of war tax resistance.

Broadcast on:: 20 Jan 2008
Audio Format:: other

[music] Let us sing this song for the healing of the world That we may hear as one With every voice, with every song We will move this world along And our lives will feel the echo of our healing [music] Welcome to Spirit in Action. My name is Mark Helpsmeet. Each week, I'll be bringing you stories of people living lives of fruitful service, of peace, community, compassion, creative action, and progressive efforts. I'll be tracing the spiritual roots that support and nourish them in their service, hoping to inspire and encourage you to sink deep roots and produce sacred fruit in your own life. Let us sing this song for the dreaming of the world That we may dream as one With every voice, with every song We will move this world along Last year, I put out a request on a War Tax Resistance listserv for volunteers to talk about their experience with doing this direct war resistance witness. I ended up interviewing six War Tax Resisters and producing three one-hour segments about the various forms of witnesses that these people have practiced. Through the process, a couple more folks came to my attention who didn't fit in the original three-part series, but I resolved to start off 2008 with a look at this issue. The war in Iraq spins endlessly on, gobbling up horrific amounts of our tax dollars, so it might be a good time to ask ourselves, are we willing to continue to voluntarily underwrite the costs of this war? Of course, if your answer to that question is no, the next question is how? We have two guests today for spirit and action who have more than 30 years of experience a piece in War Tax Resistance. Both are Quakers, like me, just a result of who happened to answer my inquiry to the unaffiliated listserv, and both speak powerfully of the gift that pursuing this seemingly demanding witness has brought to them. Patricia Washburn is, and has been, a religious peace educator, including doing some notable work on peace studies and reconciliation conflict resolution. She graduated from Episcopal Seminary back before they would ordain women, which has been its own kind of gift to her. Another gift of the process was when the IRS took her house. Clearly, she's got some startling and world-changing perceptions to share with us. We'll also talk to Perry Treadwell down in Georgia. I'll tell you more about him after we visit with Patricia Washburn, but I'll drop one tidbit right now. Perry read a Robert Fosse poem when he was 42 that led him to up and retire from his tenured position at the university. But first, let's go to the phone for a visit with Patricia Washburn. Patricia, thanks so much for joining me for Spirit in Action. I'm delighted to be able to do this. Thank you so much for asking me. Patricia, are you officially clergy? You've got the official position of being one of the clergy people who is conscientiously objecting to paying for war? I'm a seminary trained theologian, and my background is in social ethics and developmental theory. I've been a religious educator for 30 odd years. I was never ordained in the Episcopal Church because I went to seminary before they were ordaining women, so I ended up being in academia and activism instead. You've been practicing working with the Episcopal Church. You also have Quaker connection in there, don't you? Oh, yes. I taught at Earlham College and developed the Peace Studies program at the Earlham School of Religion for their seminary. I worked for the American Friends Service Committee, and it turns out that my mother's maiden name was Mills. Mills is an historic Quaker name, so I learned when I went to teach at Earlham that I had this long lineage of Quakers in my life, and I'd long had an affinity with friends, so I consider myself what John Punchin would call a sacramental friend. A little bit of both. Obviously, if you've prepared curriculum for Peace Studies, you obviously have been concerned about Peace. How far back does this go for you? Is this a high school, or before, or later, or is it just college? Obviously, it began in college. I went to a liberal arts college that was coping with the Veldi Committee, which was a subset of the McCarthy kind of behavior, and they came through and tried to intimidate the faculty at my school, and I thought, "There's something wrong here." That got me interested in, I guess, issues of justice and civil rights, and that just morphed into concern for the more global concerns around justice, and led me into the field of peace education, and of course, I vigiled with the Quakers during the Vietnam War when I was teaching in Colorado Springs, and I had a number of friends who were Quakers. They'd been a profound influence in my life for many years. And when did you start developing the concern about how your taxes went to support the military? I think I started being a phone tax resister during the Vietnam War. Over the course of all these years, it escalated. I mean, I started with phone tax, and then I started withholding the approximately 50% that the Friends Committee on National Legislation suggested was related to war expenses. I would withhold those, and that began probably in about 1970. So, did you just get radicalized? I mean, the 1960s was a radicalizing time for a lot of people, people taking just major risks and stepping out from the norm. Well, in some ways I did, I was teaching in high school in Colorado Springs at the time, when Martin Luther King was assassinated, I asked the administration why we hadn't lowered the flag to half-mast, and they said, "Well, we haven't had a directive." And I basically said, "Well, I think my class will not come into the building until you lower the flag." And that was sort of the beginning of the demise of me at that high school. Plus, as I said, I was vigiling with the Quakers in front of the Post Office, which was also the Army Recruiting Office. And this was -- Colorado Springs is a very military town. It was not long before I was asked not to return to this particular school in the following year. So, I think that was the beginning of realizing that making that sort of public witness was costly. I basically lost my job. Was there a theological route in your upbringing that this is outcome of? Is this something you got from your family? My parents were not actively engaged in some kind of church life. By the time that my mother was growing up, the Quaker piece of the family was not overt. But they were always liberal, socially concerned people. And so I think I grew up with that kind of a value system that said, "Do no harm and value all life." My father was a conservationist, so I started very early being concerned about not only the value of human life, but the value of all life. You know, I think there's a lot of people who believe that if you're connected with a church, a mainline church, and Episcopal probably fits in that role, that you're going to sell out to the government because you need to do these accommodations to continue to exist. You're going to start quoting Paul saying that, you know, "All governments are ordained by God, and so we have to obey them, including paying their taxes. Theologically, you must have gone somewhere else." Well, I guess I was reading a different part of the scripture. What I was reading was, "Render unto Caesar, that which is Caesar's, and render unto God, that which is God." And I was pretty clear about the difference. And of course, you know, the summary of the law, and Thou shalt not kill. And that was the piece that became very significant to me at a fairly early age. Is this kind of thing that you felt supported by when you're going through seminary? I was hanging out with Quakers before I ever ended up in seminary. So the Quaker influence had been very strong and formative in my life because I didn't go to seminary until I was in my 40s. And I had been a tax resistor. When we lived in Baltimore, we'd housed some of the Catonsville mine, supporters, when that trial was going on with the Baragons. So we'd been very active in the peace movement. I was a draft counselor in the Vietnam War era. So I didn't go to seminary, you see, until 1972. So I'd already lived through a lot of the Vietnam era as a tax resistor and as a draft counselor. I don't think it was my episcopal piece that kicked in as much as it was the Quaker piece. Well, then maybe my question is, because you were firm and clear in your theological direction here, did you change the Episcopalian's? I ended up participating with those members of my denomination who were also concerned about Peace Act. Most mainline denominations have something akin to a peace fellowship. There's the Presbyterian Peace Fellowship and the Episcopal Peace Fellowship and the Methodist Peace Fellowship and Pots Christi. So there is a group within most denominations which is concerned about peace and justice issues. And I became involved with those folks very early on. I think that there are groups within any denomination who have always been aligned with the nonviolence. I wouldn't say it is the dominant. Well, I was even surprised when I went to teach at Erlum that there were Quakers for whom the Peace testimony was not the dominant testimony for them. I was just, I guess I was somewhat naive because I'd been on the East Coast hanging out with Philadelphia yearly meeting friends who of course were much more liberal. And so when I came to the Midwest and found that there were friends who did not see the Peace testimony as paramount in their theology, that was a surprise to me. Normally a minister of a church ends up walking a tightrope. And so if you speak too clearly about some things that are considered controversial, you don't last at the church. It's similar for teachers as you already pointed out here at the high school you were teaching at. So has this regularly brought you to the attention of people who then wanted to get rid of you because you were too controversial? Well, I think that I have always been seen as a person who was committed to nonviolence. And I have always participated in organizations which supported that, like the Fellowship of Reconciliation and the National Peace Academy Campaign, where I was a staffer, campaigned for a Peace Tax Fund on whose board I sat. So I tended to be in the context of peace educators more than in the context of clergy. And when I was hanging around clergy, I was with those clergy who shared many of my perspectives. I did do some interesting work because I was also a developmental theorist in trying to design models for working with controversial issues in congregation. And the Auburn Institute published a piece of curriculum that I wrote with a colleague called Peace Making Without Division. And that was during the nuclear time. And then later, in fact within the last, I guess about three years, they asked us to revise it to make it more accessible to people who wanted to talk about the issue of the current Iraq War. So I've always been trying to bridge between people who had differing perspectives because I think that's the task of reconciliation. It's not just to talk to the people you agree with, but to try to find ways to bring more people into the conversation. I'm trained as a mediator. I have done this work in trying to develop reconciling models for use in congregations. And that was the direction that I chose to go, rather than always being confrontive. I was trying to be conciliatory without compromising my values. Can you feel like you've been able to do that? Yep. I mean that's been the great gift of my life, is that because I chose to be in education rather than perhaps in the ordained ministry, I had more freedom to do this. The peacemaking without division model that we created turned out to be very helpful in a number of controversial issues, whether it was with respect to initially to the Vietnam War and the nuclear issue. And then to women clergy or the gay lesbian issues, any place where you end up with an enormous conflict, this is a model that seemed to get people who differed to be able to talk to each other. And I think that has been probably the major contribution I made in my professional life. I've certainly been part of a lot of conversations which did break down when discussing the controversial issues. So what's the secret of peaceful conversations? Well, I think that what we learned was that you have to initially build some trust in a group. What happens when people with a cause go into a congregation or any other setting, they start talking about the content before they've processed the effective stuff, the feeling level stuff, the emotional stuff. And if you can begin to deal with some of that first, we used to talk in terms of hopes and fears so that people begin to get some of the affect articulated before you start talking about the content, then it doesn't come back and will be trapped you later. And what are you doing now? Well, now, this brings me back to being more theological. So after I made my tax witnesses, as I said, it started escalating and I withheld more, and after my children were grown and I felt that I wasn't going to impact their lives, because I sat on this National Commission for the Episcopal Church, the Peace of Justice Commission, we went on a site visit to Israel, Palestine. I spent some time in the refugee camps in the Gaza, and we left on this trip in 1989, just before the invasion of Kuwait. It made a lasting impact on me, and I realized that I wasn't going to file my income tax at all that year. And that, of course, sent me into a different category. And so I spent the next four years in conversation with the IRS, telling them that I could do alternative service, I could give the money to an alternative fund, but I wasn't going to pay for bombing children in refugee camps. Ultimately, I carried this to the extreme, and I lost my house, and that led me then to say, "All right, I have been forced to live more simply." So what I'm doing now is trying to do that, trying to live as what Thomas Merton would call a contemplative in the world of action. About eight years ago, I moved up here to the mountains, lived in a little renovated ranger cabin, and I've tried to be very mindful of my prayer life, my spiritual life. I work half-time in a congregation here, I work as a chaplain in a senior citizen retirement community, and I spent a lot of time just being and not nearly as much time doing. And did you go there to Colorado specifically? Because you said to yourself, you know, Patricia, you've got to get out to the woods and get away, simplify your life radically. Actually, I came to Colorado because the least bolding who was my mentor, who was a wise, wise, Quaker woman, when I left Earlam said to me, "Well, instead of saying, what are I going to do now, why don't we say, where are we going to be?" And I was homesick for Colorado because that's where I had been before I went to the East Coast, and so I said, "I want to go home." So I came back to Colorado, and that was the point at which I worked for the American Friends Service Committee. So I didn't come initially to Estes Park. I came to Estes Park eight years ago. But it became more and more clear that I wanted to live a simpler life, and when the IRS made it possible for me to do that, I just said, "All right, it's time." You know, when you talked about the way that you expressed it, you said the IRS made it possible for me to simplify my life. Most people look at that kind of thing with great fear and trembling, and, "Oh, no, they'll take my car. They'll take my house. I better not do anything to upset them." Just, "What is this that's driving you, or that's freeing you from that fear?" That's an interesting question, and I think what was very helpful to me, as you know in Quaker process, in Friends process, if you were going to make some sort of major decision, you often convene a Clearness Committee. And I had a Clearness Committee that walked through this whole tax witness with me, and when I would get frightened, they were there for me as a support community, and I had a wonderful Quaker lawyer who was the sort of person who communicated with the IRS, so I didn't have to face them directly all the time, because they can be formidable. She was a buffer for me through this whole process, and she was a wonderful woman. She did it pro bono, because, of course, I was under levy. I didn't have any resources. I think while I testified before the House Ways and Means Subcommittee on Taxation, when I was asked to testify and tell my story, I realized that I was no longer afraid. I didn't enjoy getting letters from the IRS, and I would open them with some fear and trembling, but I was deeply committed to taking this walk. And I had a strong support community of folks who walked with me, and prayed with me, and actually vigiled with me in front of Bob's tow lot on Income Tax Day, when we went to see if we could retrieve my automobile. It was just a wonderful group of people who have stayed friends and have continued to walk with me and who have made their own witnesses. I don't think you can do this alone. I think you really do have to have a community. I ask you these questions as if it was all new to me. Of course, I've been a war tax resistor since the early 80s, myself. But actually, my personal experience was where it's more naughty, where the knots get in the way, is trying to do it in a relationship. Because it's very typical that the two different people in a relationship are different places with regard to what they're fearing or what they're aspiring toward. How have you worked with that? At the time that I actually decided not to file, at that point I was alone. I was no longer married, so I was only responsible for my own decisions. And as I said, my children were grown, and I felt that I was not going to be disrupting other people's lives by my choices. In the early days of the telephone tax and the vigiling and that sort of thing, I was strongly supported by my husband. But I have friends in the movement who are in different places with their spouses. One of them may be more ready than the other. And what they've basically tried to do is to respect each other's place on the journey and also to do the kinds of legal things so that one person's salary doesn't get garnished for another person's resistance. You know, trying to do the things that would protect a spouse, even though the spouse may not be ready to be quite as radical. You mentioned speaking before the Ways and Means Committee of the House of Representatives. How did you get there? I got there because Marion Frans asked me to come. Marion Frans was this wonderful woman who for years, as you probably know, devoted her life to trying to find an alternative taxation policy for conscientious objectors, which was called the National Campaign for a Peace Tax Fund. So there was a hearing that the Peace Tax Fund folks brought before the House Ways and Means Subcommittee. And several of us, Tom Gummleton, was there. I was there. A number of denominational leaders were there speaking on behalf of this piece of legislation in Congress. I told my story of having had my house taken. It had happened fairly recently. And it was hard. I mean, I lost something that I loved a lot. And then the next year, when they reintroduced the legislation, Mark Hatfield, who was one of the major sponsors of this bill, told my story on the floor of Congress as he introduced the legislation, in effect, saying this kind of thing should not happen to people. And clearly, I'm not the only person that happened to. I just happened to be the one they chose to have the story told. So what happened to me was after the IRS took my house, they basically told the church where I was working. And at this point, it was a Unitarian church that if they did not withhold my income tax, that they, the church, of course, could be levied. There were long and poignant discussions in the board of trustees meetings. They graciously wrote a letter to the national denominational office on my behalf. What they did was they reconfigured my salary, so there was less of it that was taxable and more of it that was discretionary. But at that point, I did end up having withholding taken out. So what I've done with that is I've tried to have as low an income as possible. But I've not asked the institutions for which I worked to jeopardize their nonprofit status by refusing to withhold. That didn't seem ethical to me. It was very interesting that even when I taught at Earlem, they were not willing to do it. And I was surprised at a quicker institution that said we have to do withholding. And that was, of course, the money that I chose not to pay the year that I didn't file. I think one does the best one can given the institutions and organizations that one is committed to. Having walked through this with the Unitarians and seen how much risk they did take on my behalf and realizing that there was a point at which they could not jeopardize them further. There are not too many groups that will, I mean, Philadelphia Yearly Meeting will do that, and they got in trouble for refusing to withhold. But most institutions really struggle with that. I want to come back to the theological backing. And I guess what my concern is some people can say, well, yes, if you pay for the military, you may be reducing the amount of killing. If you're paying for the military, you may be following admonishment from Paul to support the government, which you're supposed to do. There's balancing points of view that one can listen to, and I think probably should listen to, and then make one's decision. How did you sort it out? You sound so very 100% clear, and, you know, four decades of doing it, maybe you will lead to some clarity. Interesting. I had this conversation fairly recently after the PBS production, The War, you know, about the Second World War. My congregation is full of people who are senior citizens, many of whom serve in the Second World War, and a very devout person said to me, you know, I know that you and I disagree on this. But I firmly believed when I was serving in the Second World War that we saved lives by dropping the bomb on Hiroshima. And I know that he earnestly believed that, and I did not see that it was my task to change his mind. What I said was, you and I disagree on this, and I made a different choice. But I think it was the bombing of Hiroshima that even as a child just seared me and led me down this path. You know, thou shalt not kill. You have to remember that Paul was a Pharisee. He was a legalist. So I choose not to quote Paul, I choose to quote Jesus, who said thou shalt not kill. Sounds like that could get you a lot of negative feedback within the Episcopal Church. Have you been able to convert, shall we say, any Episcopalians to war tax? Actually, it's interesting, because they're now in the national denominational structure. They say upfront that conscientious objection to military taxes is an acceptable alternative for persons who believe that that is what they are called to do. I mean, that's been a major step, denominationally, for not just the Episcopal Church, but a number of denominations to say that those of us who are CEOs are following our conscience and the right of conscience, Trump, as it were. And I think there's a very substantial group of people who may or may not be CEOs themselves, but who understand why some of us choose that route. When I was talking to you earlier, Patricia, you mentioned, why do you do this objection to paying for the military? You said it's for the children. And could you elaborate on that? When I worked in Washington, I met Betty Bumpers, and she started an organization called "Warmed," and it's a women's action for nuclear disarmament. That was the focus at that point. And they had this wonderful logo, which was a picture of a mother holding a baby on her lap, and the baby intern was holding a globe. And the caption was, "Children, ask the world of us." And that was a very powerful image for me, a powerful metaphor that I've carried for years. We do it for the children. I now, I've raised three grandchildren, and I'm starting on the next round. I have a two-and-a-half-year-old, and I will continue to make this witness prayerfully in hopes that she will never have to be the victim of war. I can't remember what I told you the story of the day that the young IRS agent came to take my car, came to the church office, I guess with his superior, to take my car. And I said, "I understand why you have to do this. You're just doing your job, but I'd like you to show you a picture of my grandchildren because I want you to understand why I'm doing what I do." And I think she was really embarrassed because I didn't try to lecture him. I just showed him a picture of my grandchildren. I said, "Children, ask the world of us. This is why I'm doing what I do." And he didn't just say, "Okay, well, then I'll give you your car back." No. [laughs] Wouldn't he have? [laughs] Just this past week, I noticed that the folks with code pink, they've called for tax resistance. Is there some hope that in the Iraqi war that the United States stimulus as a whole will rise up and say, "No, we're not going to do any more. We're not going to pay for this military. Are you feeling that whole?" I'm not convinced that the American populace as a whole is going to rise up in revolution. But I am seeing more and more people saying, "This is idiocy. Our priorities are misplaced, and this war is a terrible, terrible drain on our resources." I do believe that more and more people are saying enough with respect to the Iraq war. Well, fortunately, they have you as a role model, someone who's blazed the path before, someone who's said it can be done. As a matter of fact, the losing house can be just a call to another richer part of your existence. So I want to thank you so much. Well, I want to thank you for asking me to tell the story. I'm always humbled when someone does, and I thank you very much. That inspirational woman, teacher, and war tax resister was Patricia Washburn from down in Colorado, the first of my spirit and action guest today. I'm Mark Helpsmeet of Northern Spirit Radio, and we're exploring the connections between the roots and fruits of spirit-led lives. The topic today is those who find they cannot voluntarily contribute to the military through their tax dollars, and how they carry out that witness. You can listen to this interview and others we've done on war tax resistance on my northernspiritradio.org site. We've got another war tax resistor on the phone. As I mentioned earlier, Perry Treadwell retired from his tenured position as a microbiologist in 1972 due to a leading born of reading a Robert Frost poem. Perry has had a full, varied, and fruitful life since then, including writing books on a variety of topics, including volumes like Boys Into Men, Driving Through History, and The Last Negro in County is Dead. Perry exchanged his tenured job at the University for a life of service, and shows no sign of looking backwards, only happy with what his momentous decision to create a life of integrity cost him, and what it brought him. We'll join Perry Treadwell down in Georgia on the phone. Perry, thanks so much for joining me today for Spirit in Action. Well, I'm glad to be here. As separated as we are by about, what, 2000 miles? You're down in Georgia. Isn't everybody down in Georgia supposed to be a political conservative? Well, it feels like nearly everybody is, but there are a few people, including Quakers down here, that are not conservative. Would you talk a little bit about your history, Perry, with more tax resistance, how you got into it? You're not just a tax resistor, right? You're a war tax resistor? That's correct, and that's a good difference. Well, I didn't even know that there were Quakers up until 1968 when I was out in California and was taken to the La Jolla meeting, and I got back and found Atlanta meeting. Of course, that was during the Vietnam War. I got more and more involved in the Atlanta meeting, and then in the Southern Appalachian Yearly meeting, and one yearly meeting, we had people from the movement from New Society down. So we started macroanalysis. I became quite aware of what was going on, or what was going to go on in the world. It's coming to fruition 30 years later. So we were way ahead of the tide, and I became more and more disappointed in my university position. One Sunday, I had that extra hour for the hour change, and by chance I had picked up Robert Frost's poems. I was reading through them, and came across two tramps at one time, and it just, the last stand of it just was a spiritual experience. And I said, you know, my life has to be more together, as the poem says, my evocation and my vocation should be the same. This, of course, was a Sunday, so I went to the meeting, and after a long silence, I rose and explained my experience. I didn't quote the poem, and lo and behold, another friend rose and quoted the poem, and I thought that was a very strong spiritual experience. So I decided to retire at age 42 from a tenured position, just go out and do, and that's what I've been doing for the last 35 years. What was your field of professorship? What kind of a professional person are or were you? I was teaching microbiology and immunology in the medical school, and nursing school, and having graduate students. So here you are, 42, right, when you're about to reach your peak of earning capacity, and you give up a tenured position, you know, give up security. Why did you make that choice? Is this related to your work act resistance, too? Well, the process began in 1972 when I decided to donate 50% of my university salary to the friends meeting. And, of course, when you do that, you get a lot of money back from the IRS, and so we decided to go to England with that extra money. And we went to England and saw a lot of interesting things there, but the spiritual experience I really had there was climbing Pendle Hill, and seeing the vista that George Fox saw. That vista looking over the North Country is just outstanding to see the light overcoming the darkness. I think I need some clarification about what exactly was the spiritual experience, the spiritual insight that you gained that led you to change your life. If I was listening properly, I think it had to do with being authentic, to be not divided in your inward, outward life. Yeah, I would say that really struck a card with me. Maybe I can help a little bit better if I can read this, because this is the last stanza of that poem. You can imagine, by chance, I pick up a book of poetry, and by chance, I stop at this poem and read the poem. And then the last stanzas, but yield who will to their separation my object and living, is to unite my avocation and my vocation, is my two eyes make one insight. Only were love and need are one, and the work is played for mortal sakes, is indeed every really done for heaven in the future's sakes. I sat there, totally in bliss, and then to have Quaker the next hour or so, quote, "That same stanza," it just seemed like a very strong leading for me to change my life. And my life has been a life of service since, and because I became a war tax resistor and simplified my life, I just had one wonderful experience after another. Is the point of leaving your job at the university, is that you weren't doing a life of service, or is it that you were earning too much money, or what is there about leaving that job that was central to reclaiming yourself? I think there were several reasons. Once I got back from La Jolla, and once I got into movement for a new society and learned some of the good Quaker principles of governance and saw that the university was very hierarchical. It wasn't democratic at all, they did very poor job and management, and I was on the university senate and president of the regional group, and I was fairly high up in the university governments, and I just didn't want to do that. I felt very strongly that I couldn't contribute to the war effort in any way, as I learned later that throw said, "I must see in any case that I do not contribute to the conditions that I condemn," and here I was contributing to the war effort. In some kind of explicit way? Well, with my taxes, you figure that 50% of the personal income tax has been, and still is, going for the military. And you somehow given up doing that, does this mean that you have to become homeless? A lot of people. Well, in all these leading, I've been able to not be homeless. At a certain period of time, I had reduced my income from various sources to below the taxable level, so for 10 years, I would send in a tax form, and this is what I do, no matter how much income I have. I fill out the tax form completely, the 1040, honestly, completely saying everything that I'm supposed to say, and then for those years before this disaster in Iraq, I would withhold 50% of what I figured I owed and donate it to various charities. Most recently, because I'm getting Social Security, which I have used most of it for charity work and getting other retirement funds, well, I'll give you an instance of how this works for me anyway in the idea of service. I figured in 1906, my total income, including Social Security, was $22,000. My total contributions at that time was over $5,000, so I'm tithing, really, over 20% of my income. All of this being free has allowed me to be led into the various positions that I've been in. If you want to talk about money, I have to be honest by saying that when I decided to retire from the university, I had no idea of what I was going to do other than move up to the North Georgia Mountains. Within two or three months of that decision, my father died and left me $100,000. Now, I figured that I could live on that for about 10 years, or I could use it for other purposes. So, I have used that money to rebuild an area in Atlanta, to preserve several places in Georgia and in Atlanta, and just remodeling houses. And every time I do something like that, instead of losing money, money keeps coming back to me. So, you can see I've had this continuing experience of what you give comes back to hold. A lot of people are afraid, Perry, that if they become a war tax resistor, if they send this in to the government, they're not going to pay right away. Everything's going to be taken from, they'll be thrown in jail. Do you live in that kind of fear? Well, I don't own a whole lot. What are they going to take an 18-year-old truck, an antique desk? That's about all I really own. I'm very clear about where my money is, and they can come and attach it at any time. And that's in the past couple, three years now they have done that. Up until then, they haven't even found money after I've stayed at where it was. The IRS is not to be feared. It's to be felt sorry for. It's really a mess. So you haven't dwelt in that kind of fear for all of these years? You haven't had the moments when? Well, I'll have to be honest. Every time I get a letter from IRS, I get a little twist in the stomach. And that's about it. They've attached my Social Security funds. But, you know, I have long spent the Social Security money that I paid in over the 20 years that I was really heavily employed. My estimation, if they're going to take it from me, it's really not my money anyway. Of course, you're talking about coming of age, having this crucial experience during Vietnam War. What is there about war, whether it's Vietnam or the current Iraq war, that makes you so crystal clear that it's wrong to support that. Aren't we keeping the world safe for democracy or something? My avocation, one of my little avocations, is history. And if you go back and look at history, and if we had several hours, I would explain that most wars are unnecessary, including many of the wars of the United States. I've been doing some research into the history of the United States because I've just written a book called Driving Through History, which covers the history from Rockford, Illinois to Newport, Oregon, on US 20, which is still one of the last blue highways that go from Boston to the West Coast. And discovering all the horrible history that we've done to the Native Americans and to one another, and most of the wars have been fought, have been unnecessary wars. Now, on a very, very personal level, let's go back to my high school years. I was sent away to a boy's military school during those years in Minnesota. This was the years right after the Second World War. We saw some of the most horrendous scenes of war, you can imagine. These were so-called training films for young men. And I think that planted the seeds. There were many other seeds, but that planted some of the seeds for me to see the fruitlessness, the horror of war. We have got to find other ways than depending on our aging male leaders testosterone. You said that that happened right after World War II. I assume maybe your parents, certainly most of your neighbor's friends, that they would have been rather jubilant about our role in the United States role in World War II as the good guys and the Germans, totally the bad guys. So these training films and this experience in the military academy, why don't you have enough warrior instinct to have a take root? I think that warrior instinct is in all of us, and we have to look, each one of us has to look into our own soul. And I think that when you talk about warrior instinct, there is a phrase that I've just picked up recently in reading some history that the Protestant God is a God of War. And when you look at history from that perspective, yes, that doesn't excuse the Catholics, but we Protestants, particularly in this country, our manifest destiny in this country has been wars against other people. So always the justification, the religious justification, were you raised religiously too? I was raised as a Methodist quite extensively, and then this boy school was an Episcopal boy school where I served as an echolite there for two years doing all the things that the acolytes do it, so I do have quite a religious background. My religion became science during my college years and my research years, and it was only when I discovered Quakers, or they discovered me, that I realized that I had had some very strong religious experiences in my youth. Did you go through a period where you would have called yourself either atheist or agnostic? I think it would have been agnostic. I wasn't doing enough research to call myself an atheist. And why was it acceptable when you made this transition that led to your entire lifestyle change? What was it that led you out of your agnosticism? Well, the very spiritual experiences that I've had that I've become more and more aware of as I have gotten older, of course the Pendle Hill experience was one, but one of my early experiences was watching cells divide one Sunday morning in my lab at the University of Minnesota, and it just all came together. That sounds very mundane, but having learned all about these cells for years and years and years, and then suddenly seeing what I'd learned, there was nature confirming what I had been learning. And then one of my big experiences was running on the beach in La Jolla, where early one morning. As I was running down the beach, there was this oil-covered comrade in the tide there, and I ran by it, and then on coming back I stopped and saw it, and I had this very strong experience that I am part of the universe. It was that universal experience that some people talk about, and I never realized that there was that experience. For somebody else who hasn't been in a friend's meeting and knows the personal experience that you can have, all different types of spiritual experiences, these two experiences may sound just rather mundane, but the experience of God is an emotional experience, and you have to have a few of those before you really recognize that, yes, I've had those all along. I had them when I was a young child. You don't really think of them as connected to the universe until you're old enough to maybe look at them with two eyes instead of one. Well, and maybe you need to be in an environment which allows you the freedom to talk about the divine about this universal thing in a different way, because certainly what you're talking about, looking at the cells divide or experience in the cormorant, that certainly doesn't fit regular theology of a lot of mainline churches. Yes, the mainline churches really depend on you not thinking just having emotion, and when somebody else is programming your emotion, they just kind of turn it off and turn it on. That's fine, if that gives them the experiential experience that they need, but for scientists, you need to have your own personal awareness that aha experiences. Now, I've had many aha experiences as a scientist. When a research project that I've done turns out and you see the results of an easy aha, that's something new and different, and that's exciting. And I think maybe having those experiences as a scientist helped me to have the same experiences as a spiritual person. One thing that I think could have, maybe should have, made it more difficult to make these transitions you made, is if one has a spouse, did you have family trying to hold you back from making this irrational leap off the cliff when you quit your job? Oh, I like that question. That brings up a whole different situation. I have four children. The four children were on the way out, and my wife was working. And so, although I made that decision on my own, that decision, although being very difficult for my children, was very understandable for them. There's not a whole lot more I can say about that, but yes, I had to think of my responsibilities, and that's why I feel that I can't tell other people what to do. I can't tell them to be as definitive as I have in my war tax resistance because they have responsibilities that I didn't have. Did your wife, was she accepting of this, or did you just stay up many nights until you were both exhausted trying to figure it out? She accepted it right away. That's what you want to do. And we've had quite a fascinating experience together in doing that, although I have a different wife now. During that transition period, we lived in a community house together. It wasn't a commune, but we did all of our cooking together and cleaning and responsibilities and things like that. She and I were responsible for turning the neighborhood around as far as re-establishing the area where we lived. She was part of this transition. You said you're married to another woman at this point. When you went into that marriage, did she have to sign a pre-nuptial agreement to tolerate your war tax resistance? For our religious reasons, we decided that we would not get a marriage license. We had a commitment ceremony with the Quaker meeting. We are in a committed relationship, but not having a license. We have a marriage certificate, of course, a traditional Quaker marriage certificate. But not having a license. We did a pre-post-nuptial on the finances, so that if anything happened to either one of us or the IRS should come or something like that, she is protected. I'm curious about how you view your war tax resistance. I guess depending on how you're counting it, maybe three to four decades of it behind you at this point, do you feel it's been effective or what have been the effects of your war tax resistance? Well, probably very little on a global scale or even a national scale, but you have to understand that on my personal scale, it has been tremendously effective. It, of course, changed my life, but my life has been just one series of wonderful experiences after another that wouldn't have been available if I had been continuing to undergo the academic dry rot in the university. So your action, even though it was dedicated outward towards the military, towards the government and what it's supporting, what the university is supporting, you set out to change that and you were the change that happened? Of course, well, one of the things that has allowed me to do is to become more understanding of the whole world. How much reading could I have done if I had continued in fulfilling my academic responsibilities? How much writing of books could I have done if I didn't have the opportunity to write those books? I have just had one continuous revelation after another. You said, you know, at 42, you retired and then you describe all the work you did. Is what you did really just take it, cut and pay? That's an interesting way of putting it. If you list all the things I have done, yeah, it's been a cut and paste. It's just been one, the Quaker would say, one leading after another. And somehow you feel out of that cut and pay that you ended up richer? Oh, a lot richer. Oh, yes. I've had probably a much more exciting life than I would have had academically. I've done simple living workshops. I did non-violent training in Philadelphia. I've done the AFSC work. I've so dreamed of Pendle Hill. I've established the little five points pub in Atlanta. I've preserved a farm. I've saved a grocery store, co-op grocery store from going under it. I've established the men's experience of Atlanta, which was a support group for men. I've done friendship workshops. Jeez. Just one thing after another, as you can see, I've had a very, very full life because I've been opened, not open. I've been available. I've been available to where God has led me. So, does there come a point now when you retire from your retirement? That's an excellent question because I'm waiting for the next leading. Since I retired from the French General Conference Central Committee a few years ago, I have not been as active and coakers. And if I'm called to do something like that, yes, then I will be back doing that. In the meantime, I've been doing a lot of reading and traveling and writing, so I keep myself busy. Every day at the computer, every day reading, not every day, but at least once a week in the library. I'm just continuing at age 75 to find more outlets for my energy, and my energy hasn't decreased much. Well, I'm glad that your energy is still going there strong. I have a feeling it's the result of making choices that are life enhancing. And I just appreciate your witness, the witness to those of us who are coming behind. Hopefully the next generation, there should probably be hundreds of thousands of 20-year-olds who are looking in making the same decision in your insights. You're having done the experiment before. I think we'll help our listeners make more integral choice and their own lives. Well, thank you, and thank you for asking. I just have one recommendation for those people who feel the way I do, but can't make the commitments that I have made. And that is, what if you withheld just $10 from your income tax? If you could figure out how to do that on your 1040, why not throw some more sand into the government's wheels and see if they'll finally realize that there should be a war tax fund, a peace tax fund. Thanks again, Perry, for sharing your voice and your experience today. That was Perry Treadwell, a war tax resistor down in Georgia. And before that, we were talking with Patricia Washburn over in Colorado, also with a few decades of experience with refusing to pay taxes for the military. You'll find interviews with other war tax resistors on my site, northernspiritradio.org. The theme music for this program is Turning of the World, performed by Sarah Thompson. This Spirit in Action program is an effort of Northern Spirit Radio. You can listen to our programs and find links and information about us and our guests on our website, northernspiritradio.org. Thank you for listening. I am your host, Mark Helpsmeet, and I welcome your comments and stories of those leading lives of spiritual fruit. May you find deep roots to support you and grow steadily toward the light. This is Spirit in Action. With every voice, with every song, we will move this world along. With every voice, with every song, we will move this world along. And our lives will feel the echo of our healing.