Easter Joy Is Curdled by Taxes

By CHARLES M. GUTHRIE

of the editorial page staff

published by the StarTribune

April 1, 1961

   EASTER should be a season of ecstasy, filled with the throb of spring, returning robins and refurbished wardrobes.  But winter clings to my joints and bile saturates my soul.  I am mad at Uncle Sam, mad at his voracious appetite for money.  What was to have gone into new duds has gone into taxes.  I shall march in the Easter parade with naught but a shave, a shine and a dry-cleaning job and look like a fugitive from a rummage sale.

   BECAUSE choler will not let me go and makes me impossible, I have rejected participation in the egg coloring festivities which traditionally gladden our household at Eastertide.

   I can do little but sulk in a corner, wallowing in misery and the memory of finer yesterdays when the movies didn't have prostitutes cluttering up the screen, when women's hats looked better on the head than in a vase, and when Uncle Sam didn't have both hands deep in our pockets.

   ABE LINCOLN said that he owed everything to his mother.  Were he alive today he'd owe everything to the U.S. treasury.  My mood may pass, but at the moment I'm in rebellion against public servants and yearn to tell them off.  All that restrains me is the fact that telling them off would hurt them little but could make me poor indeed.

   Now I appreciate how my late father felt during the war.  He never grew reconciled to gas rationing.  He was convinced it was a nefarious conspiracy against him personally and refused to see any national need for it.  He lived a mile in the country, had to drive to town daily, and thought this entitled him to a "B" card.

   THE RATIONING board thought otherwise and rejected his application.  Whereupon Pop, in high dudgeon, said he'd show 'em.  He'd put the damned car up on blocks and leave it in the garage until the war was over and people got back their senses.

   He didn't carry through his threat, of course, realizing in time that the rationing board would be able to weather the blow but that he would be left afoot.

   However, I sympathize with his reaction and his resentment at the board.  My impulse, as I stew over the tax figures, is to chuck the forms into the alley, head for the hills, live in a hole, let the tax man find me if he could--and shoot him if he did.

   The flaw in this line of action is that going native would make life worse instead of better.  Beating the tax rap, though satisfying, would be insufficient compensation for lack of groceries, plumbing, easy chair, income and TV.

   Return to the primitive, though, looms as a definite possibility.  We of serious mind ponder a future of higher and higher taxes, higher and higher living costs and more and more restrictions--in the name of freedom and security--with definite trepidation.

   WE CANNOT but wonder how long it will be before this freedom and security we prize will be parceled out exclusively by a paternalistic state and humanity will return inexorably to caveman status because--after taxes--a cave is the only shelter we can afford.

   In this season of hope, wonder and awakening, it's a pity that my view is clouded by taxes, the old gray jacket and pants I'm stuck with, and a suspicion that we're headed for the pit even as we reach for the stars.

   I could be wrong and perhaps I am.  A year hence the sun may be shining and I may feel more optimistic.  By then I may have a new suit and be sartorially ready for Easter.

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